Steve Watkins 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.

The Program’s Weekly Teaching Format

My name is Mike Abendroth, and on Mondays it's a sermon. Tuesdays with my associate, Pastor Steve Cooley, we talk about church issues. Thursday, usually positive, something doctrinal, what is soteriology?

How does God save us? And then Friday, we usually take people to the theological woodshed. But on Wednesdays, I like to talk to other pastors and authors and people that the Lord is using to build His church.

And today, we have Pastor Steve Watkins online, pastor at Trinity Bible Church in Felton, California. Pastor Steve, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate the opportunity.

It's good to be on with you. Steve, we are friends, and I am always amazed that every time I go back to California for the summer, I still get invited to preach again from your pulpit. Thank you for that.

Yeah, that's the measure of a good preacher, right? You keep getting invited back. Now, we are friends. I consider you a good friend. Our church considers you and your family good friends. Of course, family, you know, your wife's brother is here, and we've just appreciated you guys as friends of ours and your ministry to us.

For, I don't know how many years now, but for a lot of years.

Conversion and the Sovereign Grace of God

Steve, it's always amazing to think about how God saves people sovereignly. I think it'd be good to let our listeners get to know you a little bit. Can you tell us how God saved you, when, the circumstances, as we trace His wonderful providence in saving you?

Yeah, the way that God saved me is what convinced me that He is the sovereign one in the salvation of sinful people. It had nothing to do with me at all. I was a rebel in high school. I was a problem kid.

I was into all kinds of manifestations of sin and fleshliness. You know, it came to a point, honestly, without being too graphic or explicit, it came to a point when I was so despairing of life that I tried to take my life.

I tried to end it, and in what is, to me, an obvious work of providence, it didn't work out. Literally, a gun didn't fire when it should have, by all accounts, and that scared me to death. I had stayed home from school, and my parents were both gone.

My dad was at work, and my mom was out somewhere, and I ran from my parents' house two miles to the church, which is the same church that I'm at right now, and pounded on the door of the youth pastor's office, which is the same office that I have now as the pastor of the church.

I got tears streaming down my eyes. I'm shaking like a leaf. I didn't know what in the world I was going to do. This guy's name was Rob Johnson. He's an awesome guy. He still lives in the area, goes to a different church, and is an elder at a different church now, but I told him a little bit of my story.

I didn't tell him I had just tried to take my life, because I was too scared and ashamed really honestly to tell anybody that, but I just told him how desperate I felt, and I told him that I know God exists, and I'd been raised to know God exists.

I was raised in a Christian home, and went to church all my life, and Sunday school, and was kind of a good kid until maybe seventh grade when I got off track and in with the wrong crowd and into the wrong stuff, and my life was demonstrating at that point that I wasn't really a believer.

I was just a nominal Christian who had grown up in the home of believers, but the faith wasn't mine. The faith wasn't genuine, and I knew God existed, and I knew I was a sinner, and I knew there was a heaven, and I knew there was a hell, but I thought I had to do all the right stuff in order to get to heaven, and I kept trying to change my life, and I kept trying to do things that would make up for my sin, and ending up in deeper and deeper sin.

It was like a rubber band effect. The more I'd try to get away from it, the further I'd shoot back into fleshliness and worldly lusts, and I'm telling Rob all of this and telling him I just feel desperate.

I just feel like unless I do all the right things that I'm going to go to hell and I don't want to do because I can't do it, and he looked at me, and he goes, Steve, you're 15, 16 years old. Has nobody ever told you the gospel?

And I said, well, yeah, you know, Jesus came, and He died on the cross, and He wants me to live a good life, and if I can do that, then I get to be with Him, and he says, no, man, the gospel is not at all about what you can do for Jesus.

It's all about what Jesus did for you, and that was my Martin Luther moment. That was my getting struck by lightning, literally, spiritually moment, and my eyes were opened and my heart was filled with faith for the first time, and I understood and I believed and trusted that because of what Christ did and in spite of what I have done and in spite of what I couldn't do, that salvation was mine because of His finished work.

So that was my genesis as a believer right here at this church. I started to learn and grow in the faith, and eventually started to work with junior hires here at the church, and high schoolers went off to college at the Master's College, went to seminary at Westminster Seminary in California down in Escondido, and then came back here in 2001 to be the associate pastor, and I've been here ever since.

Faithful Ministry in a Small, Unnoticed Place

We're talking to Pastor Steve today from Trinity Bible Church in Filton. Steve, what I'm amazed at is God's providential placement of men in gospel ministry, and He has literally littered people all across the world, and we don't know about a lot of these men.

