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October 24, 2023
Keith Allen, Pastor of Lynbrook Baptist Church of Lynbrook, Long Island, NY, who will address:
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And something about that struck you tremendously to the point where you, I believe at least, had a very strong confidence that that's where you wanted to plant yourself with your wife in that congregation and become members.
That's right. And so when you talk to Ed about discipleship, he will tell you his formula is very simple. He says you find a man who loves the Lord, is willing to work, and you give him a job. And if he does that job well, his reward is another job.
He does that well, his reward is another job and a bigger job and so on and so on. And looking back, that's exactly how Ed raised me up. He said, Hey, Keith, I want you to pray in this meeting, or I want you to read some scripture in this service.
Hey, Keith, why don't you take a turn at leading the discussion at Discipleship Group while I'm there? You know, you pick a text and go with it. And he just gave me opportunity to do a lot of different things and eventually asked me to come with him on a mission trip to Belarus in 2015.
I went with him on mission to Jamaica and Belarus.
Yeah, you guys go to Kingston, right? You do like house repair and things like that? Or at least they know.
No, no, no.
It's not Kingston. It's Buff Bay, Buff Bay, Jamaica. There is a pastor there, Vernon Allen.
No relation.
He has a circuit of churches. And so Ed has been going and serving him and that circuit of churches for almost 30 years, if not more. I can't remember whether that began before he started at North Shore or after, but long, long time and exposed me to missions, gave me more opportunities to flex, you know, evangelistic muscles and just getting out of your comfort zone.
If there's anything Ed Moore is good at, he's making you uncomfortable so that you can grow.
Well, he's made me very uncomfortable many times, but it had nothing to do with making me grow. It had to do with his sense of humor. When he springs it on me publicly in some place where it would feel least comfortable for me.
Yeah, yeah.
But I'm sure you were sanctified through that.
But I know that you eventually, by God's providence and goodness, you became the associate pastor there at North Shore Baptist.
Yes.
So four years after we walked through the doors at North Shore 2013 to 2017. At some point, I began serving as a deacon, maybe that's around 2016. And then they bring me on staff as a ministry coordinator.
So I basically just served as a liaison between the elders and all of the leaders of the different ministry teams that we had, hospitality team, meals team, showers team, evangelism team. I was the go between between them and the elders.
And at the end of that year, where I was on staff part time at North Shore, all the elders called me into the office in late 2017. And they said, Keith, do you want to be a pastor? I had done some preaching.
I had been doing some teaching. I really loved the idea of studying the word and helping people to understand what it means. And people had asked me previously if I wanted to go into ministry. That to me was sort of a dream.
Like if God was going to do anything like amazing and crazy, he would make Keith Allen a pastor. So I never pursued it. I just wanted to be the best church member that I could be and take the opportunities I was given and and try to do well with them.
So I said, yeah, yeah, I want to be a pastor. And four elders sat there and they all asked me the same question. Keith, do you want to be a pastor? You know, I felt like Peter, like, Lord, you know that I want to be a pastor.
Guys, how many times do I have to say it? I am interested in becoming a pastor. And so they said, OK, good. We just wanted to establish that because we think that if you're going to become a pastor, you should get some more training.
We would like to send you to seminary, not that you need seminary to be a pastor, but we think if you will go to seminary, that will be a massive blessing to everybody who will come under your teaching and leadership in the future.
And so North Shore Baptist Church sent me and paid my way to go to seminary at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. We moved there in January of 2018. And then we're called back in the fall of 2019 to serve as associate pastor because the previous associate pastor, Harry Fujiwara, had received a call to take the lead pastor role at the First Baptist Church of New York City.
So that's a very historic church.
Oh, yeah, it's beautiful.
That's where the best biography I have ever read in my life is called A Pastor in New York, The Life and Times of Spencer Cohn. You've got to get a hold of it since you are a pastor in New York. It's out of print, I believe, but you could still get it on Amazon.
