Don Green 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 are 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. My name is Mike Abendroth, glad to be your host today. In real time, it is pouring rain, it is gloomy, downcast, but by the time this airs in a few weeks, it will probably be bright and sunny fall day here in New England.

Don�t forget, you�ve got a couple weeks left to sign up for the Israel trip. No Compromise Radio, along with my brother,

Pat Abendroth, Omaha Bible Church, we�re heading to Israel in February, February 17th through the 25th with a three -day extension in Jordan.

I don�t know if it will work out with ISIS and everything else. Who knows? Planned to go to Egypt several years ago and that got cancelled, but the

Lord�s sovereignty rules overall and right now we�re just planning to go. Today we have a guest interview,

Don Green, Pastor Don Green from Truth Community Fellowship is with us. He�s been on before.

It was a good interview and so I wanted to have him back. Pastor Don, welcome back to No Compromise Radio. Well, thank you,

Mike. I�m glad to be with you and I�m excited about the free trips you offer to the guests on your radio show to Israel with you.

That is so nice. It�s one of those things where I�m still trying to fix the �donate� button on the website, so wherever you move the cursor, the �donate� button follows.

That�ll be great. So, no, I�m glad to be with you. I appreciate the invitation to be back. Don, give our listeners a little background, what you did at Grace Community Church with Grace Life and where you�re ministering now and how long you�ve been there, just for a little background for those that missed the last interview.

Sure. I was an elder at Grace Community Church with John MacArthur and Phil Johnson for a number of years and worked at Grace to You in an administrative capacity for 10 or 15 years, probably, and then the

Lord opened the opportunity for me to come here to the Cincinnati area to plant a church, which we�re calling currently

Truth Community Fellowship, and it was simply an opportunity for me to kind of start something from the ground up with some other good men that called me, and we�re moving into our third year of ministry, and it�s been wonderful to see the

Lord draw people who wanted nothing more than verse -by -verse Bible teaching. So, we keep it simple, and, you know,

I know that you and I share common philosophies on what the pulpit should look like.

Don, it�s interesting to me that we have the Word of God, and we can get, by God�s sovereign hand, dropped behind enemy lines, as it were, parachuted in, you know, easy company kind of thing, and we just have the

Spirit of God and His Word, and we begin to just preach it, and God is working through His Word through regeneration, sanctification, and churches grow, mature, flourish.

Why do you think so many people want to run from that? I mean, it�s so simple to me, yet it�s so difficult to employ because of the trust in God factor, because of the world�s ideologies.

What�s your take on it? Well, the, I can only speak from my own experience here in terms of what you�re describing, but the, we�re in an area where verse -by -verse teaching has been pretty unusual and rare for since the days of Warren Wearspeed, going back almost 40 years.

And so I think that, in general, those who would broadly call themselves

Christians come to have certain expectations about what church is supposed to be like, and when you come with a philosophy that emphasizes

Bible teaching and not a lot of fluff and entertainment, they look at you cross -eyed because you�re doing something different than what they�ve ever seen before.

But with our church, and we have just such a sweet body of believers, what�s happened is from an hour radius from where we meet, there�s just,

God has just brought us family after family after family that have been hungering for simple

Bible teaching, and so people that felt like they didn�t belong anywhere have found a home in our church because they had a desire for God�s Word, too.

And so, it�s not for, you know, we�ve found that people come and visit for a while and they say, �Well, this isn�t for me.�

That�s okay. We�re focused on the people that want to stay, and the people that want to stay are a sweet and a great encouragement to me, and we�re establishing roots that we expect this church to live on long after we do.

Don, before I make another comment about that, because I think that�s insightful, Warren Wiersbe has an outline for Jonah chapter 1 that I just read, and so since you mentioned his name,

I have to give you the outline for Jonah 1. Here it is. Warren Wiersbe, Jonah chapter 1, �Go,

Know, Blow, and Throw So, Don, what about churches, folks in churches that are listening to this program on podcast or here at the radio station, and they have a pastor who, he�s not very flashy, he�s not, you know, a well -dressed man, he�s kind of maybe geeky, he�s kind of wearing some kind of shoes that are out of style, and he�s not, you know, he�s kind of a

But every week, he stands up and preaches from the text, verse by verse, just showing people the riches of the

Word and the riches of Christ. I think October�s pastoral appeasement month, I mean, pastoral appreciation month.

What would you have these people say to their pastors who, they�re just faithful, simple,

Christ -centered, how could they encourage their pastors this month? Well, there�s two things that I would say.

One is that I would just encourage people like that to be with their pastor whenever he�s teaching and to support him, first of all, by their presence.

