Sifted Silver (Part 2)

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

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the 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, my name is

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Mike Abendroth. Good to have you listening, tuning in. Remember you have to tune in the dial, and even the old presets in the old cars for the

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AM and FM. I think my first car was AM only, it was a 1967 Nova II, didn't have a very big engine so it wasn't very fast.

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Dad probably planned that on purpose. But anyway, you turn it to a radio station and you have to pull out the preset and push it back in.

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And sometimes, if you were switching around channels, it didn't quite zoom in, tune in perfectly, and you have to do the fine -tuning adjustment.

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Remember that? I do remember that. I remember listening to Lyle Bremser, who was the

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University of Nebraska football team's announcer, and he had all kinds of slogans, man, woman, and child.

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He's gone in terms of going to score a touchdown. And Johnny the Jet Rogers, and I remember listening to,

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I think maybe K -O -I -L, COIL? I don't know what the call number was, 1110 or something on the dial,

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I don't know. The radio show that I used to do in Lincoln, Nebraska, a little public service deal, kind of an off -campus thing, but like a campus show, was

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KZUM. I think they still probably have it. And it was in somebody's house, and the house was turned into a studio.

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And talk about liberal, nutty, crunchy, crazy, and my show was called Aural, A -U -R -A -L

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Delights. And I did it with a guy named Bill Stoughton. I don't know what happened to Bill Stoughton.

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He was into like Depeche Mode, and I was into Joy Division. So it didn't really,

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I think I wanted to do it with him just because I didn't want it to go by myself to the nutty, crunchy

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KZUM. I wanted to play punk rock, and so therefore,

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I did. You can always write me, mike at nocompromiseradio .com, if you want some sexual fidelity books.

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I don't know. I think I have a few hundred left, and then they're going to be gone. Speaking of books,

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I'm almost finished with S. Lewis Johnson's, my adaptation of Johnson's work on Colossians, and so that'll be

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Discovering Colossians. And I'm working on a book on law gospel, and one on hell.

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And so we'll see. I used to race to get these things done, and I just think it's a good discipline.

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I'm not a very good writer. I hope I preach better than I write, but it's a good discipline. Put your thoughts down on paper.

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Hopefully it's helping the local church here, Bethlehem Bible Church. If you want to hear what's going on here at the church, bbcchurch .org,

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bbcchurch .org. Well last show, yesterday, we had some fun, at least

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I did have some fun. Seemed like it was 10 minutes ago. I have a book called Sifted Silver, compiled by John Blanchard.

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John is now in heaven. He died, I think, this year. And it's a bunch of quotations.

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Speaking of died, what was the lady's name who died who was on the Weigh Down Diet? And she was the non -Trinitarian, at least back when the book came out.

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And how to, you know, another one of these diet books using God's word. And it didn't matter that she was a non -Trinitarian.

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She would just help you with weight.

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I mean, I mean, that's a pretty big deal. If you could lose weight, I mean, come on, essence, subsistence, civilianism, partialism, subordinationism, come on.

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Pastor Steve sent me a quote today, matter of fact, speaking of the Trinity. And I don't think the book is out any longer.

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I think it's pulled from the publisher because of the errors.

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But there's all kinds of Trinity talk these days. And I've been reading quite a few books on the Trinity. Maybe the one you should get is that small little one, green.

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I think it's called The Trinity by Scott Swain, S -W -A -I -N.

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Or you could read Simply Trinity by Matthew Barrett. Those would be good books to read.

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But Bruce Ware, from all accounts, people say he's a nice man, a godly man, but it has nothing to do with that, does it?

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It has to do with what people say. And of course, back in the day, I was influenced by Ware a lot and Wayne Grudem and Feinberg, not

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Charles, but the son, John, Millard Erickson. And I think to a man they all used to deny eternal generation of the son,

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I think maybe Ware, or at least Grudem, have now accepted that even though I don't think the way they accepted it is my favorite, but that's another point.

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Here Bruce Ware, father, son, Holy Spirit. I'm going to read you a quote before we get into the other quotations from Blanchard.

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You tell me if you like this or not. You tell me if it's biblical or not. You discern this. And the three members of the

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Godhead worked together in harmony. Not in unison, but in harmony.

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Uh -oh. Unison expresses a form of unity, yet it has no texture in richness.

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Harmony, however, communicates the idea of unified expression. Here we go.

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But only through differing yet complementary parts. You have different voices in different pitches.

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One carries the melody, but just one. I sounded like a sea stag there.

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It's crazy. Um, ought to be very careful when you think about the

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Trinity. There's a reason why we have an apostolic, uh, the apostolic, uh,

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Apostles' Creed, Nicene Constantinople Creed. There's a reason why these were, were forged in the midst of standing up for orthodoxy against heterodoxy, like Arius and others.

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You want to be very careful. I mean, especially this kind of language, harmony, they're like, this is new stuff.

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This is, you know, let's start with the three and talk about social relationships and how do we get along and harmony.

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To me, that's what, how my mind reads this. It's no different than I think than Tim Keller talks about the

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Trinity is a divine dance. Let's see. Let's see.

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Athanasius Creed number 14. It's like a divine dance. No! So what does

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Ware go on to say here? Differing yet complementary parts.

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You have different voices in different pitches. One carries the melody, but just one. See this? It's like the father.

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He's going to say the father is the main. The father's the one. Others carry out the strains of harmony to fill out and compliment the melody.

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If you think that only one part matters, you're sorely mistaken. I mean, there's one main, but you need the other secondary players, essentially.