And he was the one of the pastors of that church, subsequent to John Gano. John Gano was in the 18th century, the pastor. And there is actually a legend that has some evidence to back up the truthfulness of it that John Gano baptized George Washington, even though George Washington remained an Anglican for his entire life.
According to the story, John Gano convinced him that biblical baptism was only the immersion in water of a true repentant believer. But Spencer Cohn was the pastor there in the 19th century. And I actually had an event there.
I had Tony Costa, professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, spoke there at an event I arranged. But I'm sorry I interrupted you.
So yeah, First Baptist Church, Harry Fujiwara got called to be the lead pastor there. North Shore had sent me with sort of this no strings attached kind of thing. They said, Keith, we're going to send you to seminary.
We're going to pay your way. We're going to give you a little stipend for living so that you don't have to work full.
Time.
You can dedicate yourself to your studies. But you don't have to come back to New York. Like if you get an opportunity down there to get into ministry, you take it. And they said, we're not guaranteeing you a job.
If you come back, we would maybe like to hire you in the future. But we don't know if we're going to have the opportunity or the or the availability. And so I'm thinking we're there for at least two years and maybe more because I started an MDiv, which is a four year program.
And in the middle of year two, this discussion about Harry and my possible coming back started and we were back and I was ordained at North Shore Baptist Church as an elder and associate pastor in October of 2019.
Hallelujah. Now, you've got to tell us, because it is a subject that I'm sure many of our listeners are wondering about already, since most of my listeners, I believe, are lovers of the doctrines of sovereign grace.
Tell us how you responded to your first hearing of these teachings, which I'm assuming was at the pulpit of.
Brother, I don't know if you can hear me, but you have frozen on my end.
You froze, but I could hear you. Are you there, brother? Yeah. Now, now you're back. I am here. Yeah. Yes.
So it wasn't from the pulpit directly, though I'm sure Ed was preaching the doctrines of grace from the pulpit. But the the most distinct first encounter with the doctrines of grace in full clarity was in the membership process at North Shore, where we are required to listen to five sermons that Ed did on the doctrines of grace.
And whether it be good discipleship on the part of my brother, Jared, or having listened to Ed already for a couple of months and him peppering these things throughout, when I listened to the five sermons on the doctrine of grace, it was all yes and amen.
I just I just found each doctrine to be well supported biblically. And as I'm looking, I said, yeah, this is what I read and this is what I see. And this makes sense. And and they're just beautiful. They uphold the glory and the majesty of God like like nothing else.
And so I was very, very excited to learn more about them and to see how well founded they are biblically.
It's amazing how differently people react to their first hearing of the doctrines of sovereign grace. And it's also interesting that even people who have the opposite reaction to you, who immediately have a burning hatred for what they're hearing, sometimes by God's mercy and patience and grace, these same people come around to love those precious doctrines, as did I, because I did not react initially like you did.
But thankfully, God's purposes are always brought about. He never fails in anything he does.
Amen. Amen. My wife struggled a little bit, particularly with limited atonement. She grew up in a Methodist household, which wasn't pressing forward the doctrines of grace. She talked with the elders at North Shore.
She listened to the sermons, and she eventually became thoroughly convinced that the biblical witness bears these things out. And so we rejoice in these doctrines together as a display of the glory of God and his sovereignty and salvation.
Amen. Well, we have to go to our midway break, and I wanted to plug North Shore Baptist Church as well, even though this is not the current church where my guest Keith Allen is pastoring since it had such a powerful and vital impact on him and his journey and was even a major factor in him becoming the new pastor of Lindbergh Baptist Church in Lindbergh, Long Island.
I do want to plug North Shore Baptist Church, Bayside, Queens, New York. The website is ns-bc .org. That's ns for North Shore dash bc for Baptist Church dot org ns-bc dot org. So we're going to our midway break.
As I said, please be patient with us because it's the longer than normal break in the program, because Grace Life Radio 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, who airs this program every day, is required to use the middle of our show to adhere to FCC regulations and localize Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio geographically to their location in Lake City, Florida.
