Luke Abendroth Interview (Part 2)

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

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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

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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.�

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you.

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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

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

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. Michael Lee Abendroth here. Luke Michael Abendroth.

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See, you�re getting warmed up. Today�s part two, Luke Michael Abendroth in the studio.

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My father was named Lee Henry. My grandfather was Henry something, and so therefore

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I was Michael Lee and Luke is Luke Michael. Will you carry on the tradition? We�ll see. Maybe I�ll correct it from M -I -C -H -E -L to M -I -C -H -A -L.

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No, no, because I�m out of the loop, because your summer would be like� Oh, yeah, it would be me. So maybe I�ll make it L -U -C -H -E.

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L -U -C -A -S. I never liked when people thought my full name was

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Lucas. The only cool person that I thought was full name was Lucas was our neighbor, Dr.

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Jim, who we grew up with, and he wrote the book in his memoirs about World War II. He had a couple chapters about our family, about Lucas and Haley.

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Well, to talk about that for a moment, because it�s so fascinating, this was a neighbor that we met, you know, out of the blue, obviously just moved in.

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We didn�t know who our neighbors would be. Very kind to Luke and my kids and our family. And so he would take you fishing, and tell the listeners about the story, you know, four -year -old

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Luke fishing and all that, and then the whole Nazi, you know, mass unit deal. Oh, I just remember, because it�s all in the same book, and it�s different chapters, and there�s a couple chapters at the end, and it�s about Lucas, and he came home from kindergarten and he asked me, you know, �What did you learn today at school ?�

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My first day of kindergarten, I said, �Oh, you know, at recess, I learned how to chase girls ,� or something like that.

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And then he had all, you know, he would take me fishing, and he would, you know, talk all about just our family and stuff like that, and Haley, and Haley and I getting tangled up with the fishing line, him having to cut it out, all this stuff.

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And then, you know, the chapters earlier, he�s got all this stuff about him, he was a doctor, and he actually, interestingly, he slept through Omaha Beach, or not

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Omaha, I don�t know if he�s Omaha or not, but he slept through the D -Day invasion, so he woke up in Normandy, which is, I guess, the way to do it.

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And then he was in a hospital tent, I think it was in Bastogne or somewhere else, and he was working on the wounded,

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German and American, and I believe it was an SS soldier came in with a machine gun and started mowing down the beds of the

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German and American wounded, and he had to pull out his sidearm, and he eliminated the threat, and then he went over and, you know, basically had a fit on top of the guy stomping, because he was so upset and angry.

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So I remember, I was thinking, �Man, this is a guy I was going fishing with.� I mean, I don�t care, it sounds good, but I remember he had his

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M1 Garand and stuff, and some Nazi stuff. He had taken off some dead bodies in his little shed, too, so that was pretty cool,

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I always thought as a kid. Well, that explains your psychological profile. I don�t know what explains mine besides Nebraska, going to the stockyards for field trips.

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So we talked a little bit last time, Luke, about Luther, a master�s university, the book of Hebrews, and we want to continue the second part of the show today with some other discussions, including this one.

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We�ve talked about this before on the radio show, but it�s important for those young people, especially listening, tell our listeners why it�s so important that when you�re in college you still are connected to a local church, i .e.,

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a member, and serving, versus I�m just going to hang out with college, and any kind of ministry

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I do is only via the college, ignoring the local church. Walk the listeners through the right way to think that, so the parents can either help their kids as they go off to college, or when they�re college students now, they need to think rightly about the local church of Christ.

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Yeah, well, I think obviously there�s two different sides to it. If you go to a secular school, I won�t really talk about that because I don�t, but that�s obviously so important because the college students who are going to be around are not going to be probably good influences, and you�re going to need to come back into the local church and receive the

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Word and participate in what�s going on in the church. And so, yeah,

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I think obviously that�s important in that aspect, but then from a school like Masters, or maybe another Christian school, or if you�re really involved with other college groups, or whatever it would be,

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Navigators, I don�t even know if they�re around anymore, or CREW, or Campus Crusade, those are the same thing, but any of that kind of stuff, it�s just very easy to become involved with para -church activities and groups rather than the church itself, which is the

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Lord Jesus� bride, and it�s not � Jesus didn�t die for the

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Masters University. I mean, in a sense, He did as the universal church, and members there are the church, but not for � there�s no �

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Masters is not a church, and neither is any other college or college group. So, I think that�s important to realize, and just to realize because you have older people and younger people, and there�s singing, and there�s the order of worship, and all these things that we learn from and participate in that�s very different from a college setting.

