Top Ten Books Christianity and Liberalism (Part 3)

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 ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and I almost started recording the show without my headphones on.

I have my glasses on there. On there where? On my head, but I don't have my headphones.

So now I have my headphones. What is No Compromise Radio Studio? I have mic one over here.

This is mic two. It's not really on right now because there's no Pastor Steve. I have a

Bible in front of me. I have a call box. It's called Innkeeper One. I have a

Comrex box for Retro Radio. They don't call anymore, but I'm ready. Some other blue thing over there.

I don't know what it is. Josh put it there. I have a VLZ3 1202

Premium Mic Line Mixer. I have a digital recorder, a

Marantz recorder, and that's it. Power strip, some instructions taped up on the wall, live calls on air, including phone interviews.

So this is it. This is No Compromise Radio. Had some visitors the other day from the church. We get visitors regularly.

If you're in the area and you'd like to visit us, you can come on Sunday nights. Not the first Sunday of the month, but on other

Sunday nights, we'd love to have you. Or if you don't have a home church, Sunday morning at 1015. Probably have to go to two services sometime soon.

Hate to do that, but that's life. Maybe by the time we do it, you'll be, the show will be airing.

I don't know. I think I'm taping into February now. So this is actually December 21st.

It is cold and raw outside. It's 38 -ish and raining. So it doesn't know whether to snow or what.

So I wish it would just snow and then I could be at the mountain skiing instead. My whole family snowboards, but I'm the skier.

I'm holding out. My wife is ski patrol on a snowboard.

Shouldn't it be snowboard patrol? My son teaches lessons, snowboarding lessons.

And see, here I am. But I got the newer skis. I've skied on old skis, you know, like 210s or something, 205s for all these years, probably 20 years of the same skis.

And I just went to these short little, not the tiny ones, not the foot long ones, but the other, much easier, much easier.

Well, today on No Compromise Radio Ministry, I don't know what to call this. I've been doing a series about books that have changed my life.

I've talked about the Forgotten Spurgeon by Ian Murray, Sovereignty of God by A .W. Pink, Warnings to the

Churches, J .C. Ryle, Evangelism in the Sovereignty of God by J .I. Packer, as MacArthur would say, the old

Packer, and A .W. Pink's The Attributes of God.

I have a few more books to do, but I've done two shows already on Christianity and Liberalism, Christianity and Liberalism by J.

Gresham Machin. Right now I'm doing a men's discipleship group. We're reading through that and then talking about the book and reading some

D .G. Hart stuff and other things. And so I'm captivated by the book.

It's just, there's so much good stuff in this book. I need to find this book and just, you know, once a year say, read it.

Kind of like Spurgeon with Pilgrim's Progress, reading it every year. Matter of fact, that book should probably be in my top 10.

Now, I said earlier that I was, you know, not gonna yawn. There it is, there's a yawn.

This is third show. And I don't know about you, but if you listen to three shows, you probably get tired. When you talk three times, right in a row,

I've taped three shows in a row. I don't know, you just get tired because your mind's active.

You're thinking, you're trying to say things properly. You want to honor the Lord. You want to make it interesting. So today on No Compromise Radio, I'm going to use

Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machin, to serve as a springboard to talk about theological issues.

So if you want this as part three of the book review, that would be fine. If you don't want that, then what then?

Are we to sin because we are not under the law, but under grace? By no means. Okay, here, page 51.

Indifference about doctrine makes no heroes of the faith. Just think about that for a second. Indifference about doctrine makes no heroes of the faith.

In his chapter on doctrine and how crucial it is, and how we ought not to be like the liberal mainline denominational folks who have no spine, that is no doctrine, an amoeba -like amorphous glob.

That's not Machin's words, that's mine. Those are mine. That's mine. All right, indifference is.

Who says difference? It's difference. Difference. That's a

New England thing, though, almost. It should be. Contracting things. Difference. What am

I even talking about? I have no idea. When you say to yourself, I have gospel heroes, men and women that God has saved throughout the ages, whether it's

Stephen or Paul, biblical heroes, or missionaries, preachers, a

Charles Spurgeon or Hudson and Maria Taylor. You know, you have certain heroes, the

Mary Slessors. You have to be equal opportunity for men and women. Oh, speaking of men and women, I don't think

I've ever interviewed a woman on No Compromise Radio. Does that make me sexist? Does that make me a hater?