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Dr. Joe Moorcraft.
I'm Joe Riley, a faithful Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio listener here in a tie in County Kildare, Ireland, going back to 2005. One of my very favorite guests on Iron Sherpa's Iron is Dr. Joe Moorcraft. If you've been blessed by Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio, Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, are largely to thank since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.
Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming is in Forsyth County, a part of the Atlanta metropolitan.
Area.
Heritage is a thoroughly biblical church, unwaveringly committed to Westminster standards, and Dr. Joe Moorcraft is the author of an eight volume commentary on the larger catechism. Heritage is a member of the Hanover Presbytery, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, and tracing its roots and heritage back to the great Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.
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I'm Dr. Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love, Hope Reform Baptist Church in Corham, Long Island, New York, pastored by Rich Jensen and Christopher McDowell.
It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God like the dear saints at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Corham, who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in His Holy Word, and to enthusiastically proclaim Christ Jesus the King and His doctrines of sovereign grace in Suffolk County, Long Island, and beyond.
I hope you also have the privilege of discovering this precious congregation and receive the blessing of being showered by their love as I have. For more information on Hope Reform Baptist Church, go to hopereformedli .net, that's hopereformedli .net, or call 631 -696 -5711, that's 631 -696 -5711.
Tell the folks at Hope Reform Baptist Church of Corham, Long Island, New York that you heard about them from Tony Costa on Iron Sharpens Iron.
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Solid-ground-books .com. Before I return to Keith Allen and our discussion that we will soon be entering into on the importance of family worship, I just have a couple of very important announcements to make.
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Just send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com and put I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in a question for Keith Allen, pastor of Lindbrook Baptist Church of Lindbrook, Long Island, and we are going to be entering the theme momentarily of the importance of family worship.
That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. So, Pastor Keith, tell us about exactly what you mean, first and foremost, about family worship.
Obviously, you're not referring to the worship of families. We're not to be worshiping a family, and actually, it's a tragedy that many parents do worship their children, and they disobey God very often in order to appease their children.
But we're not talking about that. We're talking about families worshiping together. Why don't you start off with an idea of what you mean here?
Very specifically, what I mean by family worship is when the family comes together in the home to read scripture, pray, and sing together. That's family worship. I'd seen it modeled. I had talked about it at North Shore.
It really gripped me while I was away at seminary, and my children were, I had three children under three, took Don Whitney's class on spiritual disciplines, and in that class, he had us read his book, Family Worship.
And he went through the introduction of discussing the different thoughts about family worship and distilling it as to what it is, and he said, there's three things that you got to do in your family worship, and you have to read, sing, and pray.
And so that's very succinctly how I would define it. A broader definition would be having a living and active faith in and love for Jesus Christ and letting that influence everything that you do in your home.
So you can think about it on the broad spectrum. You're a Christian in the church. You should be a Christian in your home. You love Jesus, and you praise him, and you read his word, and you do that on a Sunday.
That is really your life, and that should pervade your home, which should at the very least lead you on a daily basis to get together with your family and read scripture and pray and sing, but I think the concept behind it is broader than that.
Now, do you recommend that this become a very structured thing? Sometimes when we prefer spontaneity over structure, because sometimes people may get bored with structure and they find more joy in things that are spontaneous, but the downside of spontaneity is that sometimes things don't last very long when we intend with good motivation initially to have something like family worship on a regular basis, and if we're not structured, it may vanish from existence in your home.
So what are your thoughts on that?
Well, there's a secular adage that says to fail to plan is to plan to fail, and I think that comes out of some sort of understanding about the nature of humanity. I mean, I think you hit it on the head.
We don't just do the right stuff spontaneously. It'll happen from time to time, but that's not our general bent. And so if we depend on just kind of doing it when the moment feels right or doing it when we're really feeling driven to do it, we will find that we will do those good things less and less.
And so structure and planning is a great gift from God to aid us in curtailing our sloth in zeal and our lack of devotion to him by teaching us to instate regular rhythms by which we can put ourselves or seek to be in the presence of God and seek to receive what he has for us in these spiritual disciplines.
