Jeff Waddington Interview

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

Apostle Paul said, "...but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you."

In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the

Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth. Usually here at the radio station we have

Mondays, a recorded sermon, First Corinthians Exposition, recorded here at Bethlehem Bible Church.

Tuesdays, Pastor Steve and I like to talk about the world in general and evangelicalism, church issues.

Wednesdays, I like to have guests. Thursdays, try to teach something positive, K -love kind of Thursday.

And then Fridays, we like to go after people, a little bit of rebuking those who contradict

Titus chapter 1. Well, today since it's Wednesday, we have a special guest, a new friend of mine,

Jeff Waddington. Jeff, welcome to No Compromise Radio. Oh, thank you for having me on the program.

Jeff, I knew your voice before I knew your face. And how could that be? How could you know someone's voice before their face?

You're greatly blessed in that, by the way. Yeah. Well, I hear you regularly on reformedforum .org,

and you are one of the hosts there for that show. And I want you to know, Jeff, that on my iPod, my iPad, my iPhone, whatever they are,

I have White Horse Inn, I have Sinclair Ferguson, Sunday morning, Sunday night,

I have Christ the Center. I think that's it. You guys are the only people I listen to.

I'm humbled. So tell us a little bit about your association with Reformed Forum.

What is that show? And then we'll talk about you and your ministry after that. Okay. Well, the

Reformed Forum is basically a website where our desire is, of course, to spread the gospel, to convey the

Reformed message. And it actually grew out of a friendship with a couple of other guys in my context in the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church, but also in the Presbyterian Church in America. We would get together, and we'd sit down and talk about biblical and theological issues.

And somewhere along the line, shortly after I was ordained into the ministry, we said to ourselves, wow, maybe someone else would be interested in this.

And so we started just putting it out on the web, and that's how Christ the

Center came into existence. The Reformed Forum website actually had two prior existences.

One was called Reformata, and then after that, Castle Church. And we decided just to call it

Reformed Forum, and at that website, you'll find all sorts of resources for the church beyond Christ the

Center, but the flagship program is Christ the Center. We've been on four and a half years now.

Well, Jeff, some of the No Compromise listeners would be familiar with a few of your guests, such as Carl Truman and Daryl Hart, and so I've tried to interview some of those guys.

But I have to tell you, when I listen to you guys talk about some of the topics in the

Reformed world, sometimes I feel like I went to a Bible college instead of a

Bible seminary. How does that work out? I'm not sure how to respond to that.

We didn't—on the one hand, we didn't want to make things simplistic, but we do recognize, based on our interaction with listeners, that we do need to be clear and understandable.

Well, I'm not trying to imply that it was not understandable, because the other day I was listening to Vern Poythress as one of the guests on your show, and he talked about even ministry regarding evangelism, and he said,

I like to ask people this question—and it was in light of some Ventillian ideas—he said,

I like to ask unbelievers this question. When did you stop believing in God? Because that leads me into the story of their life and the narrative of their life, and that's how

I like to evangelize. So very, very clear, very, very simple, just because something's Reformed, it doesn't mean it's difficult.

That's true. And other folk have made the comment that the show does some—the

Christmas Center does sometimes fly at a high altitude. But see, I like that, because if you've got—was it

James Dozell on about the impassibility of God? And I think he went to Master's Seminary, so you guys aren't against crazy premillennialists like James Boyce now, are you?

I mean, we're all primarily Amils, but there is freedom with the eschatological view.

You can be premillennial and be an OPC pastor, can't you? Yes. Now, I will admit, it's a rarity, but it is possible.

Well, tell our listeners today a short introduction about the OPC. Some of them are familiar with Machen.

Tell us what an Orthodox Presbyterian Church is, because, Jeff, when our folks travel who are listening to the radio and the podcast,

I personally, if I find an Orthodox Presbyterian Church in the Yellow Pages, which sometimes you guys don't even list yourselves—well, that's another subject—I would rather go to an

OPC church than a Baptist church than a Bible church, because I know exactly what

I'm going to get at an Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I'm not talking PCUSA, I'm not talking

USA. Tell us about the background of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and really, what are some of your tenets and pillars?