Hey, hater. No, I never really thought about it. I haven't really thought about it much, but I'm going to have the first woman on.

No, not Mrs. Obama. But the Mrs. Obama of my house, Mrs.

Abendroth, and I'm going to have Mrs. Abendroth on, and you'll get to know my wife. And then you'll think, you know what?

We like him so much better now. For the ladies that regularly listen, I appreciate that you listen.

Sometimes I think, you know what? It's only the mature ladies that would really like me because immature ladies don't really like my style.

But I think if you listen to my wife, you're going to say to yourself, do you know, that's so nice.

She's so sweet. She's so kind. She's so unlike Mike. He won't eat it.

Mike eats everything. Mike hates everything. If you would like to be a mature

Christian, you need to have strong doctrine. That's just the way it goes. That's just what you need to do.

And Machen will help you as you read his chapter on doctrine. On the contrary, the epistles of Paul and all the sources make it abundantly plain that the testimony was primarily not to enter spiritual facts, but to what

Jesus had done once for all in his death and resurrection. Christianity is based then upon an account of something that happened.

So when you say, why is Christianity real? This is what was taught here at Bethlehem Bible Church 14 years ago before I got here.

Well, it's true because I've experienced it. And you cannot say anything against that.

So when you're doing apologetics and evangelism and somebody says, well, how do you know you're a Christian? How do you know Christianity is true because it's changed me, it's affected me?

That's an off camera, off microphone yawn. That doesn't do any good.

What, yawning off camera, off microphone? No, saying that it's true because I've experienced it.

That's flimsy. That's just a shellac that covers the thin veneer of false faith.

Now your faith might be real, but false faith people, that's what they do. I've experienced it, therefore it's true.

Read this book. If you get a burning in the bosom and God says to your spirit that it's true, then the

Book of Mormon's true. That's not, this is a historical event. Whether you've experienced

Christianity, whether you haven't, whether you're alive or whether you never were born, whether you're dead,

Christianity is a true fact.

It's historical. Christ died. That's a fact.

That's a fact, Jack. His next chapter, which we would call chapter two, but he calls chapter three, is called

God and Man. So he says liberalism only has two problems, wrong view of God, wrong view of man.

That reminds me of, I think it was MacArthur who said of Eldridge's Wild at Heart.

I'm actually working on a book now that's a biblical masculinity kind of book, evangelical metrosexuality is what

I'm calling it. So don't steal the title, it's not published yet. MacArthur said of Eldridge, it only has two problems, wild at heart.

It's the wrong view of God and the wrong view of man. But besides that, it's a pretty good book.

As with regard to the gospel itself, modern liberalism is diametrically opposed to Christianity in the first place in its conception of God.

And so what do liberals say, Machen writes, is they say we experience

God, we feel God, we commune with God, mystically saying things like that.

And that's exactly how we talk, evangelicalism. They had a thing here in New England called

Congress, Envision New England, that was rife with experiential mysticism.

I'm not against experiencing God and love and joy and peace, shalom, et cetera.

But when it comes to the faith, when that ignores what happened at Calvary, I have some problems.

You say, of course you have problems, some big problems. What else does he say? To say

Jesus is God is meaningless until the word God has an antecedent meaning attached to it.

That is so true. He said, nowhere does Jesus ever teach the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

You aren't going to find that, but that is gonna be found everywhere in liberalism.

Here's what Machen said on page 62. But one attribute of God is absolutely fundamental in the Bible. One attribute is absolutely necessary in order to render intelligible all the rest.

Which one would that be? If you had to say, I've got an attribute of God that without this, everything else is just gobbledygook, that attribute is the awful transcendence of God.

You might call it holiness. From beginning to end, the Bible is concerned to set forth the awful gulf that separates the creator from the creature.

It is true indeed that according to the Bible, God is eminent, close in the world. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without him, but he is eminent in the world, not because he is identified with the world, but because he is the free creator and upholder of it.

Between the creature and creator, a great gulf is fixed.

So he said, the problem with liberals is they've got a wrong view of God. They don't really see his holiness.

And they also don't have the right view of man. They think man, like psychologists today, psychiatric people today, think man is good.

I could not believe it. Last night I went to CVS Pharmacy and I needed to get something that wasn't a prescription, but they carry behind the counter, it was a salt tablet type of thing.

And so I asked for that. And then he said, no, you know what? I told you it was $12.

He said it was $6. And he said, I lied. I said, no,

I'm supposed to buy my salt tablets from you, a liar.