And although there is no biblical mandated length for these family worship experiences, in fact, there's no mandated biblical length for a worship service in the corporate gathering of God's people either.
But at the same time, there might be a danger in people not only on the one end of the spectrum doing it too quickly, almost like ripping off a bandaid to get it out of the way, or you might have a domineering dad really stretching it out beyond the limits of credulity for the and make your children actually start to despise this time.
We have to use balance when we think about these things, don't we?
Yeah, requires wisdom. Everyone's household is different. Everyone's family is different. Everyone's children are different. And I think it is primarily the responsibility of the father to know his wife and to know his family and what they need and how much they can withstand and to feed them and shepherd them appropriately.
There are nights when our family worship have been to say a memory verse and to sing the doxology and wrap it up just based on what's going on in the household, what the baby is doing. Many things will contribute to the like.
There are some nights where we're sitting around and we can read a full chapter of scripture and have discussion, and then we'll read some from an additional Christian book on a different topic if your children are able to withstand that.
And it's something that's bringing joy and edification to the household. Then you do it as you are able. But every Christian household should have within it the worship of God. That surely is biblical.
Amen. We have a listener from, I believe this is in upstate New York. And please forgive me if I'm mispronouncing the name of the city. Water Vliet or Water Vliet, New York. And it is Boris who asked the question, do you believe that in family worship, there are liberties that women may have to join the husband in leading, such as the wife or older children, where you would not find that appropriate in a corporate worship service?
Well, I think about 1 Timothy 3, what scripture does not permit is for a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. I think when that scripture is written, it's speaking about the context of the local church, the local worship service.
Scripture also says. I'm sorry, 1 Timothy 2. I'm sorry. My wife will tell you I am famous for bashing references.
But that's talking about an office. Right.
So then you go to Ephesians 5 and you see that the husband is the head of the wife. And so as you're modeling for your children, Christian living and Christian worship, I think that speaks to the father being the primary initiator and leader and director of family worship.
Now, there my wife may be the one who reads the scripture during our family worship. My wife may be the one who prays during family worship. My wife will give commentary on the verses that we're talking about in family worship.
You know, I think of it as a team effort. Well, one, it's worship. And two, it is an effort to teach our children the scripture and to model proper Christian living and worship before them. So I think it should be clear to the children that the father is the head of the household, but the wife does have the ability to instruct her children.
Now, if she sits the husband down and says, listen, you all listen to me, then I might have a problem with that. But generally speaking, I think the wife is free to play a large role in the family worship.
Like she could even read catechism questions to the kids and, you know, all kinds of things like that, right?
Absolutely. And who's doing it when I'm not in the home? Like tonight, because of my responsibilities to the church, my wife is going to lead family worship at home tonight. And the children must recognize that she has the authority and the ability to do so.
Now, here's a fly in the ointment. Is it legitimate for her to always lead that family worship when you have a scenario? And this is not very rare. It's a very frequent scenario. The husband and father is not a believer.
Then I think, yes, I think then she, he is not able or capable of leading family worship. He's not a believer. He himself is not worshiping.
He might not even want to be there in the room when they're doing it.
That's right. That's right. And very, very often, unfortunately, in this fallen world, wives and women have to take up responsibility in places where men have abdicated it or are not capable of carrying.
It out.
You wish it were not that way. It shouldn't be that way. But in situations like that, you know, the believing wife must do everything that she can to raise her children in the discipline and admonition of the Lord, while still as best as she can modeling submission to her husband, according to scripture in any way that does not violate obedience to scripture.
Thank you, Boris. And I believe you're a first time questioner, which would make you eligible to have a free New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers of the NASB, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com, who will actually ship that free Bible out to you.
We just need your full mailing address in Waterville or Waterville, New York. Thank you so much for participating in the show. We have an anonymous listener, and the anonymous listener says, do you believe that these household worship gatherings are actually necessary?
