Don Green Interview

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry, my name is Mike Abendroth, and we try to be pioneers here at the show and try to do things we've never done before, and we are breaking new ground, treading new ground today.

We have our first ever, well, if he does well, I guess he'll be our quarterly guest, our regular guest, our first ongoing regular guest,

Pastor Don Green. Welcome back to No Compromise Radio. Well thanks, Mike, with that introduction

I feel a lot of pressure to Well, I'm thankful for all those systematic theologies in Latin you've sent to me so that you could buy your way onto the show.

Yeah, there's more to come, if I can get more invitations. Well, Don, I wanted to have you on a regular basis, because I think we're kindred spirits in lots of ways, and you are in the

Midwest, Bible teaching pastor, expositor, wanting to talk about the gospel, and I regularly receive emails from people who listen to the show, and they say, you know what, we're super thankful that God has placed, at his good pleasure, men across the globe, across America, to preach the gospel.

So often we're discouraged, but now we're encouraged when we hear about men like Don Green preaching, so I'm thankful for your ministry.

Well, and the feeling's very mutual, Mike. You've gone before me in many years and experience, and you're a guy that brings a lot of encouragement to my heart with your own faithfulness.

Don, I went to your website again today to just check a few things, and you probably know one of my ultimate pet peeves, and I think we've talked about it before, when we have a website and we're trying to get people to learn about the

Church, there's of course nothing wrong with that, and here's who we are, education, sermons, statement of faith, but the welcome pages usually bother me, because they say something like, dress casually, we don't care what your kids do, they try to, it's this kind of sappy, seeker -sensitive, postmodern nasal kind of drain thing.

So when I went to your website and it said, welcome to Truth Community Church, and it said, we are a group of believers committed to clear, uncompromising

Bible exposition and the proclamation of the gospel. And you said a few other things, but basically it was, take it or leave it, we're about the

Bible and the gospel. Well, you know, Mike, my approach on these things is, let's just be who we are, let's not try to pretend to be somebody we don't, to attract people who really wouldn't be sympathetic to what we're trying to do.

We're not concerned about dress one way or the other, we just teach the Bible. And if that attracts people, great, they're probably going to like our

Church. If they're not interested in the Bible, they're not going to stick around too long. So it just helps everybody, both friend and foe, to get to cut to the chase and find out, you know, whether we're a match for each other or not.

See, I'm just laughing and smiling at the same time, because that is why I think we get along.

It has nothing to do with pride or arrogance, it's, this is what we are about, and we'd love to have you, we'll be nice to you and kind, but why do the switch in advertising and kind of duck -and -jive stuff, and all of a we promote ourselves one way, and then they get here, and then it's like, oh yeah, they teach the

Bible, we're looking for entertainment. So let's be honest. Yeah, you know, Mike, it reminds me of something that I've heard many times,

I don't know who originally said it, but what you win them with is what you win them to. And if we want to win them to Bible teaching, let's just make that obvious that that's what we do up front.

And I know that's what you do, and it is why you and I get along so well, I think. Now, speaking of your website, tell me a little bit about the 1689 and why you hold to that Baptist Confession of Faith.

I know your background at Grace Church, and they have at the Master's Seminary, Master's College, Grace Church, kind of their own statement of faith.

What made you say, at least loosely, we hold to the

London Baptist Confession of 1689? Well, that's a great question, Mike, and it was something that I wrestled with before we kind of adopted that as a guiding confession.

We, and you have to remember the origins of our church, we started as a brand -new church plant in an area that had, you know, that wasn't known for expositional teaching.

And so what we wanted to do was to identify historically and say that even though we're a new church, our teaching is not new, and to identify with a stream of teaching that preceded, you know, us by centuries, and to kind of step into a line of historical theology, and not simply be identified with something from the 21st century.

We thought that was important as a statement that we're trying to identify with historic

Christianity, not simply be, you know, another new brand of something here.

There were also theological reasons. I love the emphasis on the sovereignty of God and the clarity of the

Gospel in 1689. There were polemic reasons. 1689 makes definitive statements about Catholicism and rejecting the

Pope and Catholicism, and in our area where there's a heavy Catholic influence, that was important as well.

And the other thing about it is that there's a real pastoral dimension to 1689 that speaks well to people struggling with assurance, and helps them to find the way to know whether they're saved or not.

