Interview Christian Harris (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 apostle

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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 divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. I have

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Christian Harris here again in the studio. Christian Harris, you were on last week and now you're on this week.

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Thanks for being back. Thank you, Mike. It was fun waiting a week around for this next show. Five minutes later.

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Originally, we were live and then there were some technical difficulties and I'm about 22, 23 shows ahead, taped ahead because we want to make sure that the ministry of Bethlehem Bible Church doesn't revolve around No Compromise Radio.

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Glad to be on the radio. We love V &E and the leadership, some great preachers on the station. I'm glad for all that, but there's a bigger ministry that goes on at Bethlehem Bible Church than this radio station.

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Christian, one person even said to me, I don't want to, we want to make sure we schedule the funeral around the show.

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And I said, well, that's one of the reasons why we taped the show. I thought that was kind of them, but we don't really need to do that.

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So we taped the shows. That way, if we don't like one of them, we can just edit, we can start again.

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But today we want to continue talking to Christian Harris. I think, well, first of all, he's a friend of mine, but he has good insight.

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And Christian and I, we think generally the same way, but I think we think a little bit differently as we get to the same conclusions.

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And that's just because we're different people. We have different providential backgrounds of parents, and we've been justified, similar, exactly the same way, but our conversions are different.

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And the way we look at life is different. Our wives are different. And so that is why we look at things.

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And maybe that'll spice up the show a little bit today. So I think what we'll do to start with, Christian, is I've introduced you before as a pastor, and you have pastored for how many years as a youth pastor?

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That was almost 15 years. And how many years as a senior pastor? That was about seven.

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I preached at Napa Bible Church. You did. That's right, and you probably used real wine in the community cups in Napa, California.

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We had, we actually... You had both, didn't you? We had both. Okay, inner circle and outer circle.

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Gnostics and non -gnostics, right? So anyway, what we want to do today is talk about Christian's current job, which

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I think will give you, the listeners, some interesting insight about work. If you're a man or woman, of course

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I say women wake up at work, and men usually have to drive off to work. But the work ethic of Christians versus non -Christians.

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Christian, tell me about your business first so that people can kind of frame this mentally, and then

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I'll ask you some questions. What do you do now? Well, as you know, one of the things that brought us to Texas, well, the specific event was the rebellion of one of my children.

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And it was through her rebellion that we stepped down from ministry and ceased pursuing what

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I feel, and still feel, called to do, which is to be in pastoral ministry. As you know, I'm involved in a church, and I preach every morning in an old folks' home.

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But we were brought to Texas to do whatever it took to grab the attention of my daughter's heart.

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And when we did that, obviously I needed to provide for my family. And so we looked at a couple of different things that I could do.

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But one of the opportunities I had while church planting in the Napa Valley was to paint and to be trained and discipled, really, by one of the highest -end painting companies in Northern California.

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This is not like Van Gogh kind of thing? No, no, this is interior, exterior, commercial, residential, wall paint and trim paint and things like that.

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But we came to Texas, and I put out a little shingle. And before I knew it, the phone was ringing.

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And to make a long story short, we have now been there about three years. And we now have the largest painting company in the

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Granbury area. I have six full -time employees, two part -time, and have been working about 70 -plus hours a week just to make sure that this thing gets going and is heading in the right direction.

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And so what we're doing now is we're number one in sales in the local paint companies. And again, we're flying.

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It's really been a wonderful experience. And yet at the same time, desiring someday in the near future is

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God designs to be back into full -time ministry. And so in the context of that,

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I've had to, as a pastor, and I would actually recommend that, well, I wouldn't recommend, but it would be neat if pastors could somehow take a sabbatical and work six months at the local

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Arby's or McDonald's or what have you. I think that it gives, it has certainly given me a perspective of life that though I knew about,

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I think I have a much more or a much better appreciation of what our local men do and the struggles and the challenges they have to do in order to make a living.

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And one of the elements that rose to the surface as I began to engage hiring and engage bringing and developing a staff, a successful staff of my own employees, was this whole idea of understanding a work ethic.

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And just to give you a quick background and then you can take it wherever you want to. Out of my six guys, basically

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I've got two Christians, two Hispanic guys from Mexico that are legal now in the

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United States, raised Catholic and very driven with their work ethic, and then two other painters that had their own companies, but just for other reasons they couldn't, they didn't find success, and so we brought them along.

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And it's interesting, and I gotta just tell you out of the top, my two best workers are the

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Hispanic guys. They are there prior to the start of the time.

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They're early, they will work as many hours as they can in the context of painting from the start to finish.

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And we work four hours, take an hour break, and then work four hours. Basically I give them an eight hour day.