Should somebody be put under discipline if they are not having these meetings with their families in the home? And why do you think that the worship gatherings on Sundays and Wednesday nights are not sufficient for those worship encounters?
I think the answer to that question hinges on the larger principle behind family worship. Where we are to model Christian living before our families. Let me say, the thing that gripped me most about family worship when I took that class was not that this was something that I had to do, but something that I got to do.
I got to join in worship and singing and reading of the Word with my family day after day. I love Sundays.
I love gatherings. When you say you got to, you mean it's irresistible to you? Is that what you mean?
I love it. I enjoy it. I love to sing praises to the Lord. Why would I not want to do that with my family? I love to read Scripture. Why would I not want to do that with my family? Prayer is a great blessing given to us that I enjoy.
Why would I not want to do that with my family? And so there's that sense where I would be disappointed in a brother who would say, you know, I really don't want to do it. I have no inclination to do it.
I think there's something there that needs to be investigated as far as spirituality, whether it be maturity or zeal. I think one who enjoys worship of the Lord would want to do it with their family. Should a man be disciplined if he is not leading his family in family worship?
That's a tougher question. Have heard of churches in history that have done so? And I think if you are a man who has been given charge of a household to instruct your children in the ways of the Lord, and the only instruction that they're getting is the Sunday church service, which is not coming from you, and maybe a Wednesday night service, which is not coming from you, I would say at the least you are being slack in your function as a husband.
According to scripture. The discipline question and how you would adjudicate that is one that I'm not prepared to answer fully. But I would lean in the direction of if a man who claims to be a Christian is not leading his home and bringing them to the scriptures, and engaging them in the worship of the Lord Jesus Christ at home, I think that's a significant problem that needs to be addressed in one way or another.
Yes, and I'm assuming that you would agree. Whereas on the one hand, elders of a church don't want to become policemen and barge into the homes of the congregants and overstep their boundaries of authority by digging too deeply about what goes on in that household, especially if there is nothing that is making itself evident about an aberrant faith in some way.
On the one hand, you don't want that, but I'm assuming that you would agree that the avoidance or neglect of having household worship might be a disciplinary situation if there are serious problems in a marriage and serious problems with order in the household with children.
And when the elders advise and counsel this family as a part of the journey to rectifying the situation is to have the family worship, that they refuse to do so. Wouldn't you agree that that would be an area where you could say it might be leading to discipline because of that?
That's right. You mentioned that as part of a bigger package, a bigger problem. You know, when family worship is not happening in the household, that is leading to other problems. And I think that might end up just being a symptom of something bigger and certainly could contribute to a disciplinary situation.
Now, in your experience, not only as an associate pastor at North Shore Baptist, but also now a pastor at Lindbergh Baptist, is this a very common thing that people, households of congregants are having private household family worship?
What I tend to hear most commonly is, yes, sometimes we read and pray together, but it's not as often as I would like, or we did it for a season and now we're not doing it. It's something that people struggle with, just like other aspects of the faith.
You know, there are Christians who are struggling with reading their Bibles for themselves. There are church members who are struggling with prayer. There are church members who are struggling with church attendance.
And so this is another one of those things that is good for you and helpful and necessary, I think, but that members of churches need to be shepherded and taught and encouraged to grow in these areas.
And family worship, I think, is one where there is so much benefit to be had. And I think some just don't see the benefit or understand how much they will be helped by this practice spiritually. Ed Moore often says with regard to marriage, that he's never had a husband and a wife come into a counseling situation where they are at odds with one another.
And he says, oh, do you pray together? And they say, oh yes, we pray together. So that's one of the first things that he recommends. If you're married, you need to pray together, and that will help cover a lot of things as you're uniting together before the Lord.
And so I would say something similar about family worship. All kinds of difficulties and stumbling blocks and trials are going to come upon a family. But if you have this root in your household that we are set around the word of God and the worship of Christ, and this is a regular rhythm in our family, I think that's going to help guard and galvanize your family against the influences of the world and the influence of the flesh and the attacks of the devil.