Okay. Well, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church came out of the

Presbyterian Church USA, the PCUSA, back in 1936, and you already mentioned

J. Gressa Machen, our primary founding father. And that all—the

Church came out of the whole Fundamentalist -Modernist controversy of the early 1900s.

You may remember, your listeners may be familiar with the fact that Princeton Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, had been a bastion of Reformed Orthodoxy for many years, a hundred -plus years, and then about 1929, the

Board of Trustees and the Board of Directors were amalgamated and there was a reorganization. That reflected the rising power of liberalism in the mainline

Presbyterian denomination. That led to Dr. Machen's resigning, along with several of his colleagues on the faculty.

They then established Westminster Seminary in 1929, now located in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Glenside, PA, just a mile from where I am right now.

But in 1936, we had the culmination of trials against Dr.

Machen for his involvement in—being involved in the

Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions. Dr. Machen had seen the rise of the support of unbelieving missionaries by the mainline denomination's missions board.

So he was involved in establishing this Independent Board. He was disciplined in the mainline church and eventually defrocked.

That led to the establishment of the Presbyterian Church of America, not to be confused with our sister denomination, the

Presbyterian Church in America. And so that's the birth of the OPC in 1936.

Our denomination has never been a large denomination in terms of numbers, but our desire has always been to be faithful to God, to His Word, and to the

Reformed view of God's Word as expressed specifically in the

Westminster Standards—that would be the Westminster Confession of Faith—larger and shorter catechism.

We are committed to a Presbyterian form of church government, and yes, we baptize infants.

Yeah, but Jeff, on the positive side—just kidding—you are committed to expositional preaching, correct?

Absolutely. Yes, and what are you preaching through right now, Sunday morning, Sunday nights? On Sunday mornings,

I'm preaching through the Gospel of John, and in the evenings, the Book of Ezekiel.

And as the teacher of the Calvary OPC in Ringos, New Jersey—by the way, I always wanted to ask you,

Ringos. Why is it called Ringos? Well, that's the name—actually, the church building is not even located in Ringos.

How's that? But Ringos is a community, and you can't for the life of me tell you where that comes from, but we're near Flemington, and actually only about a half hour from Trenton, 20 minutes from Princeton.

All right. Well, let me— If you know where Princeton is, you'll have some idea of where we are.

Absolutely. I've been to the cemetery there in Princeton, and then walked past B .B. Warfield's tomb, and then got the anointing, kind of like Kathryn Kuhlman did and Benny Hinn.

Jeff, let's talk a little bit about theology and the Reformed faith.

How about this? What if someone says they're listening today, and maybe they love Charles Stanley or Chuck Swindoll, and they say, well,

I don't really need Calvin or Luther or Zwingli or men who are part of the

Reformation and the children of the Reformation. I have the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is my teacher.

How would you respond to that? Oh, my. That's a good question. Well, it's true that in the most ultimate sense, you may not need

Calvin or Zwingli or any other Reformed luminary, but God works through means.

And the Holy Spirit didn't begin working in the church with me or with you.

He's been working in the church, well, of course, we can go all the way back to the Garden of Eden, right, in Genesis 3 .15.

But God uses means, and men like Calvin or Spurgeon, these men have been used by God in the past and to great blessing in the church.

And that's what I would argue. Of course, the value of a Calvin or the value of an

Edwards or the value of a Machen or Spurgeon is that they are biblical.

I don't know if that gets at quite what you were looking for. Yeah, I know you agree with me, Jeff, that the

Spirit of God, He has been working past Acts 28, and He has teachers that He has given us to equip the saints for the work of ministry.

And I know you have good manners and you're a guest on my show, but if I was on No Compromise Radio, I might say something like, at the root, that it could be a very arrogant question.

I've got the Holy Spirit. I don't need anyone else. Who are you to tell me? It really ignores

God's gift to the church, His gifts to the church, who include Calvin and Luther.

So that's a great answer. Let me ask you another question. I know you did not grow up Reformed.

