October 24, 2023 Show with Keith Allen on “The Importance of Family Worship”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of Founding Father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the Church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 24th day of October, 2023.

I am absolutely thrilled beyond words to have as my first-time guest today, Keith Allen, who is pastor of Lindbrook Baptist Church of Lindbrook, Long Island, New York. In fact, he is the new pastor of this congregation since October 1st.

And many of you will immediately recognize the name of that church, Lindbrook Baptist Church of Lindbrook, Long Island, because they have been sponsoring this program, Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, ever since we first launched out of WNYG Radio in Babylon, Long Island, in 2005, and they continue to do so.

And today, Pastor Keith and I are going to be discussing the importance of family worship. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Keith Allen.

Happy to be here. Thank you for having me, Brother Chris. It's an honor. A pleasure.

Well, it's an honor and a pleasure to have you on. And I am very grateful to God that He allowed me to be at least a spoke in the wheel of His providence that wound up bringing you to Lindbrook Baptist Church and being called as its pastor.

As am I.

And I can remember one of your elders, my dear friend for decades, Sal D 'Antona, I remember him contacting me, telling me of your need, that is Lindbrook Baptist Church's need for a pastor. And I immediately said, well, you've got to get in touch with Ed Moore, pastor of North Shore Baptist Church of Bayside, Queens, to at least get you started with pulpit supply and perhaps he knows just the right person that would make the perfect fit for Lindbrook Baptist.

And the rest is history. And so tell us about Lindbrook Baptist Church.

Lindbrook Baptist Church, we're right off Merrick Road in Lindbrook. The church itself will be hitting on its 110th anniversary early next year. I myself have been here since October 1st. We are a very strikingly diverse church.

Going to North Shore, having served as associate pastor there, myself and my wife, we are an interracial couple. When we first went to North Shore, we were kind of afraid that we would stick out like a sore thumb and we walked in the door and we found that that was quite the opposite.

We just blended in with all of the other various nationalities and cultures that were there.

At the church.

So I had always been very proud of North Shore in the sense that we have this diverse church that everybody is sort of looking for and we didn't contrive it to happen, just ended up that way. I walk in the doors at Lindbrook and the very same kind of thing is going on, which has been very rare, I think, as I've gone around and seen different churches, but the diversity here is wonderful.

The saints here are warm and loving. The people are hungry for the Word. And we are just poised to see what the Lord is going to do in this new season of our life here at Lindbrook.

Well, praise God. Well, I urge everyone listening who either lives in or near Lindbrook, or if you know you're going to be visiting someone in that area, perhaps with the holidays coming up, Thanksgiving and Christmas, or if you have family, friends and loved ones in that area that you want to introduce to a very biblically solid church, if you want to know more details about that church, the website is Lindbrookbaptist .org, and God willing, we will have a new recording for their new commercial, recorded by Pastor Keith Allen, in the not-so-distant future, so you'll be hearing reminders about that church and all the details that you need on a daily basis.

So just write that down for now, Lindbrookbaptist .org, and God willing, we'll repeat that information later on. Well, we have a tradition here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Pastor Keith, before we get into our major theme, which is the importance of family worship, whenever we have a first-time guest on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation story, and you were actually giving that story to me before we were on air, and I was utterly fascinated by it, but why don't you share that story with our listeners, and let's start with the kind of atmosphere, religiously, that you were raised in, you may not have had any religion at all in your home, or you may have had some kind of religion, let us know about that, and also, obviously, the kinds of providential circumstances that our Lord brought about in your life that drew you to Himself and saved you.

Raised Catholic and Living as an Unbelieving Teenager

So, I grew up in a Catholic household, I don't know if I want to say nominally Catholic, we were faithful attenders, my mother had a rule, as long as you live under the roof of this house, you will go to church, and we went to Christ the King Church in Queens, I did all of the sacraments there, you know, penance, communion, confirmation, and went faithfully.

Well, you didn't get the last rites, though, or...

Nope, praise be to God, praise be to God. But at some point, my mother left the Catholic Church, didn't feel like she was getting what she needed there, but because I was in structured programs there, she made me stay.

And so here I am, this thoroughly unbelieving teenage kid, taking the bus to church every Sunday or walking to church every Sunday, because I had to. And sometimes I would just go and sort of close my eyes in the pew, and wait for things to be over, and then go home.

I actually even worked for the Catholic Church one year as sort of a secretary slash security guy in the rectory.

Wow. I did, too, actually. I was a janitor in the very Catholic school, elementary private school, where I was a student. This was years later, not that many years later, but after I had graduated from elementary school, I became the janitor and was fired for showing up at work very late and very drunk.

But that's another story for another day. But continue with your story.

So one of the poignant moments that I recall from being in the Catholic Church is that one day I said to myself, you know what? Today I'm going to pay attention. Today I'm going to actually try to hear what's going on.