If you're neglecting that in your household and your children see church and worship as something that's out there and not in here, I think you leave the door open for all kinds of dangerous things, accusations from your own children about hypocrisy, doubts about the reality of the faith, because we only do that out there.
And in here, we're just like everybody else.
Amen. We have Stu in Bradley, Maine, and Stu says, I know as you said earlier, there isn't a detailed blueprint in the Bible about these family worship experiences, but could you give us a basic idea of what you do so that those of us who might not be accustomed to this might be able to take your ideas and run with them, so to speak?
Well, this is why I love this little book by Dr. Don Whitney. If you can pick it up, get it. It's simply titled Family Worship, and he says these are the three things, read, sing, and pray. And so in whatever way you do those things, that's the framework that I took and ran with that I would encourage anyone just to take and run with.
So read, how much do you have to read? Maybe you're just reading a verse. Maybe you're reading a chapter. Maybe you're reading a couple of verses. That's for you to decide with your family. But the significant thing is that the word of God is being presented in your home.
Then you have sing. Singing is we express our love for the Lord. We use our bodies in worship. We use our energy and our breath. And you can choose a short song or a long song. My wife usually knows what song we're going to sing, depending on the hour of the night.
Sometimes we'll sing a longer hymn with four or five verses, but if it's late and the kids are antsy and everybody's tired, it'll be the doxology or two verses of Jesus Love Me. You can shift that, but sing something.
And then similarly with prayer, you can have a long prayer and have everybody in the family pray a little bit, or you can have mom or dad offer a prayer or one of the kids offer a prayer. There's really freedom there.
There's no constraints. But what I can tell you is I'll give you a general layout of our family worship. We gather everybody together in the living room. We have the children who can read and get their Bibles.
We have our Bibles, and we'll open with a prayer. So either I will pray or my wife will pray. And what we're doing right now is that we'll then read. Right now we're reading through a chapter of the Proverbs.
We'll read through the Proverbs. And occasionally I will stop and make commentary on one of the Proverbs, point something out to my children that would be pertinent to them and their life. And then when we finish reading the chapter, then we'll sing our song.
I might pick a song and have a little worship sheet that we all have so we all know the words. I'm just teaching my children the hymns of the faith. Or we'll sing something that we have memorized. We've sang, My Jesus, I love Thee many, many times.
My kids know it by heart. Often we'll sing that. And that's really it.
Okay, we have, let's see. I was just looking at a question, and it escapes my vision right now. Oh, we have Cleveland in Yapank, Long Island, New York. And Cleveland asks, might a good idea in family worship to get children more enthusiastic about it is to allow them to do things that normally would not occur in a formal gathering of God's people on Sunday, where they get to occasionally at least pick the songs that you sang and also even pick the topic that we are going to hear from God's Word.
Yeah, I think it would be wonderful to have your children involved in the worship. There was a season where we were reading through Psalms, and my oldest son, KP, was just learning how to read. And every night, he would read a couple of verses from the Psalms.
My daughter, Acacia, is a year older than he. She's a better reader. And for a season, I had them both reading. And then in a recent season, my third son, Cannon, who is five now, and just learning how to read bigger words, we give him a verse or two and work with him through the verse.
And so they get instruction in reading, practice in reading, and they also get to read from God's.
Word.
Cannon will often choose the song or call out,.
Doxology!
All right, we'll all sing Doxology. So it's great to have them involved. We're reading a little book now that I selected because my son had some questions about the.
Faith.
And so I said, all right, well, let's read a book that is written for kids defending the faith and the truth about Jesus Christ. So that was based on his interests and where he was at so that we could learn and instruct them in a helpful way.
Just last night, we sang To God Be the Glory, which was a song we used to sing all the time two, three years ago. And in the last verse, we got up and we marched around the living room because it's a high energy song.
So yeah, sometimes we march, we dance. Yes, certainly it's not as structured as a Sunday worship service would be. You could have fun and yeah, just glorify the Lord. Enjoy your family. Enjoy the Word.