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And so, I think, you know, obviously, even just because it�s biblical, it�s so important, and it�s so easy to get sucked into, and then when people do do that in college, then they get out of college, and they don�t know what to do because they don�t have the same people around.

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What are you doing now at the church for ministry? So, I�m at Grace Community Church.

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I�m a member there at the church where John MacArthur is now a pastor, and I�m doing a high school ministry, so I basically just hang out with high schoolers all the time, which is � we have a �

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I actually have a � I mean, at the time of this show, we have a � next weekend, a winter retreat, so that should be fun.

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Nice. And when you run into MacArthur, does he just talk in Hebrew and Greek and stuff? What does he say to you usually?

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He just kind of looks at me and shakes his head, and then sighs and mumbles something about my dad. I don�t know what it is.

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Mumble. Well, when I see John, and the last time � two times ago when

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I saw John, what he said to me was, you know, something about my son,

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Luke. So, see, in the old days, you used to be known as Mike Abendroth�s son. Now I�m Luke Abendroth�s dad.

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I�m not sure about that. Let�s talk about what you�re reading.

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One of the downfalls of being at school is you have to read what you�re told, right, for the different finance classes and accounting classes, et cetera, but you still have time to read other books, and of course, now on vacation, you�ve been reading.

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What have you been reading, and what has affected you in terms of your walk with the Lord or thinking rightly about God?

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Well, I�m reading through 2 Corinthians right now, which has been cool, but in addition to that, I am reading through Recovering the

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Reformed Confession by R. Scott Clarke, and then I�ve almost done with The Pearl of Christian Comfort, that little booklet by Petrus Dathinus.

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I don�t know if that�s how you say his name, Petrus, Petrus, whatever. Anyways, so I was reading that, and then

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I have a couple other books lined up. I�m trying to try to read The Everlasting Righteousness. I read part of it by Horatius Bowen R.

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Soon, so some things like that. I really like the Recovering the Reformed Confession. I think you�ve talked about this on the show before, but especially just the first couple, first part of the book, that�s the only part

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I�ve been through so far, but just about the quest for illegitimate religious certainty and the quest for illegitimate religious experience.

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It�s been really helpful in just kind of reorienting, talking about what is Scripture really there for, what does it tell us, what does it reveal, and going back to really the true

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Sola Scriptura, which is not, you know, Scripture has an answer for, you know, it�s not a physics textbook, it doesn�t show us how to program computer software or something like that.

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That�s not what we mean by when we talk about the sufficiency of Scripture, but it�s sufficient for everything we need to know for salvation and for our life and for godliness.

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So, I just think just learning that has been helpful and R. Scott Clark has been helpful in showing that and just kind of, it�s interesting to see the effect of pietism throughout, even go through the

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Great Awakening. I don�t know if that�s right to talk about in New England, might be kind of getting dogged for that, but just the

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Great Awakening and how there was a lot of emotions, how a lot of times the fruit of the

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Spirit was replaced with some kind of hyper -supernatural, weird, not outpouring of the

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Spirit, but things that were said to be of the Spirit that aren�t really in the Bible. So, yelling and screaming and, you know, waving your hands, maybe some kind of IHOP Kansas City type of stuff, and those had to be used even by people like Edwards to demonstrate the validity of the revival rather than actually the fruit of the

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Spirit, which is biblical. So, stuff like that, just to see some of the people that you think have had a huge influence on our world, maybe haven�t had as big of a positive effect as we think, and so even, you know, being off on justification for some of the stuff like Edwards, and I would obviously like to study that more.

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But it was just interesting to see some of these things where the turn is really from a lot from the outward, the objective truth about the

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Lord Jesus and His finished work on the cross and all the benefits that we can have by our union with Him, and the turn is away from that towards, or inwards towards ourselves about what, where can

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I find the graces that accompany salvation, basically it�s just all about me and subjectively the inner life, which obviously piety is important, but it�s different than pietism.