I said, oh, he said he's going to speak from such and such letter of Paul. Let me grab the Bible and read along.

And did you find one?

I did not.

I did not. And I said, oh, oh, well, and went back to my obliviousness. Another moment that I recall is when I was making my confirmation, when they ask you, you know, do you believe blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I said yes to every one of those questions, knowing full well that the answer was no. But wanting to please my mother and do what she wanted me to do. So the next major thing that happened is my moving out of the house.

I moved out of the house at 22, moved into Seaford, Long Island.

Oh, yeah.

I grew up in Laurelton, Queens, moved to. Have you had the meatloaf at the Seaford Palace,.

The best meatloaf at any diner in the United States, as far as I'm concerned.

I have not had meatloaf at the Seaford Palace. You got Seaford food was was the whitefish salad on an everything flagle at Seaford Bagels.

Oh, cool.

That's.

Go get one.

Next time I'm there, I will.

So I moved out of the house, and once I moved out of the house, there was no more going to church for me. And I was headlong into the world, full bore, just my mother kept control of the house. You know, she was she was a good mom.

She was a single mom. She taught me morality, the do's and don'ts. And for the most part, I did what I was supposed to do. Learned learned how to lie and deceive very early on. So so to this day, my mother thinks I'm better than I am and ever was and tried to convince her otherwise.

But, yeah, I think most moms are like that, you know.

And so that was from 22 until 33. I was just out there doing doing all the things that the world tells you a young man should do. Pursuing money, pleasure, women, you know, alcohol, just just all this stuff.

I was all of my desires that had been pent up for so long. I could. I was just free to exercise them all and exercise them.

I did.

On my 30th birthday. I said to myself, you know what? I'm not going to get drunk this birthday. I'm 30 years old. I'm an adult. You know, I need to make something of my life. And on that night, I got more drunk than I had ever gotten.

And that left a question in my mind that lingered until I get saved three years later, which is what is wrong with me?

Wow.

I set myself to to do this, which I thought was good. And I went completely in the opposite direction.

Now was this something that was habitual with you getting drunk like it was with me before I was saved or was it very regularly?

Some people go running for recreation and they do it a couple of weeks. You know, some people play video games. Drunkenness was was my recreation and it was regular and habitual.

Yeah, I sometimes would run as well, but that was just to make it to the liquor store before they locked the door.

The Lord was very was very kind to me. And that in the midst of debauchery, I still did well in school, I still held jobs from the outside looking in. Everybody thought I was a very respectable young man, eventually became a public school science teacher.

Wow.

Yeah, so so so the Lord really was looking after me, you know, never got arrested once. Well, I was a teacher in Jackson Heights, I .S. 230. Middle school science for three years, but I was not nearly as mature.

As as I could have been or should have been, I would have arrested it, but. Why were you arrested? That was that was a DUI.

And I had one of those of.

Had to be in my later 20s. And so that was. That was a low point, but the day that I got pulled over was one of the days when I was least drunk and driving.

Wow.

And so I've always kind of had this feeling. I used to call myself the luckiest man in the world. You know, so many things have just gone well for me that should not have gone so well. And looking back now, I see that the Lord was just operating to get me to where he wanted me to be.

Amen. And somewhere or somewhere along the line, I don't know how early on in your life this started, but you developed a love for keeping physically fit. And that actually was a key factor in you becoming spiritually fit because you became born again as a result of an encounter in the gym.

Why don't you tell us about this?

Yeah, that's right. So my my. Degree in college was athletic training and sports medicine, so I worked in the clinic there, that's kind of like being a physical therapist, but only dealing with athletes, something like that, you do on site injury care at the games, did that for a while in the year of my graduation, I decided I didn't want to do that profession anymore.

And so I was trying to find something that I could do that could use the skill set and the knowledge that I had gained in school. And someone suggested that I try becoming a personal trainer. And so I did.

I started working at Bally's, the Bally's in Lindbrook. I don't think it's there anymore, or it's right between Lindbrook and Rockville Center was my first personal training job. And then I worked for Equinox in.

Woodbury and then in Great Neck, and so it was at the Great Neck Equinox that I heard the gospel, it was a young man by the name of Jared Dikandia, I hired him in. Two thousand and. Ten, he was my first hire, I was the personal training manager there or the fitness manager, I hire him as an intern.

He comes in, we become good buddies. He leaves the gym and goes to California for some Bible school that he was going to. And then he comes back in must have been 2012, seeking to pursue a young lady who worked at the gym, so he's coming back to New York.

And I told him I would love to hire you back, have you back here. And so he comes back at the same time that I'm dealing with this sort of existential crisis. What is my problem? Who am I? Why is my life not going the way that I hoped that it would go?

Why am I sad and upset and unfulfilled? All of these things. And so I tell him this as he's preparing to come back and he just listens and he says, oh, OK, mention some things about God that I don't really remember.