Enjoy the singing. Enjoy the praying.
Amen. And we're going to our final break right now. If you have a question for Pastor Keith Allen on the importance of family worship, please submit it as soon as you can, because we're rapidly running out of time.
Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least your city and state and your country of residence. Don't go away.
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We are discussing the importance of family worship. And, Keith, we have a question for you from Chimzy, C-H-I-M-Z-Y, in Baldwin, Long Island, New York. What is the difference between family devotion and family worship, or is it just semantics?
Pastor Keith? And Pastor Keith is not answering.
Do you hear me?
Now I do, yes.
That was just a dramatic pause, brother. I heard the question, yeah. Yeah, I think family devotion and family worship could probably be regarded as the same thing. You know, when you start defining things and using words, you always want to understand what a person means, what they're saying.
Generally, when I hear Christians use the term devotions, you know, you're talking about a time to get into the Word, to read and to pray. So if you're talking about family devotions, maybe that's reading and praying, that could also be considered family worship.
I think the singing piece maybe is more, might be more emphasized in a person's mind when they think about using the term family worship rather than family devotions. But I don't think I would work so hard to separate those things.
I mean, they are the same things. You're taking your household, you're devoting them to the study of God's Word and the worship of Christ, and so whether you call it family devotions or family worship, I think is up to your preference.
Excellent. Let's see. We have Val in Brooklyn, New York, and Val says, other than illness, would you allow a child to bow out of participation in family worship?
I'm going to say no. I have young children, so I haven't been through the parenting of teenagers. But as I think about just an overall view, the parents are the authority in the household. Children are to obey their parents in the Lord.
This is an opportunity to instruct the family and point them to the glory of Christ. So generally speaking, I would say no. I would not allow a child to bow out of family worship, particularly my children at their.
Age.
Of course not. As a child gets older and closer to adulthood, might there be a certain scenario where you would do that?
Perhaps.
You know, it's a nuanced situational question where I don't just want to lay a hammer down and say like across the board, don't you ever let a child bow out of family worship? I would say generally speaking, my answer would be no.
But I could imagine a circumstance where you might, for a day or a season, permit an unbelieving, rebellious child who's going to cause problems and disturb the family worship to not participate. But that would be something that I wouldn't have any real serious wisdom on until I encountered it or thought about it a little more deeply.
Well, before we run out of time, I want you to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today about this topic before we go off the air.
Jesus and his word are worthy of our attention and our praise and therefore our good and for our enjoyment. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that worshiping on Sunday and maybe attending another service on Wednesday is the full orb of your participation in the worship of Jesus Christ.
If you are a Christian, your home should be a place where the worship of Jesus Christ and the love of his word should be evident. How you do. It could appear in many different forms, but this thing that we're referring to today as family worship, when you, in a structured way, call your family together and read the word and pray and sing, is a wonderful thing to institute in your household to make sure that one, you yourself are spending time in the word and praying and singing praises to God on a daily basis, that you are modeling that to your children and that they are having the opportunity both to witness you exercise your faith in this devotion to the Lord and you are exposing them to the word and teaching them and instructing them in the way that they should go.
Amen. Well, it's been a delight, truly, brother, to have you as a guest and I look forward to you returning very often. I would love to have you as a regularly featured guest on Iron Trump and Zion Radio to discuss what's ever burdening your heart, and you can also suggest authors or other guests, and you could be my co-host as well, in addition to being a guest, and we could have a lot of fun.
I can tell that right now, and I hope that we have a long future ahead of us as interacting on Iron Trump and Zion Radio.
Amen, well thank you, brother, so much for having me on.
Hey, thank you, and I want to remind our listeners of the website, lynnbrookbaptist .org, that's l-y-n-b-r-o-o-k-baptist .org. I want to thank also everybody for listening, especially those who took the time to write, and don't forget Chimsey.
I believe you're a first-time listener as well. Send to me your full mailing address in Baldwin, New York, so that we can send you a New American Standard Bible. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.
Amen.