And so there were just, there were multiple reasons that fed into that. And, you know, we don't agree with absolutely every point of 1689, but it's the direction of 1689 that we really want to identify with.

The authority of Scripture, the sovereignty of God and salvation, and that pastoral dimension that I alluded to.

Talking to Don Green today, truthcommunitychurch .org. If you would like straightforward, simple

Bible teaching, I don't mean simplistic, but simple. This is what the text says and means, and here is how it is relevant to our lives, because it is relevant, it's

God's Word. truthcommunitychurch .org. Don, I'm going to start something new here in No Compromise Radio.

You know, when you're on radio, you have to have these little kind of adverts and catches and stuff like that, and little segments.

And so I've developed a new one specifically for you. You're called

Pastor Don's Craw, and so that means there's something probably stuck in your craw that you've been thinking about, and you've been working through biblically, you wish other people would see things like you do, that is, through the lens of Scripture, and so something's stuck in your craw.

You have to explain that. So today, on No Compromise Radio, Pastor Don's Craw.

Well, the thing that currently is stuck in my craw is, I came across an article about Mark Driscoll, and it's titled,

Mark Driscoll's Books in a Mars Hill Ballard Graveyard. And basically what it's saying is, is that when

Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill Church went out of business, they sold their campus to another upcoming church, and left the contents of the old church in the building and left behind.

And there's a picture here with cases upon cases of Mark Driscoll's books in the dumpster, specifically his book titled

The Resurgence. And it was just a parable to me of all of the hype that went into his ministry, all of the hype that goes into his books, and people like John Piper supporting him and promoting him.

And where does it all end up? It ends up in a dumpster after the church fails. And it's just a picture of how we as Christians should not follow after the marketing and the hype and the mega -bucks, mega -name kind of guys in our ministry, and just stick to the text and be faithful to Scripture, be faithful to a local church, whether it's big or small, and let

God bless us through the means he's appointed, rather than loving the marketing that the world promotes and tries to inject into the

Church. Don, thank you for that, and at the risk of patting myself on the back, I knew

Pastor Don's craw would be a success. Let's talk a little bit about books and reading, since that would be a good segue.

I tend to read books of men that probably are older. I'm reading the

Sinclair Ferguson book on the marrow controversy now, but I read a lot of classical books as well, and it just seems like a lot of the new stuff, you know, there's nothing wrong with reading a new book.

I mean, I write new books, but tell our listeners the wisdom to at least pepper their reading with some of the classics.

Yeah, that's right, Mike. And it kind of ties back into what

I was saying about 1689. You know, when you read the guys whose ministries have been established, they've gone on to be with the

Lord, but you see what the fruit of their ministry is, and these are guys who have stood the test of time, that were speaking to eternal truth, and that's why it lasted, rather than speaking to the coming and going issues of their age.

I think about this often in our modern upcoming political climate, that guys that I respect still want to talk so much about politics and Donald Trump and what's going to happen in the election and all of that, and I just know that that's just going to fade and not even be thought about in a year or two after the election is over with.

And so what we want to do in our preaching today and our reading of men who have gone before us, we want to anchor ourselves in those guys who showed that they understood the eternal perspective from God's Word and explained it to us in a way that is eternally relevant because it's eternally true, not based on shifting circumstances of today.

Amen. Don, when I consider your background and your law degree and as you were practicing attorney in Chicago for years, does that help you, or how does it help you when you consider topics of the day?

For instance, I've got Christianity Today's new magazine, March 2016, big full -page color ad for Baylor Truett Seminary, and it's got a person there kind of advertising the school, and it's this person graduated with an

MDiv 2012, they're a teaching pastor for Grace Baptist Church, and it happens to be a lady.

So many people to me want to then argue that, well, women can be pastors for feeling -oriented, for practical reasons, for pragmatic reasons.

How has your lawyer background helped you just say, you know, it's not a matter of any of those things, what does 1

Timothy 2 say? Well, exactly, you just kind of analyze the issue for what it is.

My legal background makes me want to prosecute them for false advertising. But since I don't have that kind of jurisdiction, it just lets you, you know, and I don't really even think about it unless somebody brings it to my attention, but you know, just kind of that analysis that there is a standard, there is a law, as it were,

God's Word, and that law is what we apply to interpret the right or wrong of what's around us.