You're just a good friend. And he listened to me when he finally touches back down in New York, we spend some time and I was writing a blog. Just as Keith Allen, the fitness expert, and in one of these blogs, I use the phrase body.

Body, soul and spirit, right, you've got to take care of yourself or mind, body and spirit. And he comes to me and he says, Keith, I noticed that you wrote something about the spirit in your blog. I would love to talk to you some more about the spirit.

And I was feeling like I want to be a good employer and a good friend. Of course, I will hear you out. Let's let's even set a meeting date. And so we set a meeting date and it was September 13th, 2013.

Jared and I were going to get together and he was going to share with me about the spirit. So the day of the meeting comes and I'm walking to one of the offices. At Equinox Great Neck, we're both on break, you know, we don't have clients.

And as I'm walking into the office, I say to myself, I know that Jared is a Christian. He had been openly witnessing to other people in the gym, people had gotten baptized in the gym. And so I knew that if he's going to talk to me about the spirit, eventually he's going to come around to the whole repent of your sins and believe in Jesus Christ thing.

I knew what Christians were about. And as I was and I was thinking to myself after he says that I'm going to have to shake his hand and say, thanks, Jared, but no, thanks. That's just not my thing. And then as I was having that thought, another thought came in immediately behind that one that said, don't do that.

Don't make up your mind to disbelieve him before you hear what he has to say. Looking back to me, that was a move of the Holy Spirit. I don't think it was an audible voice at the time, but it was so deep and real that it might as well have been.

And what Jared did was he opened up a PowerPoint, which he had a number of scriptures listed under the headings of body, soul and spirit. And we just began to read through the verses, he would read one and explain it, then he would have me read one and explain it, and we would go back and forth and go through the verses and he would explain some of the biblical teaching on these things.

So, Jared believes in the tripartite man, that soul and spirit are distinguishable things. I myself now fall on the bipartite side, but as he's going through these explanations of what body, soul and spirit are, the gospel was laid out.

Through the body, the understanding of what the flesh is, the passions, the desires, the morality, and these things are lighting me up because this is me. And something of the morality that I already knew told me that I was wrong.

But I delighted in being wrong. I loved being a rebel and doing what society said was wrong, being a champion at it. And then he goes through the soul and then he comes to the spirit and lays out the spiritual deadness, which is, you know, of which all of these things are symptoms.

And he talks about the spiritual life that one can have through faith in Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of sins that is necessary. And I would have always told you that I was a sinner. I would have jokingly said, and I had said, oh, I'm going to hell.

But but never with any sober consideration of what that actually meant.

Yeah, a lot of times that's followed up with the ridiculous statement. I want to be with all my friends, of course. That's why I'm going to hell. And of course, these people are tragically mistaken that there's not going to be a party in hell because even Satan and his demons are going to be tortured in that place, let alone those who are lost and have not yet and have not ever received Christ as their savior.

But if you could continue.

So what became most apparent to me in that meeting was that I was wrong and it wasn't society that was judging me wrong. It was God himself. I was I was guilty before God and and I was going to hell, but but not in a funny ha ha sense.

Right. But but in a your creator is going to judge you and you're going to be found wanting and you will be worthy of whatever he intends to do with you. And you don't want that. Right. And so he said, but brother, if you if you place your faith in Jesus Christ, if you invite him into your heart, ask him for forgiveness, you can have forgiveness of sin today.

You can have Jesus Christ living within you today. And so if you want, we can pray. And I said, yeah, let's pray right now, praise God.

Yeah, I I'm glad that he said, if you want, let's pray, because far too many Christians well-meaning would say, just repeat this prayer after me. And they would recite something that the person is repeating that they're not even really giving perhaps much thought into what they're repeating.

And the prayer that has been manufactured by the Christian evangelizing the lost person becomes almost like a magical spell. Well, you've said the magic words, you're saved. Of course, they wouldn't say that if they were magic words, but that's the way they're treating that kind of thing very often.

But anyway. Yeah, so so he sort of gave me the words to say, which I which I assented with wholeheartedly. And we finished praying. He says, I say, man, he goes, all right, that's it. And I look at him like, wait, you know, we've just had this hour long time in the word, we're praying and he goes, that's it.

What do you mean, that's it? He says, well, you know, if you've repented and believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, you are now spiritually alive. It's that you're going to need to feed your spirit and you do that with the word of God.

So tomorrow I'll bring you a Bible and we can start reading together. But for today, that's it. And I was like, all right, thanks. And I went back to my office and I sat in my chair and and the primary thing that was running through my mind.

Well, first I sat down, I said, what was that?

What just happened?

And and so it was that thought that was the verbal thought in my mind, and then the sense was my life is never going to be the same. My life is never going to be the same again. And he brought the Bible the next day and we would get together and we would just open up the scriptures.