They're faithfully laboring behind the scenes, small little towns. How do you, as a pastor in a small little place in the middle of the Redwoods, do you say to yourself, or what do you say to yourself when it comes to the proclamation of the gospel that might encourage some other men who are out in the country, and no one knows who I am, and I don't get any recognition from the press?

And what's your mindset theologically as you minister behind the scenes, and you might not ever make it on the world stage?

It's all about Romans 1. It's all about not being ashamed of the gospel wherever you are, because the gospel is God's power unto salvation. So you know, for us here at the church, we are a little church, and we are out in the middle of the Redwoods in a weird town, you know, Santa Cruz is a super, super liberal and progressive postmodern kind of town that embraces every unbiblical godless thing you can imagine, and makes it a matter of public policy and all of that.

So this is as far away, spiritually speaking, from the Bible Belt as you can get, but God's Word is more powerful than any of that. And so we're not, as a church, we're not about, and we've never been about trying to compete with anything, or try to impress anyone, try to look like what the culture wants people or organizations or churches or whatever to look like.

We're trying to be just about being faithful to God and do what He's called us to do. We believe that the Word is living and that it is active, that the Bible is God's breathed-out Word, it's not just any book, and it's inspired by the Holy Spirit and it's full of God's power.

So our goal, our main goal centrally here at the church, is just to teach the Bible, to preach it on Sundays and teach it all throughout the week and meditate on its truth and get it into people's lives, because it is the power of God that transforms their lives.

And that's what we've seen here. We've got a lot of hurting people at our church, people who have been through really, really rough backgrounds and lives and going through hard things, and for them, there's nothing in this world that works, that meets their needs or any of that except for God's living Word.

So we've got the book, God gave it to us, He just calls us to be faithful and proclaim it.

Christ-Centered Worship and the Shape of the Service

We're talking to Steve Watkins today, pastor at Trinity Bible Church in Felton. You can go online and listen, tb-church .org. And I know Steve probably won't like me to say this, but you ought to listen if you're listening to No Compromise Radio.

Pastor Steve, preach. It is Christ-centered, clear, crisp, compelling. I'm not trying to alliterate on purpose either. Well, you're a good preacher. He doesn't alliterate. It's like Jay Adams said, always alliterate, question mark.

But anyway, you ought to listen to him. I think Pastor Steve is one of my wife's two or three, one of the two or three favorite preachers in all the country. She gets those CDs of his and burns them and sends them to all her friends.

And I'm very, very thankful that we can have a church in the summer that holds the Word of God so centrally and wants to depend on Christ so much. Tell us, Pastor Steve, about the worship service there in Felton.

I know you have it planned out in such a way that it drives us to the cross and to think about Christ, to hear from His Word. What's a worship service like for you, and how as a pastor do you try to, I don't want to say craft it like you're playing with it and you're manipulating it, but just tell us about a worship service at Trinity.

Well, our goal in worship is always, first of all, to remember that worship is for God, church is for God. We've always joked about putting that on our sign out by the highway, that this church is not for you.

People would take it wrong and misunderstand, and it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but we mean it in this sense, that I think where we've gone astray so much in evangelicalism in America and in our modern culture today so often is thinking that church is for people, it's for us first and foremost, and then our desires, what we want and how we feel and what we expect kind of dictates what we do, and we need to be reminded that worship, first and foremost, is for God, and He's the one who dictates what we do.

And so we try to design, not manipulate, but design a worship service with that in mind, with the goal, first of all, of ascribing glory to God and doing what we do very purposefully and very deliberately in order to accomplish certain goals, biblically, theologically, that we see as critical in worship.

So we start out, we have a call to worship where we sort of, you know, we're not high church liturgical, we don't wear robes, we don't, but we've got a guy with a guitar stand up and sing a song that's like an invocation, you know, a come, Lord, and be in our presence and bless this service and be praised in kind of a song, and then we do a corporate reading in order to ascribe God's glory to Him by reading His word back to Him as He speaks to us.

We see worship as a dialogue between us and God where He's going to speak promises to us, and we're going to respond with sacrifices of praise. We do a confession of sin time. A lot of times I'll just read a scripture that focuses on the law in order to frame our minds after God's law so that He can continually expose the sin that remains in our hearts and we can confess it to Him, and it's a time of quiet prayer where people can do that, and then I need a time of prayer where we talk about sin and ultimately focus on the sufficiency of God's grace and how He has abundantly poured out mercy on us as sinners in order to forgive our sins, and I pray for our congregation.