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At the end of the four hours they're sweating, they're working, they're faithful to do what

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I've asked them to do. The other two guys that are not the Christians, they are, they're faithful, much slower pace, they're not working as if their children would die unless they are faithful to that particular day.

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But they do a good job and that's why they're hired. My two Christian guys, one's actually a youth pastor that needed a job, and one is my own son -in -law, they have been the most challenging to me in attitude and work ethic.

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And so it's really been placed upon my heart is saying what are we doing as a church to disciple men?

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What are we doing as fathers? What are we doing as dads? What are we doing as employers to bring the truthfulness of the gospel and its implications to the workforce?

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And the testimony and the integrity of the gospel to the workforce? What are we doing or what are we not doing that we can find ourselves in this kind of circumstance?

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Because it's just not my particular, it is not my particular deal. I remember as a youth pastor where we would have work days and I'd get all the

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Christian kids together. And Mike, I don't know, young guys could not, they could play video games, but they didn't know how to use a shovel.

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They didn't know how to sweep. They did not know how to mop. They did not know how to clean windows. So I'm just,

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I'm concerned a little bit and maybe we could talk about that for a few minutes. Well, let's even go back to the very beginning.

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This is Mike Abendroth talking to Christian Harris really about work, a theology of work.

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I'm looking at Genesis chapter three and the fall of man. And God had told

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Adam, this is what you do with the garden. This is what you're supposed to do. This is what I've called you to do.

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And then Adam fell. And so what is the result of this fall? Cursed is the ground because of you.

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In toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall grow for you, but you will eat the plants of the field.

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By the sweat of your face you will eat bread till you return to the ground because from it you were taken.

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For you are dust and to dust you shall return. So the way I think about it,

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Christian, and correct me if you think I'm wrong. If God says to work, which is good before the fall, which is good in heaven, there's work in heaven.

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There are things to accomplish for the Lord. After the fall, it just gets tweaked a little bit. It's off.

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It's now propensity towards sin, propensity towards to do the exact opposite of what

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God calls you to do. So work, God says before the fall. Now after the fall, there's still work, but people, especially men, are lazy.

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Men are lazy. And so for me, I have three girls and a boy, and so I see propensities of the fall built into their systems.

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And so you grew up, as your young family grew, having four daughters. And so now maybe you see this a little bit more in youth ministry, at work.

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My question is, why are Christian men, not as hard workers, sometimes as unbelievers?

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Great question, and I give an answer, and it goes back to what we've been discussing in maybe even last week's show, or last show.

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When you take a look at the nature of ministry today, and you take a look at, from the leadership, again, without being too specific, it seems to me that the guys that I see involved in pastoral ministry, or have seen, if I was just to judge it from a distance,

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I don't see a whole lot of hard work going on there. It's fun and games.

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In the circles that I ran with, there would be not even a day, full day, spent in study, for example, in preparation for their own particular messages.

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Whereas I know that, for example, you start your message preparation, when you close your last service on Sunday and say amen,

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I say, hey, Mike, what are you doing? Ah, I'm getting ready for next week. I mean, you are a great example of, really, what we should be doing in the workplace, and so if we're not seeing it in the pastoral ministry, how can we really be encouraged in the common workplace?

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Just to jump in there for a second, Christian, if you're listening today on No Compromise Radio, and you don't wanna do any work, and you're a man, but you'd like to get paid, become a pastor that won't teach the

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Bible verse by verse. Just go to a mainline denomination, Episcopalian, some kind of Methodist, you can go out of Christian realm,

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Roman Catholic, wherever you wanna go, and just do your prayer breakfast, meeting with people, do some weddings and funerals, and you get paid pretty well.

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It's a lucrative job, and you can have your subsistence through other people's money.

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But if you want to work hard, begin to teach the Bible, and try to shepherd the people according to Scriptures, and it is a very, very difficult work.

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So these guys that don't preach very often, and they don't preach deeply, I just think, man, you guys, you are lazy.

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And if you're not careful as a pastor, I mean, who do you report to? Now, of course, the elder board and the church, they can vote with their feet, but I think you're right.

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It starts with models of people working hard to say this is good and right to sweat and to toil and to labor for something called the gospel.

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It's also good to labor and sweat and toil to pay your bills. So when I run into families,

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Christian, and their kids don't know how to do the wash, they don't know how to put dishes in the dishwasher, they don't know how to mow the lawn,

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I don't know what the dads are teaching, but maybe the dads do what the kids do. Yeah, and let's make it real practical for our listeners.

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As a small business owner now, and as an employer with six employees, one of the things that I noticed is as we were building this business is other painters would come in, for example, to the paint store and they would be complaining about the economy, they would be complaining about the recession, of how little work that they had, and yet we saw, by God's grace, an escalation of work through the slowest times over this last three years.