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Just learning all those things has been really good. What�s so fun for me, Luke, as your dad, and I get to see this in other people too, but with you very closely

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I get to see it. Three years ago when we first did the show together, I guess that would be two years ago, this is the third year in a row,

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I said, �Okay, we�re going to talk about this, and then I�m going to ask you that, and then I�m going to ask your testimony.� And we had the whole thing written down.

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Today it�s, �Oh yeah, you fly out later today. We�ve, you know, haven�t been able to do the shows. We�ve been doing everything else.

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Let�s go do the shows. We pray, and then we just talk, and then off we go. Little did you know, I�ve been fasting for the last ten hours.

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Well, there�s a Cotton Matter book over there I could probably give you, and you could have some delusions along with it and kind of listen to some crazy charismatics to determine certain things.

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Yeah, I think it is interesting, you don�t really associate a lot of charismatic stuff with the Great Awakening. And obviously, that�s not to discredit,

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I mean, there probably were really people that were truly saved during the Great Awakening, but it was just interesting to see, it�s almost like, you know,

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I won�t say who, but it�s like when people come and they want to, they come to New England to teach at our church, and you say, �Hey, do you want to go see, you know, this rock, or Whitfield Rock, or some kind of Edwards thing ,� and they�re like, �No, it�s okay, or I guess ,� and you�re like, and at the time, you�re like, �Are you serious ?�

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And then now, I think you start to know why, so, anyways. Well, what happened when

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I moved here 21 years ago, Luke was five months old, I think, when we moved, and we just grew up, you know,

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I grew up in ministry here, and he grew up as a child here, and we�d have speakers, and we would say, �Oh, we would like to take you around to a good place to eat, or, you know, an interesting site, or, you know,

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Bunker Hill, or whatever.� Well, of course, when

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I moved here, I thought Cotton Mather, his tomb is in Boston, you have

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Edwards, and he�s not buried in Northampton, but there�s a little obelisk there, there�s a technical word for an obelisk with a �nobody ,� because he�s buried at Princeton in New Jersey.

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And there�s David Brainerd�s tombstone laying there, and you�ve got the Edwards house where it was, and all these places,

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Whitfield Rock, and these places Whitfield preached all around, and where he was buried in Newburyport. And so I would want to take everybody around.

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And Luke is referring to the one case in particular when I said to Carl Truman, I picked him up at the airport, �Hey, do you want to go see this, that, and the other ?�

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He�s like, �Yeah, I guess.� He didn�t really care. I couldn�t figure it out because I didn�t understand

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Edwards and Whitfield and this pietism. And it�s almost like, you know, a lot of the

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Great Awakening, as Luke was just talking, it wasn�t necessarily charismatic, but it was pietistic. It was emotionally oriented.

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It was just not tethered to any type of Reformed confession or objective work, as Luke just said,

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Christ for us versus Christ in us. So now I know what the guys mean.

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Yeah, and I guess I use the charismatic word loosely to describe practices that often go along with continuationist theology.

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So, you know, usually when you go to a classic, you know, I�ve seen the Babylon B article where there�s the sniper, the

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Marine Corps sniper in the back of the OPC church taking out any hand raisers before they can do it.

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So something like that, that�s what I meant. You know, usually those churches from a cessationist perspective don�t have a lot of those as many crazy things going on.

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So, yeah, it�s just very interesting to hear those things and just kind of that quest for illegitimate religious experience.

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And so that�s been good for me to just strengthen my convictions about going back to Scripture and what does

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Scripture say. And I think that just makes your life a lot simpler too when you�re not seeking just an experience or an emotion, but when you�re really seeking what does the

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Scripture say and what do they mean, and I need to just be obedient and do those things.

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So that�s been helpful. And even, it�s been interesting too to just see kind of, you kind of forget, just as we forget during the

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Revolutionary War period that a lot of the loyalists were the ones who were faithfully preaching to the text because they saw passages about submitting to the government and even government like Nero who�s, you know, using them to light up his house parties.

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They forget that. I think people also forget about, you know, I guess the old side that was really trying to be faithful to what they saw as biblical and what really was biblical about the preaching of the

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Word and the ordinary means of grace and the sacraments and all that stuff. So it was interesting to see kind of even their critique of some of the

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Great Awakening, the New Side guys, and it sounds almost like our critique sometimes of charismatics or pietistic groups.