And he said, oh, I'm depraved. I said, no, wait a second. I've been talking to people behind counters in retail stores for 20 years.

And I've never ever heard someone say they're depraved before. How did that come into your head?

Well, he said, it's true. I thought that is amazing. And he said to my kids,

I tell your dad to go look up what the word depraved is and then he can explain to you what it is.

I said, I don't think I have to do that. I said, I'm a pastor and I always teach my children how depraved we are.

And they understand that from a biblical perspective, dead in trespasses and sins. He just looked at me like, okay.

So I was hoping he was gonna bite, but that's about as far as he bit. And so I bought some salt tablets from a liar last night.

There, there you have it. Listen to what Machen says. At the very root of the modern liberal movement is the loss of the consciousness of sin.

That's it. Well, what's the problem today? I have a low view of God and his transcendence.

That is his holiness. That's what liberals do. They don't have a high view of God. And they have not a low view of man that is needy, spiritually unable to save the inability of man, the total depravity of man, the sinfulness of man, but they have too high a view of man.

His goodness and his kindness and his adventure and his inventiveness. So the problem with liberalism is view of God, too low, view of man, too high.

And if you thought God was really high and man was low, there's a huge chasm that needs to be bridged that only Christ could bridge.

But if God is pretty low, man's pretty high, the chasm now seems bridgeable, seems jumpable.

Get beneath the rough exterior of men, we are told, and we shall discover enough self -sacrifice to found upon it the hope of society.

The world's evil, it is said, can be overcome with the world's good. No help is needed from outside the world.

In time of war, our attention is so exclusively called to the sins of other people that we are sometimes inclined to forget our own sins.

So Machen says, coming out of World War I, everybody else is bad. Everybody else is horrible.

All the other nations are sinful. And all the other nations ignore whatever kind of conventions there should be in war, and they are massacring people left and right.

So we look better. It's back to the whole thing. Bin Laden, we're better. Hussein, we're better.

Hitler, we're better. Stalin, we're better. Forgetting our own sins.

So when you meet a liberal, when you meet a Methodist or Episcopalian or Presbyterian USA, I think if you ask about the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man, you'll get to where you need to get quickly without a transcendent

Holy God. Of course, He's other things than that, but without a transcendent Holy God, knowing we're so sinful, why the gospel?

Why is it needed? If there's no bad news, you don't need the good news. Even our

Lord did not call the righteous to repentance. And probably, Machen said, we shall be no more successful than He.

Oh, if I could only write that way. And of course you're saying, if you could only write that way too, we wouldn't have to buy your books from the bargain bin.

I did see, I won't tell you where, but I did see some books of mine in the bargain bin here at Bethlehem Bible Church.

They threw them in the bargain bin and put out on the book table, the message, Max Lucado, John Eldridge.

No, they didn't. But it was Cumberland, I think, books. They were selling my first book for like 2 .99.

Aye, aye, aye. Even our Lord did not call the righteous to repentance. And probably, we should be no more successful than He.

Well, the next thing on Machen's list, No Compromise Radio today, Christianity and Liberalism, Jay Gresham Machen.

The next chapter, he talks about the Bible. So how do liberals look at the Bible? It doesn't take you very long at all to figure out what liberals do with the

Bible. That was written by a man. A man wrote that. How do you know which books are in the

Bible? All sorts, variegated sorts of biblical criticism.

But if the criticism is true, we're in trouble because Christianity is predicated upon an historical event, a historical event.

For a Christian experience depends absolutely upon an event. The Christian says to himself, I've meditated upon the problem of becoming right with God.

I've tried to produce a righteousness that will stand in His sight. But when I heard the gospel message,

I learned that what I had weakly striven to accomplish had been accomplished by the

Lord Jesus Christ when He died for me on the cross and completed His redeeming work by the glorious resurrection.

If the thing has not yet been done, if I merely have an idea of its accomplishment, then

I am of all men most miserable for I am still in my sins. My Christian life then depends altogether upon the truth of the

New Testament record. If you're a Christian, that's exactly the case. You have no other hope without it.

If the Christian record is flawed, then you're still in your sins. Machen said, it is rather surprising that intelligent men should be so blinded by prejudice about this matter as not even to examine for themselves the perfectly accessible treatises in which the doctrine of plenary inspiration is set forth.