And also, secondly, just during the week, send him a note, send him a text, give him a quick call, and just let him know that you appreciate what he�s doing and you see the value of it, even if the world doesn�t.

I had someone in my congregation not too long ago that sent me a very meaningful email that said, �Listen, we listen to different speakers on Christian radio and we value what they do, but we want you to know that we have a special affection that only you have in our heart because you�re our pastor and you�re the one that sets the spiritual tone for our family.

We love you and appreciate you.� Well, that, you know, a pastor can go along, that fills a pastor�s gas tank and he can drive on that for a long time when he gets that kind of love from people that are under his ministry.

So the big thing is to verbalize that and to affirm him and give him a sense that his ministry is actually changing your life and you�re growing in Christ because of what he does.

That man is laboring for your sake. He�s laboring for the Lord, but he�s laboring because he loves the sheep.

And he just, he lives to see the sheep of God flourish. And when he gets a sense from you that says, �I�m flourishing.

Your ministry is helping me.� That�s his real paycheck in life. Amen. We�re talking to Don Green today,

Truth Community Fellowship. If you�d like to listen to some of his sermons, and I suggest that you do, he�s preaching through Ephesians in the morning,

Tuesday night, an overview of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. Truthcommunitychurch .org.

Truthcommunitychurch .org. Don, I know you�ve been doing some study lately regarding chapter and verse.

Where do we get the chapter and verse breaks in the New Testament? And you said you had some interesting study thoughts there, and I think we used the word �geeky.�

And I don�t know if that was the topic, you or me, the show or Cincinnati. What are you studying lately?

Well, I was applying the term �geek� to me, because this is kind of obscure.

But, you know, Mike, one of the things that your audience, that you and I share together, is that we believe in the inerrancy of God�s Word.

And we�re confident that it is inerrant, without mistakes in the original manuscripts.

And so we have a very high view of God�s Word, and that�s what drives our ministry, and it subordinates man to the

Word of God. But one of the things that sometimes we don�t even think about when we open our

Bibles, is how did we get it in this present form? When you and I open our English Bible, we see chapter and verse divisions, and we tend to just assume that it�s always been like that.

But that�s not the case, and it can, you know, and sometimes those things can affect the way that you understand the text.

Well, how did you focus in on this? I mean, for me,

Don, I�d say to myself, okay, Galatians, walking by the Spirit, and all of a sudden

I see that it�s love and joy and peace and patience and kindness. And then there�s a chapter break a few verses later, but when

I read Galatians 6, I say to myself, wow, this is amazing. Some of the attitude fruits of the

Spirit are in chapter 5, but an action of the spirit indwelled person who�s walking by the

Spirit is bearing one another�s burdens. Did you see a passage like that and think,

I need to do a little research on how they got chapter and verse designations? Yeah, that�s exactly what happened,

Mike. It was in my study of Ephesians 1, in the last half of Ephesians verses 15 through 23,

Paul begins praying for his readers, and he�s praying that they would understand that the power of God that raised

Jesus Christ is the same power that is at work in their Christian lives now, so that they would have a sense of confidence and a sense of security as they�re going through their

Christian life. Well, then you come to the end of that in verse 23, and then you see chapter 2, and you go into this discussion about how man is dead in sin and dominated by the devil and doomed to suffer the wrath of God, and the tendency might be to think that Paul has changed his subject because you look at your

English Bible and you see a chapter break there. We tend to think, just kind of naturally, that that�s introducing a new and perhaps unrelated unit of thought.

But actually, what�s happening there, you can see it even in English with the word �and� in chapter 2, verse 1, that it�s carrying over the thought from chapter 1, verse 23.

And so what Paul is saying there, despite the chapter break, it�s a continuation of his thought. He�s saying this power raised

Christ from the dead, chapter 1, and what you need to also know is it�s what raised you from the dead spiritually.

You were in a lost condition of incalculable magnitude, dead in sin, dominated by Satan and doomed to suffer the wrath of God.

And even in that condition, God raised you to new spiritual life, chapter 2, verses 4 and 5.

God, being rich in mercy, made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved.

And so rather than making an unrelated point about the depravity of man, it does teach the depravity of man, but his bigger point is that we would appreciate the grace and the power of God that raised us from the dead.

And I wanted to bring out the fact that the chapter break doesn�t change the flow of thought.

We need to see that Paul�s making an overarching point there that�s very important for our understanding of the

Christian life. Don, I�ve often thought to myself, too bad I can�t get a text, a

New Testament copy in English without any chapter breaks, without any verses, and just read through the whole thing.