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Talking to Luke Abendroth today on No Compromise Radio. You can always write me, info at nocompromiseradio .com.

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Don�t forget, if you want to have the special, you order two sexual fidelities and we just throw in the things that go bump in the church for free.

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So if you order two of those, it won�t say the ones for free, but I put it in for free since I�m now the author, co -packer, shipper.

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How much do those cost? The sexual fidelities? Yeah. Are $11 .99 and why you got that look?

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I actually was just given a big batch of sexual fidelities to give out, but I�m actually selling them for $10.

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So if you want to buy them from me, you can email. Well, you could probably go for $8.

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Yeah. We�ll say $8. So Luke is always saying to me, �Hey, Dad, you know, if I had those books and sexual fidelity is an important concept and topic in college and the young man and everything, and so I�m handing them out all the time.�

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This whole time, I thought that�s exactly what you were doing, but you�ve got a side business. Gray market.

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It�s not as bad as the gray market. I didn�t end up, I never did this, but a lot of people have at least the idea,

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I work in Alaska in the summers up in the salmon fishing industry, and a lot of people like to sell cigarettes on the side.

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So it wouldn�t be quite as bad if I was selling sexual fidelity rather than cigarettes because you could sell them for maybe $20 a pack.

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Now, I don�t think we�re fundamentalists or legalists here at the show, but I just said to Luke, �You know what?

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Trying to make money selling cigarettes, we should probably just figure out, just sell the salmon. Let�s just take the high road.�

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Reading Romans chapter 3, �None is righteous, no, not one. No one understands.

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No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one.�

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And then the litany of the Psalms goes on. Luke, tell our listeners a little bit about the essential nature of understanding anthropology and how if you get anthropology wrong,

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Lee, if you get the fall wrong, if you get depravity wrong, it affects everything else.

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In other words, when people have a problem with election, it�s because they don�t understand depravity. Talk through that as it just comes to your mind.

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I know you don�t know what I�m asking you, but I�m thinking about it. I mean, obviously it affects it because if you have a faulty view of anthropology, and the faulty view is always too high, and it�s never too low usually.

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I mean, obviously there are different people, but it�s almost always you have too high of a view of man.

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And so oftentimes I think what you�re getting at is the fall affected everything maybe besides this one portion of my life that would be my free will or my ability to choose.

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And I mean, if that�s what you believe and the fall hasn�t permeated you so far that you would only choose your sin in and of yourself, then you�re not going to need unconditional election or irresistible grace or any of those things.

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You�re not going to need God to call you and to give you a new heart and to cause you to be born again without anything that you are contributing.

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You�re not even your free will. So if there�s a faulty view of man, a too high view of man, obviously there�s going to be a lower view of God because man is somehow participating even if that�s just by his choice.

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So I think, you know, Luther talks about you have free will enough to do�I mean, your free will is only going to allow you to choose what�s within your nature.

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And if you have a sin nature and if you have a totally depraved nature, maybe you have a free will, but you�re always going to choose the wrong thing.

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You�re always going to choose sin. You�re never going to choose holiness or the Holy One. And so that�s why you need a new heart and a new nature to be born again and to be regenerated so that you can now trust in Christ.

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Luke, as you were talking about that, and I agree with what you said, the unbeliever who�s affected by Adam�s fall, right, his

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Adam�s sin was imputed to the account of everybody except, of course, Jesus.

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And then consequently, people are born sinful, they have sinful natures. And people want to talk about free will for unbelievers, okay, free from the effects of the fall.

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How about this though? How about are unbelievers free from anything that was in their past, right?

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As our past makes us, I mean, the fall was in the past way, way back, and then everything in our lives, training, parents, social customs, what they like, where they live, how can an unbeliever be free from even their own past?

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I don�t think they can. There you go. I don�t think they can. I don�t think that question was supposed to be answered. You and I talk about assurance a lot.

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What goes through your mind when it comes to assurance? Obviously, at 21 years old, you can�t have been a

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Christian for two decades, so you haven�t been a Christian for that long. There�s probably the struggle with assurance as a younger

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Christian struggles with it more than probably a more mature Christian. What are you thinking, especially with the

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Petrus book that you�ve been reading? I think that, you know, at least within evangelicalism, the emphasis is primarily on the subjective.