I pray for the needs of our people out loud in front of the group so that everybody together can be in prayer. We have Ministry of the Word every week, of course. We've got Pastor Malcolm, who has come over from England, and he does a great job giving a children's lesson.

He uses his art skills, and he's a wonderful storyteller, and he takes the great passages of Scripture and explains the Gospel and Christ and the Old Testament and the New to the kids in a way that they understand, and that's wonderful.

And then I preach, and after I preach, we do communion every single week now. Not every church does that, but we love coming to the Lord's table kind of as almost the pinnacle of the mountain. God has spoken to us, and then He feeds us at the table.

He nourishes us and strengthens us with His Word and with the life of Jesus Christ, and then we sing His praise in a doxology and a benediction and go out blessed and filled and strengthened in order to bring light into the darkness of the world.

That's what we do. Well, we love the service there and the Christ-centeredness of that service. Pastor Steve, tell our listeners, if they're reading the Old Testament, how do they read the Old Testament like a Christian?

You preach regularly from the Old Testament, and of course, it seems to me that we balance between seeing Jesus where He isn't in the Old Testament and then seeing Jesus where, you know, how do we read the Bible?

I mean, I was going to give you my answer, but I want to know yours.

No, tell me yours so I know the right thing to say. Yeah, right. Yeah, I think, you know, there's two sides. There can be a danger of trying to find Christ under every, you know, rock in the Old Testament, so to speak, and over-allegorizing all of the symbolism and imagery of the Old Testament or creating symbolism and imagery in order to try to find references to Christ, where honestly they're just not.

On the other hand, of course, as Jesus Himself says, all of the Law and all the Prophets point to Him, Abraham spoke of Him, it's all fulfilled in Him. So even if there aren't these strange allusions to Christ in the hair of the Shulamite in Song of Solomon or something like that, nonetheless, Song of Solomon is clearly pointing in some way to the love of Christ.

So when we talk about the Old Testament, you know, it's Augustine's old maxim that the I always get this back, that the new is in the old, concealed, and the old is in the new revealed. But there's a continuity between the two in that God is working to reveal our sin in the Old Covenant and reveal our need for a Savior in the Old Covenant.

And when Christ comes on the scene as the fulfillment of everything that God has done prophetically and in terms of His promises and the history of the people of the Old Covenant, we see the fulfillment that He is and embrace the great grace that He has come to give that is better, like Hebrews says, it's so much better than everything that was going on in the Old Covenant.

And, you know, I believe it was deficient. There was a deficient worship system in the Old Covenant. It could not do what Christ did, but it was deficient by design. It was designed to show the people that even all of the blood that was shed and all the ceremonies that were done, none of that could compare with what God was going to do when He sent His Son in order to make one sacrifice that was sufficient to take away sins.

So yeah, we love the Old Testament because it's such a revelation of the seriousness of sin, but also the greatness of God's grace and really good stuff.

Evangelism Through Relationships and the Power of the Gospel

Steve, when I think about Santa Cruz, and I know the area fairly well, what's your philosophy for evangelism as a church body, therefore individual Christians? It wasn't that many years ago when Luis Palau came and wanted to recruit all the people and the money and go down to the boardwalk and bring in sixpence, none the richer, Jesus wants to kiss you, and then there's the fallout of no one's there, no one's saved, not that I know of at least, no one's plugged back into the churches.

So how do you think of evangelism as a pastor? Kind of out in the sticks, and how do you win over the city? What's your strategy for evangelism?

You know, prayer first, and our strategy is not to go and hold big events, again, try to compete with the cultural expectations and phenomena that the culture thinks of as means to inspiration and means to change or whatever, you know, we don't buy into that, we don't do milk crate evangelism typically down on the Pacific Garden Mall and the sort of cultural centers downtown.

What we tend to want to emphasize to people is to build relationships with the people that God has providentially put in their lives, family members, coworkers, colleagues at work, neighbors, God has surrounded all of us.

You know, we don't have to go out and look for unbelievers anywhere in the world, but especially in Santa Cruz, we're surrounded by them, and we try to emphasize that our task is to build relationships with those people and friendships with those people in a way that they understand that we care about them, we love them, and earn ourselves the right to be able to proclaim the Word of God to them, and again, it's the Word of God that's living and acting.

It's the Word of God that's powerful unto salvation. It's the Gospel that changes people's hearts through the work of the Holy Spirit. So we don't have to convince them, we don't have to rationalize with them, we don't have to out-argue them or anything like that.