You probably were born a Pelagian, like everyone else, and then you graduated to semi -Pelagianism as you got saved, and then you grew into the

Reformed faith. Let me ask you this. When people first grasp God is sovereign in everything, including salvation, and they start understanding

Calvinism and the doctrines of grace, sometimes they go too far overboard and they can become very obnoxious and very prideful.

What kind of advice would you give to some of the new Reformed converts? I don't mean converts to Christianity, but they're converted to the doctrines of grace and converted to some of the confessions, and they just need to take a kind of a chill pill, if you will.

What would you tell them? Yeah, what you're referring to is sometimes called the caged stage, or the cage stage.

Cage stage. And what we mean is when a person who's been a Christian comes upon the doctrines of grace, as you've already said, they tend to be overwhelmed with the beauty and the wonder of it all, and they tend to go to be pretty obsessive with what they've discovered.

I went through that phase. I'm pretty sure I did. And I guess the thing to remember is that we should not fall into, let's say we're now

Reformed, so we shouldn't act as if, you know, pragmatically we're still

Arminian. Okay, that's a great response. Some people like to say we should, let's see, how do they say that?

We should believe like we're Calvinistic, but we should pray like Arminians, and I think it was Jonathan Gershman who said, don't do anything like an

Arminian. Right, exactly. We can, of course, express ourselves, but one of the things

I guess in my own pilgrimage is that I've learned that I'm not, such an important matter is what we're talking about, the doctrines of grace, which

I believe is just biblical Christianity. It's something, you know, it may take time and patience and effort in unfolding that for other people.

I think it's probably helpful to actually remember our own pilgrimage.

In other words, we're not Reformed because we are smart enough. And I think maybe that's the pitfall, is that we forget that we're

Reformed, we've come to the doctrines of grace by grace, and we ought to be gracious in how we share those with other brothers and sisters who haven't yet seen the light.

We're talking to Jeff Waddington today on No Compromise Radio, one of the co -hosts at Reformedforum .org,

and teacher of Calvary Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Ringos, New Jersey.

Jeff, there's a man at our church who now understands the doctrines of grace, and I was talking to him a while ago, and he said, it took me probably five years to believe these things, to submit to who

God is and what he says in Scripture regarding election and depravity and the atonement, etc.

And so to his particular case, if he's trying to convert someone else from Arminianism to Augustinianism, it took him five years.

He can't expect other people to buy into it the first time they hear it, right? That's correct.

I mean, in some ways, or in many ways, it's going to be like sharing the faith with an unbeliever.

We don't convert a person. We can be the instrument or the tool in the hands of the

Holy Spirit to point someone to Christ and to his word, and we can give a reason for the hope that it's within us.

But at the end of the day, it's the Holy Spirit who changes a person's heart and mind, not us.

I'm reminded of Al Martin's small booklet, Banner of Truth booklet, called The Practical Implications of Calvinism.

I think you can get that online for free, by the way. Al Martin, Practical Implications of Calvinism. And he basically says, since God is sovereign, if we believe these things, we only believe them because God has revealed it to us through his

Spirit anyway, and so that should force us to be humble. Christians should be humble people, and certainly

Calvinists should be all the more humble. Wouldn't you agree? I would agree. What makes it complicated is that in our postmodern world, skepticism often passes itself off as humility.

That's true. That is exactly true. So our pattern for humility needs to be

God's word and not, you know, the unbelieving world. Let me ask you some more personal questions for my own benefit.

How do you pick your guests for Reform Forum? Very often it's someone we personally know, or someone who has written an article or a book, and we're interested in interacting with them.

No mystery in that one, actually. All right. How about if somebody says, well,

I grew up in a Calvary Chapel church, Assemblies of God vineyard, and I know we have to respond, the

Bible says, to repent and believe, and I think I did repent and believe, so I can't really grasp unconditional election.

What would you tell someone who's struggling with unconditional election and God choosing?

What should they read? How should they think through the issues? Well, obviously start with God's word.

Well, maybe it's not so obvious, but let's start with God's word. In places like Ephesians, you know,

I think the Gospel of John is absolutely soaked to the bone with the doctrine of election.