It's not based on the feelings of men or what we think is right or what our culture is doing. We just have to go back to God's Word again and again, and you start to feel a little bit like a broken record,

I guess, because you're just continually making that same point, but that's what we're told to do.

We just need to stand firm on God's Word and trust Him for the results of that. Well, if I had a

Pastor Mike's craw, it would lead into Andy Stanley's new sermon about how small churches are selfish.

You've got to go for the big churches. Don't even get me started. I haven't seen that one yet, but yeah, what can you say to that?

What would you say to that, Mike? Let me turn the table for the interview. What do you say to that? Well, I would say to myself,

I guess maybe the most selfish people that we could ever meet then are on the pages of Scripture named people like Jeremiah or Isaiah.

While it wasn't the Church for them, their ministries were super small, and shame on them for being so selfish.

I mean, that God would give them the ministry of hardening, how bad. Yeah, and I remember also what

Paul said, you know, only Luke is with me, he said at the end of his life, and Christ died alone on the cross.

You know, that's just, it's just so wrong that you start to lose words to express your outrage at it.

Don, I've been working through a few things in my mind for messages and radio shows and things like that, and I was trying to figure out why people love

C .S. Lewis so much, even though he denied inerrancy, he believed in purgatory, he wouldn't have called himself an evangelical.

Lloyd -Jones knew that, and other people did. C .S. Lewis denied substitutionary penalty at atonement.

Tell me if you think this is right or wrong. We value style over substance in our culture, it's the aesthetics that we go for, and we would rather, it seems to me, listen to someone write things well than write things precisely.

So if we have to pick, of course people would pick both, but it seems to me people pick C .S. Lewis because he was an excellent writer, they pick him because he writes things well, even though he denies things that we would want him to affirm, and we'd rather pick him versus somebody who's dry and precise.

What do you think of that analysis? Well, I think that's true, and I think it's reflected in what people gravitate toward in their preaching today.

You know, it's all about style rather than substance, and I was reading an article on a more mainstream leadership church leadership website that was about preaching, and the guy was describing what changes he had made in his preaching, and it was all so superficial.

I thought, this guy shouldn't even be in a pulpit, and yet here he is publishing writings, because it was all based on style rather than substance, of communicating the intent of the text.

That wasn't important to him, it was just about how he was going to rhyme or alliterate his points, or stylistic things that had nothing to do about communicating the meat of Scripture.

And that fits right in with what you're saying about C .S. Lewis's writing. You know, he was such a clever writer, and very winsome in his appeal, but you have to peel below that to look at the substance, and as you pointed out so well, the substance was not what the style would suggest.

I think of Paul as he writes to the Corinthian church, and when he says in 1 Corinthians 2, I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and I think there's a chi there, and most times it's translated, and him crucified.

But I think what Paul is trying to do is, he's showing that the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, they think it's foolish, they think it's dumb, and Paul is saying, listen,

I'm gonna preach to you Jesus Christ, even the crucified one. That's what you don't want.

There's no aesthetics to the cross. This is the stick in your eye. You don't want to talk about the crucified Messiah.

It makes you stumble. You want signs and wonders and all these other things, and I just think, how can we overvalue style, and then we look at the cross, and what kind of style is there?

There's no style at the cross. That's right. The cross was a symbol of shame and defeat in the first century.

It wasn't a piece of jewelry that people would wear. It was where condemned criminals and traitors to the

Roman government and vanquished military people were, military foes were crucified, and so it was a symbol of defeat and shame and ostracization, if I can multiply syllables beyond what one word contains.

And Paul says, yes, Christ crucified, Christ rejected by the world, that's what

I proclaim to you. And you know, Mike, I'm just, the longer I go in ministry, the more content

I am to be alienated from the world, to be rejected by the world, to be overlooked by the world.

I would rather be identified with Christ and be alone in ministry than to identify with the seeker -sensitive group that draws a lot of crowds around them that are not faithful to the gospel.

Give me Christ and let me be alone with him over identifying with the world and its masses that reject it.

Talking to Pastor Don Green today, Don, I have in front of me that Christianity Today. They have a gleanings section and how teens read the

Bible with a survey put together by the American Bible Society and BARNA, or as we say here in New England, Barner.