And maybe you know of a resource like that. The closest I can find is The Message, but I never recommend it. Well, you know, you�re echoing what

A .T. Robertson, the Greek grammarian from the last century, said. He said the first step in interpretation is to ignore the modern chapters and verses so that you actually read it in context rather than as isolated units of thought.

I�m not aware of anything like that, and chapters and verses are here to stay, unfortunately.

But they�re good to help us locate where we�re at in the text, but they are not an aid in interpretation. Yeah, how would we use our

ESV smartphone app if we didn�t have verses? You�d have a mess on your hands, wouldn�t you?

Don, tell us what you found from your research. Who was the person who first started putting in chapter divisions and or verse divisions, and does it have anything to do with a man riding a horse, and sometimes he would slip on a horse and then we�d get an extra chapter division, as S.

Lewis Johnson likes to joke around? Yeah, well, you�re referring to Stephen Langton, who was a lecturer at the

University of Paris. And he�s the one who�s usually credited with introducing chapter divisions into the

Bible. And he did it on a journey from when he was in France, riding from Paris to Lyon.

Some people have said that he was riding a horse when he did it, and the horse would make a bump and his pencil would make a mark in the wrong place in the text, but he kept it anyway.

Not everyone believes that, but sometimes the chapter divisions are so illogical that there�s no better explanation for why it happened that way.

Well, this is the first tour de France, I guess, right? See? Yeah, that could be. Riding on the horses instead of the bicycles.

What happens with churches, Don, in your opinion, that will have a special series, and of course there�s nothing wrong with a special series, but that�s typical for a church that they only give a special series, so they�ll pick a neat topic and for six weeks they�ll kind of jump around and look for a verse here or there, maybe pick a translation that they like better, and they�re just giving these little series.

They�ve got the ad campaign behind it, it�s man -centered, seeker -oriented. What�s the problem with that, and why should they abandon it and just go to simple verse -by -verse sequential exposition?

Well, the whole point is that individual verses occur in a larger context, and the biblical writer, you mentioned

Paul writing Galatians, or I�m studying through Ephesians with my congregation, that he had a flow of thought, and those verses occur in a flow of thought, not as isolated units that are meant to be separated from the context in which they occur.

And what happens is, with these topical series, the great risk that is usually fallen into is that men end up bringing their own ideas to the text and imposing them on the text and using the

Bible to support what they�ve already decided they want to say, as opposed to letting the truth come out of the text in its natural flow of context, and therefore as you�re letting the context speak and inform what the verse means, you�re really letting

God speak to us. We humble ourselves before the Word, and we try to study it as best we can, as God gave it to us, rather than cutting it, you know, rather than slicing and dicing it and reconstituting it according to our, whatever we want to say at the particular time.

You know, Mike, I told my congregation last night, we meet on Tuesday evenings to study, and I told them, and we have a group of faithful people that come week after week after week, and I just told them,

I said, �You are enjoying the true benefits of Bible teaching, because the impact of Bible teaching is not found in a flashy conference speaker who gets a big honorarium to come and speaks to an arena full of people.�

That�s fine as far as it goes, but the real impact of Bible teaching comes from that accumulated impact week after week, verse by verse, and you have your mind shaped continually over time by the steady influence of God�s Word in your life.

And sometimes, you alluded to the pastor with outdated shoes, sometimes it�s not very flashy, and it�s not something that would sell books or fill arenas because of the interest, but what it is, is it�s

God�s Word being communicated through a man that he�s gifted to speak it, and I believe, and I know you do too,

I believe that that�s worth hearing and that�s worth giving our time to, whether we�re doing it with a group of 20 or with, you know, 2 ,000.

If we�re hearing from God�s Word, that�s what really matters, and the context is the key to that, not slicing and dicing it with individual verses that were never meant to go together.

Wise words from Pastor Don Green. Don, do you think it�s true that a person sitting underneath exposition week after week after week should regularly preach to themselves something like this, �Well,

I heard a message tonight that was telling me the truths about Scripture. I don�t really feel changed.

I don�t have a to -do list of things to do right away, but I will trust the

Lord that He�s changing me and maturing me and conforming me into Christ�s image, little by little, step by step, week in and week out, and though I don�t have something to do today,

I know something�s being done to me through faithful exposition as the

Spirit of God applies that Word.� Yeah, absolutely. You know, that�s one of my favorite phrases to use is that the person in the pew has to preach to themselves and to bring to bear from their own thinking and their own understanding from what they�ve been taught, they�ve got to apply that to their individual lives and to remind themselves of that.