When I first came to the Reformed faith, I decided in my personal devotions to read through the

Gospel of John. Nobody told me to do that, at least I don't remember anybody telling me to do that. And I remember reading it, and I'm thinking, wow, you know,

God's sovereignty, election, the difference between the saved and the unsaved, the elected and reprobate, whatever language you want to use, is all through that Gospel.

And I found that particularly helpful. But in terms of beyond the

Bible, Calvin's Institutes is a great place to go. I had a conversation a few years back with my eldest daughter,

Susanna, and she asked me the question, how can I know if I'm elect? And I said, well, the only way you can know you're elect is if you trust in Christ.

The mistake that people often make is to try to answer the question of election or to try to grapple with the truth of election apart from Christ.

And that is like the worst thing someone can do, because election is not conceived apart from the

Son of God, and it isn't carried out in history or our personal lives apart from belief in the

Lord Jesus Christ, with the exception that we're already familiar with the elect infants who die in infancy, the mentally challenged, and so forth, who can't indicate their belief in Christ.

Jeff, one of my favorite preachers who died about ten years ago, S. Lewis Johnson, he used to say in a very pastoral way, if you're wondering if you're elect or not, come to Christ Jesus by faith in Him and repentance, and let's settle that issue once and for all right now.

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. And I think that's exactly what you're saying. Exactly. That was well put.

We've got about four minutes left. What do you take with this blog war that's going on with the idea of justification and sanctification becoming maybe merged, or sanctification is looking back, justification as maybe

Tullian would put it, and Rick Phillips has responded, maybe Truman has responded. Tell us what's your take on that, and then how should we see sanctification biblically?

Well, I do come at it, I do take sides, although I think, okay, so I would side with Rick Phillips.

I think Rick has stated things quite well. And basically his criticism of Tullian Chevigian, Billy Graham's grandson, pastoring down at D.

James Kennedy's church in Florida, he is, I don't know that he's intended to do this, but the tendency is for him to say that sanctification is our getting used to our justification and leaving it at that.

And there's sometimes a tendency in his writings to suggest that any stress upon the duty of the

Christian to follow God's word and so forth and so on undermines our assurance, undermines our justification.

And I think Rick Phillips offers a pretty solid and balanced response to that.

Sanctification does involve being mindful of our justification, so that's true.

But sanctification is, of course, what, well, let me go back, retrace.

When we come to faith in Christ, we are united to our Savior. As Calvin would put it, we get a two -fold blessing or a two -fold benefit, justification on the one hand, sanctification on the other hand.

Both of these aspects of our salvation or redemption are a response to what happened when

Adam sinned, Adam and Eve sinned. Adam, of course, is the federal head. When he sinned, we also fell, and that resulted in the guilt of Adam's sin being imputed to us and the corruption or power of sin.

And so those two aspects have to be dealt with in salvation.

So justification addresses the guilt problem. Sanctification addresses the power or corruption problem.

They are always together, but they are distinct.

Okay, so they're inseparable, but they are different. And I suspect, my thinking is that Tullian tends to stress justification so much that a proper biblical understanding of sanctification gets short tripped.

Well, see, that's exactly why, Jeff, I listened to the Reformed Forum, because those last 90 seconds were crystal clear.

Did you read the new Kevin de Young book, Hole in Our Holiness? I have it on my nightstand, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

Yeah, it's an excellent book. I'm just reading 1 Corinthians 15 right now. But by the grace of God, I am what

I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them.

And then Paul quickly says, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. I think Tullian wants to guard the gospel.

I'm glad for that. I think we should look back to the gospel. Bridges is right. Preach the gospel to yourself every day.

But I'm glad for men like Rick Phillips, who in love will put some correctives on some of the theologies that we have as younger men.

Right. Well, Jeff Waddington's been our guest today. You usually host the show with Camden Busey.

Christ the Center, found at reformedforum .org, or you can

Google Jeff at his church, the Church of the Pastors, Calvary OPC Church, Ringgoes, New Jersey.

Jeff, it's been great to have you on No Compromise Radio. I appreciate your ministry. Thank you, my privilege.

And I appreciate yours as well. 835 -3400.

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