I think I think we were reading in Matthew. I remember distinctly reading with him through Matthew and reading with him through Genesis. And we would just read and we would notice things and he would explain things in scripture.

And that brother met with me faithfully every week from the week that I got saved until four years later, when I went away to seminary, unless one of us was sick or or indisposed, we met all the time.

And praise God, that's one of the greatest blessings.

Amen, and when we come back from our first commercial break, I want to hear about your first encounter with the man who would eventually become your pastor. And if if anybody, a mutual friend of both mine and my guests, Ed Moore of North Shore Baptist Church, Bayside Queens, who I've known since the early 1990s, and if anybody has a question for Pastor Keith about not only his salvation testimony or any of his theological beliefs, but also about the theme that will eventually be entering into the importance of family worship.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail dot com. As always, give us a first name, at least city and state and country of residence. If you live outside the USA, don't go away.

We'll be right back with Pastor Keith Allen of Lindbergh Baptist Church in Lindbergh, Long Island, right after these messages from our sponsors.

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That's royaldiadem .com. We are now back with Pastor Keith Allen of Linbrook Baptist Church in Linbrook, Long Island, New York. He has been the pastor there since October 1st, and we are delighted to have him on the program for the first time.

We will eventually be discussing, God willing, the main theme of the importance of family worship, but I'd like you to pick up where you left off about this encounter you had with a Christian at the gym, and then you're going to be eventually meeting somebody else at the gym who is a mutual friend of both of ours, Pastor Ed Moore of North Shore Baptist Church of Bayside, and tell us about that.

Meeting North Shore Baptist Church and Pastor Ed Moore

So I get saved at Equinox in Great Neck on September 13th, 2013. I get engaged to my then-girlfriend on October 5th of 2013, and then we begin looking for.

Churches.

We are both Christians, and we're going to be married in the Lord and raise our children in the Lord. We need to find a local church in which to grow and be together. I was living in Bayside at the time.

The plan was when we got married, she was going to come live with me in Bayside. So we started exploring some churches in the Queens area and really didn't find anything that seemed like it would be a good home or a good fit for us.

So one day, I'm at Equinox working. I was showering up after a workout, and I meet a man in the gym, in the locker room, who is searching for lotion, and I'm searching for lotion. If you know Equinox, Equinox is a very upscale gym, very well cared for, very clean.

So we were very surprised that none of their lotion dispensers had lotion in them. Somebody was slacking on the job. And so this man says, oh, wait a minute. I think I have lotion in my bag. And he pulls out his own personal lotion and offers it to me.

I'm a new Christian, and this sort of blows my mind. That's a sort of a nice Christian thing to do. And so I'm sitting there using this man's lotion, and I get this burning sense. You need to talk to this man.

You need to talk to this man. Don't just use his lotion.

I thought that the lotion you were given was burning your flesh for a minute, and that would be very easy to believe with Ed Moore playing some kind of a practical joke.

So I introduced myself to the man. I strike up a conversation with him. So this man is not yet Ed Moore. This is a man named Jay Angelus, who was a member at Equinox. And we began to talk. And in the conversation, I tell him that I am a Christian and that I just got engaged.

He says, wait a minute, you're a Christian? I'm a Christian. He goes, do you have a church? I said, no, actually, we are looking for a church. He says, well, why don't you come to my church? And the church that Jay Angelus was a member of at the time was North Shore Baptist Church.

And so my wife and I went there the following week. My wife loves it instantly. The music, maybe at the time, wasn't my style. And I wasn't super comfortable there because I'm a big introvert. And everybody there was super nice and coming up to me and trying to talk to me and shake my hand.

But the thing that grabbed me was that this man in the pulpit stood up, opened the Bible, said what the Bible said, explained it, and then told me how I could apply it. And I said, I knew enough to know that that's exactly what I needed in life, was someone who would do that for me week in and week out.

And so that was my first experience of Pastor Ed Moore. The sermon that I remember most from those early days is a sermon that he gave on Exodus Moses and the burning bush. And he kept saying, take your shoes off, talking about the need for Christians to be holy and to uphold the Lord as holy.

So this man is serious about the word and serious about walking with Christ in a manner worthy of the gospel. Eventually, we end up in Ed's discipleship group, which North Shore had at the time. And he poured into me, taught me, gave me opportunities to serve in the church, and eventually to pray and to maybe teach a little in the small group.

And so for many years—.

Hey, brother, you were freezing up there.

Oh, I'm sorry.

That's all right. That has nothing to do with you. We're back, though. You froze up a little bit, but that's all right.

What was the last thing that you heard?

You know, I started going into a panic when you were freezing, so I don't remember right now. I just remember you were blessed by Pastor Ed Moore's message on Exodus and telling you to take your shoes off, just like Moses did before the burning bush, and that we are to be holy and so on.