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CBD Blues
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, and laying right next to me is the no-co dog. Well, she�s at my feet. It is 7 .50 p .m. on a Friday night. My wife and daughter are at a Martha Peace conference up in New Hampshire.
My daughter is working. My son is in Costa Rica on a surf trip. He said, �Dad, it was $250 round trip or something from L .A. I said, �Okay, go. He�s got his own money. Once he�I think last year he said, �I�ve got a cheap ticket to Turkey.
Who are you going with? Nobody. Then you can�t go. So I like to be able to say yes, so I said yes to Costa Rica. And my other daughter, Maddie, she�s in L .A. So it�s just the dog and moi and No Compromise Radio studio.
Oh, it�s one deluxe studio. It�s an old table. We�ve got a mixing board and a couple of nice microphones and headphones. We fixed the headphones so they don�t give you the black specks anymore. Isn�t Steve happy?
He should be. And we are doing a few shows, still Tuesday through Friday shows, live for a while. I might go back to a Friday rerun show, maybe, maybe not. In front of me I did have�what is that I did have a bunch of church resources.
You know, one of the things when I first became a pastor that I thought was quite fascinating is the mail that the pastor of a church would get, let alone the mail that a church would get. And of course there are many things that churches need to buy, and there are people who then try to sell those things.
And then there are a bunch of things that the church shouldn�t buy under no circumstances should they buy. And so today I think we�ll talk a little bit about church accoutrements. Is that the second French word I�ve said today?
Accoutrement. When I was in Paris a few months ago, people were pretty nice, nicer than other times that I�ve been to Paris, until I went to the northern section and there was a lot of Muslims there. And it was just a different vibe.
And then we went to Normandy to go to Omaha Beach and Utah Beach and St. Mary Lee�s. Is that the second or that�s the third French word or phrase that I�ve said this show? Merci. Anyway, they like Americans in the north of France because they�re not speaking Nazi German anymore.
I mean, speaking German is one thing, but facilitated by the Nazis. So what about church resources? In front of me there�s something that you really need to have, especially on those Christmas Eve services.
This is from the CBD catalog, by the way. I don�t know how they stay in business. It�s not that very far from church. It�s not that far from church. Peabody Mass. It looks like Peabody for those of you in Nebraska or California, but it�s Peabody.
There goes the dog. Where�s she going? Is she barking? She is here trying to protect me. I don�t know how they stay in business. It�s a huge warehouse. And now with Amazon and other things, it just doesn�t work out as much.
I�m torn because I like CBD on one hand, and on the other hand, they sell a bunch of garbage. So it almost serves them rightly. Okay, we have long candles with paper drip protectors. Let the light of these stately tapers scatter the darkness and illumine your sanctuary.
Includes 100 candles measuring 7 1⁄2 inches tall and 100 drip protectors measuring 3 inches in diameter with perforated centers. CBD catalog, $32 .99. Remember that? You know, on Christmas Eve services, you�ve got to turn out the lights and sing Silent Night.
And you always know what songs you�re singing when you look at the hymnals over the years and you see the candle wax on said pages. Now, this dog of mine is going to bother me when she just keeps like making laps and she just won�t lay down.
Another thing, so I think you can get the long candles with paper drip protectors. That wouldn�t be too bad. You could get the more, it looks like a sword, fencing sword. It is a congregational candle with reusable plastic holders.
And this is more safe, they say, $68 .99 for a set of 50. And it�s got a cone. And so it doesn�t just have the candle wax drip down on a piece of paper that�s just stuck around a candle. It�s got a little cone catcher.
I kind of like those little cone catchers. Okay, what else do we have here? Oil of joy set. I could probably use some of that right about now. I could use some joy. Oil of joy set. Since ancient times, those in need of healing and blessing have been anointed with oil.
Equip your church elders, I�m always looking for a gift for them, prayer ministry and visitation team to perform this sacred ritual, which is found in a little bottle. This bit-a-lottle, 6 -1 -4 ounce of vials, 100 unscented olive oil, $16 .99.
Retail though, it�s $20 .99. Also available under the same oil of joie de paume set is the anointing balm and the I�m going to do fromage, healing oil in decorative glass bottle. You can get the olive wood flask, but they are trying to sell you it under some other name because somehow they think you probably shouldn�t buy flasks on a CBD dime.