I immediately thought of Romans 12, 1 and 2 with what you were describing, that be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you might prove what a reasonable service of worship is, and God�s work in our hearts through the

Word is often hidden. It�s not something that we see manifested, but that is what the tool that the

Spirit uses to change us, and He�s changing us sometimes when it�s even imperceptible to our understanding, but we know that God�s Word is what

He uses to sanctify His people. Jesus said, �Sanctify them in the truth. Thy Word is truth.�

And if we�re under the teaching of God�s Word and receiving it with willing hearts, we can be confident that God is doing a work in us, even if we don�t always see it.

I really like the way you put that. Well, Don, for me, of course, I want to tell folks at times, here�s a few things that in light of God�s grace and who you are with union with Christ, Spirit of God dwelling within you, here are some imperatives that flow from the text, and you must and you ought to.

Of course I do that because there are all kinds of imperatives in the text. But sometimes, let�s say we�re in Genesis, our first kings are preaching through Jonah now, there�s not a lot of exhortations to the church, but the

Word of God is changing me. It�s affecting the way I think. It�s affecting the way I deal with temptation.

There�s just something in me that wants to do something when I have to squelch that at times and know that it�s something done in me as the

Word of God is preached and I hear it. Yeah, that�s right. If I had a group of pastors around me,

I�d want to echo what you�re saying there. We kind of have to resist the temptation because in the spiritual environment we live in, where so much of the church is man -centered and, �What can

I get out of the church today ?� It�s easy for us, and I�m speaking to myself as I say this, we have to guard ourselves against drifting into that mindset and saying, �Okay, here�s what it means for you today.�

Yeah, we want it to be relevant, but I think God�s Word is relevant by definition. And we don�t need as preachers to add a lot of our thoughts to it to make it so that God uses that in the lives of our people.

It�s a risk that we have to avoid in our fallen tendency sometimes to want to please men and get their approval from it.

Let�s just be faithful to the text and trust God to do what He�s going to do. Don, I know you agree with me on this one.

How amazing is it that we have the Word of God that is fixed, it is a gracious, specific revelation from God, and it is trans -chronological, trans -cultural.

God doesn�t change, and He knows who we are in terms of fallen man needing redemption.

And you can preach this Word 2 ,000 years ago if the Lord tarries in 2 ,000 years.

You can preach it in India, you can preach it in Cincinnati and anyplace else, and it is still relevant and life -changing.

It�s an amazing thing. The Bible, and I�m with S. Lewis Johnson, we just ought to read our Bibles more.

That�s the problem with the Church today, he used to say, that we just won�t read our Bibles. Yeah, well, anybody that�s quoting

S. Lewis Johnson is always going to be a friend of mine. I appreciate his great ministry there at Believer�s Chapel in Dallas, and that�s what he did.

You listen to his messages or read his transcripts, and the depth and the sincerity and the clarity with which he brought

God�s Word to that congregation was really wonderful. It�s just an echo of the greater truths that point to God�s Word that you were saying.

Man has not changed over the past 3 ,000 years or 10 ,000 years, 5 ,000, whatever number you want to put on it.

Man has fallen into sin, he�s driven by irrational desires that are embedded in his nature that cause him to rebel against God.

He needs a Savior, he needs a new nature, he needs to be born again, he needs to be forgiven.

And that is true, as you said, whether you�re in Europe or South America or Boston or Cincinnati, and God�s Word is the only thing that can accomplish the one thing that really matters to man.

By the time we button up our lives and we exit this world, we�re going to be left with facing our

Maker. And the only thing that we have to offer people as pastors and as Christians is the message of salvation, that there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved, the name of Jesus Christ.

And people must come to Christ in repentant faith in order to be saved from their sins.

And that is only found in God�s Word, and that�s why we preach it. We want to see sinners saved, we want to see the saints sanctified, and what a privilege it is that you and I have that we�re able to do that week after week with people that want to hear

God�s Word. We�ve been talking to Don Green today on No Compromise Radio. Don, I don�t know if you�re geeky in person or not, but in the last 24 minutes, if this is geeky,

I like geeky. Well, I put on my best face for you,

Mike. Thank you. You can go to truthcommunitychurch .org if you�d like to listen to some of his sermons.

I�d encourage you to go to Ephesians. I mean, I already have my appetite wet for understanding the link between 1 and 2 and want to study it.

Don, thank you for being a guest on No Compromise Radio. We hope to have you again soon, and I�m thankful you�re preaching the

Word there in Cincinnati. Well, Mike, same to you. We thank you. Enjoy that trip to Israel, and thank you for your faithfulness in upholding the authority and integrity of God�s Word on No Compromise Radio.

It�s a privilege to be your friend even across the miles. 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.