And by the way, I was offended the other day, someone, when I was at the Naval Academy speaking, someone said, yeah, you kind of picked up the

New England accent. I don't think I did, but I have no idea. Here is one of these statements, and then

I'll tell you what percentage of the teens agreed with it. Here's the statement, and I like your comments, please.

The Bible's main message is the story of who God is and his desire to have a relationship with the people he created.

So the Bible's main message is who God is and he wants to have a relationship with people.

Seventy -five percent of teens said that would be true. That's what they're told in their youth ministry, isn't it?

See, that's exactly right. Explain what you mean. Well, you know, the youth ministry dynamic is all about, you know, trying to entertain young people rather than teaching them the doctrines of God's Word, and if I were given an opportunity to speak to a youth group anywhere,

I would open up and I would start at Romans 118, for the wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.

And all of you that are in front of me, you are under the condemnation of that wrath. Let's start there and talk about you coming to God in repentance, instead of expecting

God to come to you to give you whatever you want, to make you happy, and to entertain you as you've been led to believe.

And you know, that would turn off them and their parents, maybe, but at least they would hear the truth about sin and judgment and wrath, so that they would actually be prepared to receive the good news of the gospel that Christ died for sinners like you, and calls you to himself, to allegiance to him as Lord, in order to save your soul.

Don, when I consider the landscape of New England in the 1600s and congregational meeting houses,

Puritan meeting houses, trying to put the emphasis on the Church would be the people, not the building, so there would be a meeting house, and there's no bathrooms, there are no

Sunday school rooms, no, you know, pastor's study or anything else, it's just this big square rectangular building to try to keep you out of the

New England snow. And what did children do back then? I'm not inherently against Sunday schools,

I mean, we have them for adults and young people, why not have extra education on the campus?

But what did those folks do back in those days, when there were no, I don't know, climbing walls in the gym for the junior high kids?

Well yeah, and you know, even just as I'm finishing preaching through Ephesians here, when

Paul wrote to the Ephesians, he said, children, obey your parents and fathers, raise your children in the discipline and instruction of the

Lord. The very nature of what he wrote presupposed that the children would be there with the adults to hear his instructions.

And so, you know, I look at that and say they anticipated, Scripture expected that the children would be present when

God's Word was being taught. And you know, I'm not a big fan, I'm not a fan of separating the children out for their own kind of worship.

At our church, we like to have the children with us, so that they learn to respect God's Word when it is preached, to sit with the people of God across generations and hear

God's Word as it's taught, and it's surprising what they're able to pick up even at the earliest of ages.

Yes, but Don, what does that do? What does a crying child do to your TV show?

Doesn't that make an interruption? Well, when I get a TV show, I'll worry about that.

But you know, our parents have the sensitivity to say, you know what, my child's getting disruptive,

I'll just step out until he's able to settle down. It's just, that's a small, it doesn't even distract me in the pulpit, really, and it's just, you know, that's just part of the overall dynamic that God's Word is being taught to all of God's people.

Not that the little ones are covenant children, that's not what I'm saying at all, but just that, you know, this is life, and God's Word addresses us in our lives.

Don, we've got about a minute or two left. Tell us what you're working on these days, anything with radio or blogging or books or the,

I know you're on Ephesians, what you'll be in next, just anything about your ministry as we kind of land the plane now.

Well, on Tuesday nights I just started a new series. I don't often do topical series, but I'm doing a topical series titled

A Refresher on Holiness. It'll probably be three or four messages, and just designed to help people think biblically and shape their affections.

Why is it that we should pursue holiness? It's because of who Christ is and the purpose of our salvation, maintaining a pure conscience, the people of God, there's just so many things that make it critical for every

Christian, even those who have no leadership responsibility, to pursue Christ and to honor

Him and to love Him from their hearts, because our lives overflow and minister to the people of God that way.

Talking today to Don Green, truthcommunitychurch .org. I know Don will not be offended when

I say this, but if you would like blue collar preaching, that is, I can plod

William Carey, we're going to go through the text, and the star of today is not the pastor, but it's the

Lord Jesus Christ in His word. Blue collar preaching, I call that. It's truthcommunitychurch .org

with Pastor Don Green. Don, thanks for being on No Compromise Radio. I'm glad for your partnership in ministry and encouragement, as well as a friend.

Well, Mike, it's the same way. I often think about you and pray for you, and I'm just grateful for the ministry the