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So while everybody's sitting around drinking coffee, one of the things that kept happening was weekly, monthly growth.

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I had to hire more guys, I had to be more involved. My alarm clock started being set earlier and earlier and earlier.

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So now, just to make sure that I've got a day that's planned out and is profitable,

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I have to get up at 4, 4 .30 now. And I'm even thinking about even going earlier, just to make sure that the trucks are set up, that the jobs have been planned, that we're ready to go.

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And I would say this, I would say that what fuels that? Is it my desire for money? No, not at all.

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I would say that in pastoral ministry, as you said, when you have to study 20 hours plus per message just to make sure that you are biblically accurate in understanding the mind of God and the way that he has presented revelation and the way that he has revealed his truth, and then transitioning that in the multiple times that we would teach to make sure that the people of God got it presented to them in a way that was not only biblically accurate, but also relevant to them, that takes a lot of hard work and time.

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And in translation that over into just my day -to -day job, I have to be as equally diligent.

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Otherwise, I'm not gonna be profitable. I'm not going to be successful. I'm not gonna be faithful.

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Let me bring you back to just one text here. Maybe you can comment on this. When I read, I'm flipping through Ephesians.

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Everything's good. I understand our identity in Christ, husbands and wives, children and parents.

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And then I get to this little section of scripture that says, slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart as you would

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Christ. That's Ephesians 6, verse five. I just read that in the three phrases that I see in there.

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I wanna step back and go, that's weighty. That causes me to push myself away from the table, even as we're discussing this and say, there are eternal implications here.

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And there is a weightiness of these commands and this instruction that I don't see today.

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And I don't know, it's - Christian, it is so true. When I look at the workers out there, because I had to work for a long time, going through school and try to do ministry on the side.

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And I think I understand what men go through in corporate America. When I look at what's going on,

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I don't see this. I have to work heartily unto the Lord. The Colossians 3 or Ephesians 6.

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I see men more concerned about, how can I evangelize on company time? Is it friendship evangelism?

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Can I read my Bible at the desk? This is all, I mean, if you meet a man and you wanna go out to lunch and you preach the gospel to him, fine.

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If he's your boss, great. But where are the super hardworking Christians who just labor and toil, knowing in the background that whatever they do, they do the work as to the

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Lord. I think for Christians too often it's, well, when the cat's away, the mice will play. And since Jesus isn't on earth looking over their shoulder, then they're kind of free to do what they want and their minds are off in ministry land where this is the ministry.

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The King, the General, the Sovereign Jesus says, I've saved you and now providentially you're right where I want you.

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Work heartily unto me. It doesn't mean ignore your family. It doesn't mean work 80 hours a week and so your family's crazy.

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It just means you work heartily for them. And that's what I'd like to see the men do, to be a good witness, to say,

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Christians, shouldn't they be the hardest working people? Yes, absolutely. In fact,

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I'll just tag on it and re -edify it. It's as if, listen to this, if you are a man right now and listening to this and you want to make an impact in your community, i .e.

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your workplace, the number one, and I'll say this, I believe I can back this up biblically, the number one way that you evangelize those around you is by the way that you work.

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Not that they can get saved by seeing your work ethic, but that gives you the integrity, that gives you the foundation, the platform for then giving a reason for the hope that is in you, giving a response or engaging those around you because what you've done there, you've established the integrity of your life.

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And so when we go back to this passage that I just referred to in Ephesians chapter six, when it says there in the context of the workplace that we are to obey our masters with fear and trembling, when you work with that reverential awe towards your employers, what that does is that brings strength and integrity to the message that you say that you believe.

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Do not, I repeat, do not claim the name of Christ if you are not working for your employers as if you were working for Christ.

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It is a stumbling block, it destroys the integrity of our message, stop it. I'll never forget the

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MacArthur message when he was talking about the jail ministry he had and a guy kept coming up to him every week and talking about he was a

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Christian, he was, you know, I was really wronged and I'm not guilty,

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I'm in jail and I shouldn't be here and everything else and I'm a Christian and he was acting improperly, saying improper things.

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And John finally said to him, stop calling yourself a Christian because you're giving a bad name to Christianity.

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I just did some study even last week, Christian, with this whole phrase with fear and trembling, it's found in 1

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Corinthians chapter two, it's found in, what's the Philippians chapter two, it's not necessarily cowering fear and then, you know, we're just afraid.

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When those two words are put together, Paul is saying this, you have an authority over you and since you have an authority over you, do this, you have a master and the master here is not your earthly master, you have

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Jesus Christ as a master. And so if we were seeing Jesus on earth and he would say,

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Harris, you're gonna go be a painter in Texas, paint well, then you would say, yes, sir, thank you for forgiving me my sins, give me a wife, give me daughters, reporting for duty, do it well, work hard,

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I'm watching you and I will reward you at the end. I think men need a good dose of that where the sovereign

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God has put them where they are and to quote a woman, Elizabeth Elliot, bloom where you're planted. So just be all there and work super hard and if God's called you to ministry, well, he'll get you there, but you need to work hard now because in ministry, you're gonna have to tell other men, continue to work hard because we do not believe in some secular sacred bifurcation.