Now, there are some honest scholars, honest biblical critics who have read the

Bible and who have dealt with it, but your modern Joe, your modern Jill, and your modern Jane, they haven't hardly read much.

Christianity is founded upon history, doctrine, understanding

God and man rightly, therefore the holiness of God in sin rightly, but it's also founded upon the

Bible. Machen said, dark and gloomy would be the world if we were left to our own devices and had no blessed word of God.

What would we do? How would we assuage our consciences if we didn't have specific revelation,

God revealing his mind on how to deal with sin? He said, liberalism on the other hand is founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful men.

That's why I say regularly here on No Compromise Radio that there are churches in the area, probably your area too, that have orthodox, conservative, theologically conservative statements of faith.

Now, usually there are about 10 points and they're very vague, vague enough to get anybody in.

Allegedly, hey, hater. But then from the pulpit, from the

Sunday schools, okay, let's forget about the pulpit this time because last time I talked about that and how essentially the imperatives and the do's and the how to's that come out of the pulpits are liberalistic, are liberalism because there's no triumphant indicative, there's no gospel record, historical, doctrinal, theological truths.

Since they're not coming out of the pulpit, since they're assumed to be true, then what comes out of the pulpit is all the imperatives.

Yeah, maybe from the Bible imperatives, but imperatives nonetheless detach from the engine of the gospel.

But now let's dig deeper into a typical church. I can just think about one right up the street. Go to the

Sunday school rooms. Are those teachers there doing anything less than moralistic, therapeutic deism?

It's all moralism. By the way, I like well -mannered kids. There's nothing wrong with teaching a kid.

If you are the dad, I don't want elbows on the table. I wasn't allowed to put elbows on the table, but I allow my kids, unless they spread them out too far, and then they hit their sister.

No elbows on the table. Push the chair in when you get up. Don't talk with your mouth full.

Use the other side of the knife. Don't push the piece on your fork with your finger.

I actually like well -behaved kids. I think I'd rather have moral kids than immoral in that sense.

Mannered instead of ill -mannered. But what do we do with the gospel?

Is the gospel taught in the Sunday school rooms? Now, even if it's at the end, except Jesus in your heart, that's better than not.

But dare to be a Daniel. Don't tell lies. Like David, your sin's gonna find you out.

Be pure. Run away from temptation like Joseph did. Tell the truth.

Couldn't you use another book, Aesop's Fables, to teach the same thing? Couldn't you use the

Quran to teach the same thing? Couldn't you use the Book of Mormon to teach the same thing? The answer is yes.

Honesty, integrity, duty, courage, loyalty.

When you go just off the Hudson River to West Point Military Academy, they have benches.

It's a great, great place to go. They have all kinds of statues. There's Patton, there's MacArthur.

But they also have benches that you could sit at and just relax and enjoy the campus.

And they have carved on those benches words like duty, honor, loyalty, integrity, sacrifice.

I like all that. And in the military academy, great. But in Sunday school rooms, imperatives, moralistic imperatives, therapeutic imperatives about wholeness, wellness, without the gospel.

Turn your Sunday school rooms into a different religion. I don't want the teachers at Bethlehem Bible Church, and they know this, to do the dare to be a

Daniel thing. I want them to be taught of God, taught by God, taught about God.

That's what I want. I want them to be taught about the holiness of God, the awfulness of sin, the exclusivity of Christ, the literal resurrection.

And in light of that, repentance and belief, and then for the Christian, a life of truth, honor, integrity, et cetera.

But I do not want to make moralistic kids because short of regeneration, that doesn't do anything except makes them think they don't have a need for salvation.

They don't need a doctor to cure them because in their mind, they're not sick, especially compared to the society we live in and how such a cesspool we live in.

So if your kids have half a clue and you teach them half a mannered way of life, then they seem good.

We fly across the country with kids. And from when my kids were babies, boy, your kids are well -behaved.

Well, that's true. Thanks mainly to my wife. Kids are well -behaved.

I went to a concert last night at a public school, some winter solstice warlock concert,

Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, anything but Jesus concert. You know those concerts? Some of the kids were so disobedient, but you know what, at least those kids know probably they're needing a savior when they get older.

Anyway, No Compromise Radio Ministry today. My name is Mike Abendroth, info at nocompromiseradio .com.

Those emails come straight to me. We don't need moralism. We need to talk about Jesus Christ in our

Sunday school. Would you do that today? At Awana, our Sunday school or any place else, talk about Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

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 six. 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.