Now why do I talk about some of these things? Well, it just comes to me. What do you find in your mail if you�re a pastor? Many of you probably don�t know that because you�re not a pastor or you haven�t worked at a church.
I�m studying 1 Peter chapter 1 and he has a great intro, which is just a eulogy to speak well of, a good word, and I don�t mean like a death knell, but I mean just speaking well of God, a praise, �Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I want to say who according to, that would be NAS, I believe, but according to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.
And it goes on, just praising God. Now it does say a few verses later, �As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, �You shall be holy, for I am holy.
How do we go about doing that? What�s our strategy for holiness? And if you don�t talk about union with Christ, if you don�t talk about gratitude, if you don�t talk about the Spirit of God gracing you to do these things, you might as well just get some oil.
It�s a lot easier. Just a little dab will do you. It�s like brill cream, oil of joy set. I keep wanting to say oil of ole set, and I also want to talk like I�m from Nebraska. I keep wanting to talk like that.
Okay, what else do we have here? There are offering envelopes, and you know, I don�t have any problem with offering envelopes. And these particular offering envelopes confirm the fact that you should be thinking rightly where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, Matthew 6, 21.
I don�t like it when they say tithe. You can get some that say tithe, it just says offering. Offering is a much better term. Okay, now we get into some other things that are very interesting. You can buy communion bread.
Now, of course, I think highly of communion, the Lord�s Supper, and it says here, �For the Lord�s table, hard and soft bread comes in batches of 500. I don�t even think we should call it a batch. There�s just something irreverent almost about that, in my opinion.
One half-inch square pieces in resealable bags. Is every one in a bag? That means you have to take it out of the bag before you give it to the person, or is it just 500 in a bag? �Unleavened wafers measure one and one-quarter inch across and come sealed in ten rolls of 100 each.
$6 .49 for hard communion bread, serve 500, it�s on sale. And soft communion bread, $6 .49, serving 500. And you can also get those wafers. Communion wafer serves 1 ,000, that�s $15 .99. Those are those little discs that I got in a Lutheran day, and it would stick to the roof of your mouth, and it was hard to get off there, and it took a little bit of the wine from the part of the communion to get that off.
And then you can also get some gluten-free communion wafers that serves approximately 50. So there�s not as many as in the others, because there�s not as many who are gluten-free. There is a debate what kind of bread you should use, and it�s not hard, soft, or gluten-free, it�s do you have any yeast in it or not, should you use unleavened bread or not, and what does the leaven symbolize, that type of thing, and they don�t want to have leaven, which to many, and in many passages, would symbolize sin, and they don�t want to think about Jesus� body having sin.
I�m not really a stickler on that, what kind of bread is used. You know, some people want to bake a thing of bread, and then you just take a little piece out. When it comes to communion cups, in the old days, and still some other churches, I�ve been to some Charismatic churches and some Greek Orthodox kind of churches, and churches over in Europe, Czech Republic in particular, and it was a communion cup, and it was just a big cup, and you had a little napkin, and you kind of wiped it, and then took a drink, and if you were about the sixth person down the line, there was no un-germed areas to put your lips, and you were hoping it had a high alcohol content.
That would be a time where you would really want to make sure you had wine. My preference would be wine, because it just, that�s what the Bible had, and maybe you have inner rings and outer rings. At the church here, we have grape juice.
I just don�t want to cause a big fuss. Somebody will fuss about it, so I�d rather not cause a fuss, because it�s not that big a deal. But anyway, I was the speaker at this youth conference, and I don�t really like it when they have communion service at youth conferences, it�s for the church, it�s a church ordinance.
But I was just there speaking, and I was in the back, because I just got done speaking, and so I went to the very back, you know, to just kind of relax and sit down. And I�m thinking, �Oh, there�s like 300 teenagers that are all drinking out of these cups, and then it�s going to be my turn, and what am I going to do
And I didn�t have these kind of sealed communion breads, hard or soft, from CBD. And then they said, thankfully, �If anyone here, for conscience or because you�re sick, you don�t want to take the common cup, you can have one of these small little fellowship cups.