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What do I mean by that? Yeah, you cannot make a separate between secular and sacred, you can't, it's unbiblical to separate that, that you are somehow a

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Christian on Sundays and in the workforce, your faith is not meaningful.

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No, you as a Christian man, as a Christian, your faith, the gospel, the integrity of the gospel, the reality of that, it moves itself through all facets of your life.

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There are, you can't make distinctions like that. So the way that you work is tied directly to what you believe and what you know to be true.

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Just in a real practical illustration, you know, these guys, the two believers that I have, I love them dearly and we have a special relationship as the way

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God designed. But in the context of that relationship, I've had to rebuke them,

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I've had to correct them because they're bringing, quote unquote, gospel freedoms into the workplace that really are destroying the integrity of their work.

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And one is, one that you alluded to and mentioned, one guy loves to evangelize, so he loves to stop working, stop what he's doing and actually engage in conversation while my other guys are thinking, wait a minute here, we have a great boss here and he's called us to do this and what you wanna do is you wanna stop what you're doing and actually present what you believe.

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And it got back to me, these guys are complaining that when I leave, these guys turn into evangelists and really they're not getting it.

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And so I've had to pull these guys aside and say, you know what, you need to stop what you're doing, you need to close your mouth, establish a platform for that gospel to come out.

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And I said, that's what will help. And it's been tough with these guys, but it's good. And in fact, early on, they said, well, you're not being loving, you're not being gospel -driven.

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What would Jesus do? What would Jesus, I had to just point out, I said, you know what he'd do?

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He'd shut his mouth and he would pick up that paint bucket or the sandpaper or that putty and he would be faithful and do a perfect job.

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And that's what you're called to do. That's exactly right. Well, it goes back to Ephesians and Colossians.

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If we look at Ephesians chapter six about this work ethic and Colossians chapter three, there are chapters previous to that.

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In other words, if you say you've been captured by the gospel, God has chosen you in eternity past, had his son die for you at Calvary, has sealed you to the day of redemption by the spirit.

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If God has done that for you and he's brought you in, most likely as a Gentile into this great work of this great king, then in light of that, your response should be,

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I should work hard. I should be a hard worker. And so Christian, we don't have much time left, but if somebody is not a hard worker, they don't really understand the gospel like they should.

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They're connected. Theology and methodology, faulty methodology shows a faulty theology.

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Yeah, if right now you're listening to this and maybe you're examining what we're saying and I would encourage you, yeah, to go back to the beginning pages of these books, to go back to Paul's letter to the church at Ephesus and read chapters one through three and understand who you are in Christ and what

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God has given you in him and all these blessings. And then you ask yourself, how then shall

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I work? How shall I take tickets at the movie theater? How shall I sell cars? How shall

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I paint houses? Whatever it is, and you'll be amazed at the changes that will happen. When you look at that word redemption found in Ephesians chapter one that Christian alluded to, you will say to yourself, if a slave, if a slave from South part of America during the

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Civil War was freed by someone and that ransom was paid, that slave would probably go up to that person who paid the ransom and redeem them from slavery.

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He'd probably go up and fall on his face and say, I'd love to work for you for the rest of my life for free.

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You're so gracious. You're so generous. Thank you for saving me. You're reuniting me with my wife.

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I will gladly serve you. I will serve you in response to what you've done. And so when people have been redeemed from the slave pit of sin by Christ Jesus's life and death, the response should be,

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I will serve you wherever you put me. Amen. So let's take our fish stickers off of our commercial trucks.

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Preach it. Yes. And how about private cars too? Let's do all of that and prove by the integrity of our work ethic what we believe.

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Well, we've been talking to Christian Harris. This is Mike Ebendroth of No Compromise Radio Ministry. We sat down at the studio today to talk about whatever, and it turned into be a whole message, a whole show on a

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Christian work ethic. Work is good. Work is pure. Work is God -pleasing. And by the way, if you're a listener today and you're a hard, hard worker, but you're not a

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Christian, I want you to know none of your work can accomplish heaven for you. You need to look away from yourself and look to Christ who did the perfect work.

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Died on a cross, lived a perfect life, was raised from the dead. You are saved by works, but only Christ works.

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And we encourage you to repent and trust, not in yourself, but in Christ Jesus. Christian, thank you for coming to the studio today.

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Thank you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebendroth 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 six. 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.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE in staff or management.