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It�s on the works that you do and those things, and the

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Scripture does emphasize the subjective. It does emphasize, you know, in 1 John, the subjective side of assurance and how we can gain assurance from the fruit of our life, and so that�s not wrong to talk about, as some people say.

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Some people, they swing so far away from the subjective that it�s only objective where, you know, the confessions talk about three paths to assurance.

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You have the spirit testifying, you have the fruit or your works, and then you have the objective promises of God or the gospel.

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So I think, you know, when you go to those, those are all found in Scripture, and so I think for me, the biggest one, or not the biggest one, but the most helpful in my life has been just looking back to the objective promises because I always only heard the subjective and basically it became a new law for me to try to achieve assurance and that I was almost earning my assurance in a covenant of works kind of setting, trying to do enough to have assurance to finally get there, and instead of finally just going, �Okay, the

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Bible says and the Lord promises that anyone who comes to me, I will never cast out.�

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No one can snatch them out of the Father�s hand. All this stuff, all these promises, you just flip through John and you�ll just see, you know, there�s assurance to be found and, you know, as Sinclair Ferguson talks about, the seed of assurance is already in faith in the gospel because there is an assurance already for saving faith.

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There�s an assurance of Christ that He�s able to do what He says. There�s an assurance of Christ that He is who

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He says He is and that He�s done what He�s done. And so that assurance, that confidence in Him is the seed for our assurance that that is actually for us.

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I thought that was a pretty interesting point. As you said, flipping through John, that�s what actually

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I was doing. I mean, we were thinking the same thing. So must the Son of Man be lifted up, comparing

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Jesus, of course, to Moses when He lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life?

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And it is that exact promise of God, that exact statement of God that is true, trusting in the work of Christ and His Word.

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You know, they go together. Whoever believes in Him may have eternal life. Luke, what does belief imply when it comes to our contribution?

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If we�re believing in what God says, why is belief, you know, not a work?

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How does that work out? Well, you were talking about Romans earlier and, you know,

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Paul is talking about his boasting is excluded. So why is his boasting excluded?

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And he says, is it by a law of works? And he says, no, it�s not by a law of works, it�s by a law of faith.

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And I remember hearing someone talk about that and saying, you know, it doesn�t really make sense because it seems like the boasting would be excluded by, based on the law of works.

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Because, you know, okay, yeah, it�s not a work. So if we�re looking at our works, we just see our failure and, you know, under the covenant of works, we don�t have perfect obedience.

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So our boasting is excluded because it�s not by our works. But he says, no, it�s by the law of faith.

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And I mean, maybe you disagree and so I didn�t, you know, we didn�t do any screening. But it seems like Paul is really saying there, faith in itself, the point that can be made from that is, if it�s excluded by a law of faith, faith is even more, by stating in the positive by a law of faith, that�s even more, that�s even more of an exclusion of our works than if you would say it�s by a law of works.

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Because faith is this position of receiving from God, it�s, you know, Owen in that chapter on faith talks about it�s receiving is the most common term, it�s rolling onto in the

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Old Testament, it�s leaning, it�s, you know, all these different things that, you know, I always use an example.

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If you�re laying, kind of funny example, if you�re on a dock laying on your stomach and you roll onto a raft, you know, what�s supporting you?

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You are the raft. Okay, that�s the raft. If you�re receiving something, you�re not contributing. If you�re leaning on a wall, what�s holding you up?

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The wall or you? The wall. Okay, so it�s always the object of the faith that supports us. And the law of faith, faith that emptying your hands and grabbing hold of Christ excludes anything because everything that you were holding onto has to fall out of your hands for you to grab hold of the

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Lord Jesus. Amen. Talking to Luke Ebenrod today. Luke, it�s good to have you here in the studio and in New England, snowy

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New England. I don�t know what I�m going to do if it starts snowing again as you fly off today. My special snow thrower, snow blower, 21 -year -old guy is moving out.

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I will see you at the Shepherd�s Conference, Lord willing, and in Escondido. Thanks for being on No Compromise Radio.

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If anybody wants to contact Luke, they can through me, info at nocompromiseradio .com. Thanks, Luke. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebenrod is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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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.

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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.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.