Those common, not the common cups, but the little tiny plastic PVC cups, celebration cups sometimes people call them. So I did. So I was very happy. One of the reasons why I know I�m thankful for Christ�s atoning work is when I went on a Lutheran mission trip when I was 15, 1975, down to Galeana, Mexico, with the Lutheran church, a buddy and I stole the wine that the pastor had for the communion for the team, and we would just take a few shots of it.
If you think you�re going to get killed for something, that would probably be it, and God saved me in spite of those kind of asinine, stupid, sinful, rebellious things. Speaking of communion, I remember here as a pastor, you have all these stories that you obtain over time.
I remember there was a couple and they wanted to get married and they wanted to have communion together. And I wouldn�t do that now. I don�t let couples write their own vows because they�re not asymmetrical enough according to Scripture, and they become subjective and romantic, and I just don�t do it anymore.
And lots of times I�m not even around during the weddings because in summers I�m usually gone. But this particular time, it was my first wedding where someone asked me, and it was probably 15 years ago, and I just said okay.
And normally what happens when it�s the first of the month here at Bethlehem Bible Church, bbcchurch .org, there�s a team that gets everything ready. And I didn�t ever have to think, do we have juice and do we have bread?
Because it�s prepared a couple days ahead of time and it�s all set out and ready to go. The only thing I really need to remember is move the communion table away from the platform so I can easily get back there.
And years ago I said, you know what, let�s have the elders take turns leading communion and doing Scripture reading and pastoral prayers. I don�t need to do that every single time. And I want to train the other men and I also want the people at the church to realize there are other leaders besides Mike.
It is a plurality of elders and there are five elders here at Bethlehem Bible Church. Well, we are getting ready for the service and double-checking everything, and weddings from a pastoral perspective are very, well, they take a lot of time because premarital counseling, you have the rehearsal, you have rehearsal dinners, you have the wedding, you have wedding receptions, and even, you know, more, lots of stuff to do.
Well, I wasn�t thinking about this extra step and now it�s Saturday morning and it�s two minutes before I�m about ready to walk out with the groom to find out that somebody said we don�t have any juice and they�re scrambling trying to find grape juice.
Somewhere, can we find some grape juice? And if I would have had these fellowship cups, water and juice communion sets from CBD, if I would have had this little legacy portable communion set with anointing oil bottle, and by the way, I don�t really think that�s an awful idea.
I think communion should be had on a Sunday morning with the body, but if somebody has a sickness and it�s long-term, they�re chronically ill, they�ve been in the hospital, the rest home for a long time, it would be nice to bring some Christians.
I mean, the pastor can do it on his own, but it�d be nice to bring some Christians on a Sunday, sing some songs, have a little message, and then have communion with that hospitalized person or that sick person or the person in the rest home.
That would be a nice thing to do. I think that is an exception, because we�re trying to serve them. And if I would have had that little set, it would have been fine, but finally I thought, you know what, we could do water, or I had Diet Coke, and the Diet Coke was dark enough that people far away would not notice, and I had to give the heads up to the couple so that they wouldn�t wonder what I was trying to do.
But it wasn�t done out of any irreverence, it was just done out of poor pastoral planning, and it probably was one of those things where it was, you know, �I told you so� kind of moments where I shouldn�t have done it, because it is a communion where the church saints on Sunday, one of the sacraments, okay, ordinances, that the church celebrates along with baptism.
The other thing when I was thinking about communion is we have some young people who are helping pick up after a Sunday communion, and the service was over, and I was standing around talking with people, I try to talk to visitors, and this particular time I saw one of the kids and they tripped and the bread goes flying.
And I looked around to make sure nobody was noticing, would hear, and I said, �Good thing we�re not Roman Catholics, right? You would have just spilt Jesus all over the ground. And then I told them about the special, at least they�re supposed to have them, last I checked, the special drains in the kitchen, that if the priest doesn�t drink the consecrated wine then he can�t pour it down into the regular drain in the kitchen, because that goes down to the sewer, it�s consecrated, blood, and then you want to go ahead and just pour it down a drain, it goes to the outside to the ground.
But if transubstantiation is true, the whole issue of where you pour it, it does lead into the conversation. Well, if you drink it, when does it not become the blood? Is there a time that it doesn�t, or does it then get mixed up with things and you purge it out?