There's a good place for apologetics, but mostly we want people to just be familiar with the content of the Gospel and be bold in proclaiming their faith in Jesus Christ and who He is and what it is that He came and did on the cross.

Ministering to Suffering People with Compassion and Hope

Steve, my wife Kim is from the Santa Cruz area, and so I've been going there regularly for probably 25, 26 years now, and I don't know if it's just the people that I know, but it seems like there's a disproportionate number of people who have suffered so much, some kind of physical trial.

Just crazy things happen in that county, and I'm not saying it's more demonically possessed and oppressed and all these other things, but there are a lot of people who suffer and are hurting. What's your approach as a pastor?

You're very Bible-centered from the pulpit and the sovereignty of God, there's transcendence of God, but when you meet with people, and I've even watched you, and your tone changes and you're more compassionate, my question is, so our listeners can learn, how do you minister as a Christian man, not even as a pastor, but to people who are suffering and hurting, and what's your approach of trying to minister the Word of God to them?

I guess one extreme would be you just start firing off Romans 8 .28. What's your approach? So how do Christians minister to hurting, suffering people?

Yeah, that's a good question, because you're right, you know, Romans 8 .28, living act of truth, real truth, that God uses all things and works them together for good, but when people are really, really suffering, it's hard to see that, so they need to believe it, they need to understand it, but first, in order to really understand it, they need compassion, and they need to know that their hurt and their pain and their suffering is legitimate, that, you know, sometimes I feel like what we're trying to do when we fire Romans 8 .28 or something from the Book of Job at people, we're trying to get them not to complain or not to suffer, not to hurt anymore, because it makes us uncomfortable, and so we're trying to talk them out of it, and, you know, stiff upper lip, and come on, buck up, old chap, and get them to be stoic about their suffering, and I don't think that's biblical at all.

I see Jesus having immense and intense compassion for people who were hurting and suffering and weeping when great pain was the reality of people's lives, and I think people need to know that there's a difference between sorrow and discontentment, there's a difference between crying out in anguish and crying out in bitterness, and so we really just try to come alongside first and listen and understand what they're going through and feel their pain with them, care about what they're experiencing, and then pray with them through that, and then gently, as the Lord provides the opportunity in their heart to hear it, gently do emphasize that God is the Sovereign One, that this is your hope.

If He hasn't forgotten you, He hasn't forsaken you, He doesn't fall asleep, He doesn't have better things to do, He's always here with you, and you're exactly where He wants you to be, and He's going to give you the strength that you need to endure, to persevere through whatever trials He gives you.

There's so much good scripture in the book of Job and Paul's words in Corinthians about the, you know, his own experience with the thorn in his flesh, of God's grace, and how He meets our weakness with His supernatural strength, and that really is encouraging people to know that through the worst of their trials, God is with them.

And then lastly, to continue to focus people above and remind them that sometimes, maybe even oftentimes, what God does is He providentially allows suffering and ordains it and uses it in order to remind us and teach us to walk by faith, trust Him, pray, lean on Him, but also to take our eyes off of the things of this world and keep us focused on the things that are invisible and eternal and laid out for us in the heavenlies, just as Paul did whenever he suffered, it made him long for glory, it made him long for the kingdom and for eternity with Christ more and more and more.

And when we focus on that with people, it really does seem to give them a sense of comfort from the God who is the God of all comfort.

Radio Ministry, Theological Banter, and Closing Remarks

Steve, I know you used to be on the radio there in Santa Cruz. I think you've got such a good radio voice and the doctrinal training. You need to be back on radio again.

I would provide. That season needed to come to an end for a lot of reasons, and the opportunity wasn't there anymore, so. I don't know. You know, I'm no Mike Abendroth. Hey!

Listen, I remember you invited me to your radio show before I invited you on to mine. I do. It was one of our better shows. I felt like I was the pre-mill guy up against the wall, is what I was.

I think what it was is I was the newly graduated Aumil seminary student, and I thought it was fun to jab at you a little bit. See, I didn't mind the Aumil part.

I was just glad you came out of Westminster West still Baptistic.

Absolutely. Stronger Baptist than when I went in, actually, I think.

All right. We're talking to Steve Watkins today, pastor at Trinity Bible Church. You can access his sermons there, tb-church .org. Pastor Steve has been there for quite some time. I look forward to hearing him preach and sitting underneath the ministry of the Word this summer, Lord willing.

Pastor Steve, thank you so much for your ministry under the Lord there in that community, and thanks for being on No Compromise Radio Ministry.

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.