There�s a lot of inconsistencies there. What do we have here? The dog is barking on No Compromise Radio. That is a first. Okay, I just had to pause, let the dog stop barking, now we�re back on. My name is Mike Avenroth.
This is No Compromise Radio. That was the NoCo mascot, Jetty, J-E-T-T-Y. She�s a Parson Jack Russell, because I�m a Parson, and I like those particular long-legged Jack Russells. You probably see her on the Twitter feed sometimes, at NoCoRadio.
It�s a crazy Twitter world out there. I�m posting things, and you want to argue, you can argue all you want, but you won�t find me arguing back. All right, what else do we have here on this church resource page?
We do have shofars, the trumpets of Zion, Yemenite shofars, so these are from Yemen especially. If you want to get the smaller one, the 22-inch one, it�ll cost you, well, they�re on sale at $84 .99. If you�d like to get the 51-inch, it�ll be $329 for the trumpets of Zion.
Those Yemenite ones are a little more expensive. They also sell a cheaper one-foot ram�s horn shofar, $37. Now, I don�t know what would happen if you trumpeted one of those things. I used to play trumpet, cornet, not too much baritone, mainly sousaphone, and the tuba in a band growing up.
But you could get a prayer shawl, timeless and beautifully made. These garments represent an extraordinary privilege, conversation with the king of the universe imported from Israel. What if I can�t afford it?
Then I can�t have a conversation with the king of Israel? Wow. All right, well, what else do we have here? We have a variety of top picks for the season. And what are the top picks for the season this year on the CBD Catalog?
There is John Hagee�s book, Earth�s Last Empire. No thank you. The Paradigm, Jonathan Cahn. No thank you. Capital Gains by Chip Gaines, entitled Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff. This is the top pick of the season.
Tim Keller, Reason for God, The Prodigal God, two volumes in one. Standing Strong, Charles F. Stanley. Lou Giglio�s Goliath Must Fall, Winning the Battle Against Your Giants. They need to sell those in San Francisco.
The San Francisco Giants? Isn�t this the first thing we learned about Bible interpretation is not to do that? Notice I didn�t say anything about the Tim Keller book? R. Charles Stanley. Martin Luther by Eric Metaxas.
Maybe he does a good job in this book, but when I read his Bonhoeffer book, Bonhoeffer, he tried to make him an evangelical, so no thank you. Draw the Circle, 40-Day Prayer Challenge that Will Change Your Life, Mark Batterson, Offering Principles from his book, The Circle Maker.
So you got 40 days. And here�s a new one that I didn�t really know about before. I�d like you more if you were like me, John Ortberg. And then the new John Eldridge book, The Wild at Heart fame, All Things New, a breathtaking look into God�s promise of a new earth.
Many believe that heaven is an eternal church service in the sky, but Eldridge argues that the life we long for, the paradise Adam and Eve knew, is precisely what we will experience. He gently dismantles familiar religious concepts and offers a new perspective.
Okay, top picks of the seasons, no gracias. How do you say, now we started off the show talking French, and how do you say no thank you? No merci? Merci, no, no. Is anything good come from France? Okay, no, John Calvin, he was from France.
Baguettes are good there. We went to a cool place, Mount Michel, or yeah, Mount Saint, Saint Mount Michael, something like that. It�s on the west coast of France, and when it�s low tide, you can have access to this cool castle in this little island town.
But once it�s high tide, you can�t get in, you can�t get off. It reminded me of the Agatha Christie�s Ten Little Indians. That�s what it reminded me of. Well, this is why I don�t usually come in on Friday nights and do radio show.
Number one, the dog barks. Number two, it�s kind of scary in here. Number three, you get what you pay for. Oh, and then if you don�t think that�s enough, new from Greg Boyd, Cross Vision, How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence.
You�re going to want to make sure you don�t read that. Okay, Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio. We�d love to have you go to Israel with us, February. You can write me info at nocompromiseradio .com.
That�s info at nocompromiseradio .com. There�s a YouTube channel. There�s a Patreon channel.
There�s a Facebook. There�s a Twitter. There�s a website. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God�s Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.
Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We�re right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.
The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.