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For again, to achieve the kind of textured and rich unity that harmony accomplishes, all the parts are important.

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Just please don't call me a heretic. You know, we need all the parts. Parts are parts. Why would anybody even use the word parts?

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That's another question, isn't it? Simplicity of God. God is simple.

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No parts. No composition of parts. For again,

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Bruce Ware said, to achieve the kind of textured and rich unity that harmony accomplishes, all the parts are important.

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Parts are parts. Yet each part has to be an expression of the same score, the same composition, expressing the mind of the composer.

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In other words, the father, he's the composer, and these others, they do their parts.

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Parts is parts. If it hasn't been pulled, it should have been, but that's the kind of stuff that we're dealing with these days.

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We ought to be very careful when it comes to thinking about the Trinity, right?

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Maybe it's the most important topic, the triune God. So get the Swain book, or get the

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Simply Trinity by Matthew Barrett. Mike Ebenroth, nocompromiserradio .com,

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John Blanchard. I open up the book randomly. I read a quote. We talk about it. Here we go.

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When we take to ourselves the place that is God's, the whole course of our lives is out of joint.

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A .W. Tozer. I know some don't like Tozer. What's Tozer's book,

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Knowledge of the Holy? Some don't like Tozer in general. Some don't like him because of his kind of mystical stuff, maybe in the pursuit of God.

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Is that the name of it, pursuit of holiness? That sounds more like Sherry Bridges, so maybe the pursuit of God.

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There are better writers. He's not at the top of my list.

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So far, this show is bombing. Here's another one. It would have never, I would never have been saved if I could have helped it,

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Charles Spurgeon. There we go. Finally, after two days, we get a real zinger.

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I would have never been saved if I could have helped it. I mean, I contributed sin. I said no.

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I was depraved. I was a slave to my sin. I was following the course of the world.

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I was a slave to Satan doing his will, 2 Timothy chapter 2, and there's no way

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I would have been saved. God voted yes, Satan voted no, and I cast the dividing as a deciding vote, and it was no.

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But God, right? That's Ephesians chapter 2, verse 4.

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You see the first three verses about our horrible state, children of wrath, even as the rest, but God.

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What if it said, therefore, God, and God crushed out of his due justice and holiness, but it says, but God, because of his great love with which he loved us.

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That's amazing. You're saved because of the love of God. You're not saved because of faith. You're saved because of the love of God. You're saved by grace through faith, but you're not saved because of faith.

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I would never have been saved if I could have helped it. Just think about that for a second and how that drives praise, how that drives thankfulness.

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I was hell -bent on going to hell. Nobody was going to stop me. Oh, I mean, I thought

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I was still going to get to heaven because I wanted to try to be good. I threw God a bow and said, I believe in Jesus. I wasn't a

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Buddhist. I was baptized as a kid. You know, all this other stuff. Baptized as a kid,

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I'm not slamming my Pato Baptist friends. I'm talking about baptismal regeneration. I'm slamming those people who aren't my friends.

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I know I was supposed to do this randomly, but I did look down on the same page and it has William Carey's famous quote,

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I can plod. I can plod. You know, there's a lot of things that we can't do, but we can just move forward and we can just, by the grace of God, walk by faith, adjust, shall live by faith.

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And we can just do our duties now, quiet behind the scenes, live a quiet life and work with our hands and honor

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God. We see God's law as a loving guide to help us and we're motivated by the love of Christ and we just plod.

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I can plod. That's how you write books, by the way. You know, I talked about writing these books. It's just plodding.

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The hardest part about writing a book is just sitting down and typing. Because once you sit down and start typing, you're like, oh,

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I see progress. It's kind of like mowing your lawn in the backyard or the front yard. You go, oh, I see a little progress there and I almost got it done.

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Like today I mowed the lawn. Today's Monday, my day off, and so I mowed the lawn.

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I trimmed around the areas that I didn't get. I put down some grub stuff, some grub poison, insect poison, to kill the grubs.

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And I did something else around the yard. I can't remember, but it was important at the time.

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I can plod. Well, we're here in the studio and I'm going to pick another quotation here randomly.

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God uses men who are weak and feeble enough to lean on him. J. Hudson Taylor. Isn't that so true?

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When we're weak, that's really when we're strong. You think about wisdom, understanding, counsel.

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I was reading in Proverbs this morning, no wisdom, no understanding, no counsel is ever against the

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Lord. And no matter what people end up trying to do to conquer him, he's going to overpower them because he's the omnipotent

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God. And then we as Christians, we are now children of God, adopted sons and daughters.

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And it's not like we're going to get thrown out of the kingdom if we sin, but we may be disciplined when we sin.

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We might sense assurance evaporating when we sin. But we still need to recognize that we're weak.

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We're weak people, and therefore we're going to have to lean on God. That's who God uses.

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I mean, I guess he uses prideful people too, because how could we,

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I mean, has God used you? Are you prideful? So, I want to be kind of careful there, we get into some kind of hyper lordship stuff.

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That's what we need to do a show on, lordship. I'll do one of those when I return back from California.

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I would rather make bricks without straw than to try to live the Sermon on the Mount in my own strength,

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D. Martin Lloyd -Jones. Isn't that interesting?

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That is interesting to me. Hmm. I'd rather make bricks without straw than try to live the

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Sermon on the Mount in my own strength. I mean, we're given commands, we're given law.

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And of course, unbelievers see the law and go, uh -oh, I need a savior, I'm a lawbreaker.

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But Christians, we see the law and we say, well, this reflects God's nature and holiness, and it's a good thing, and therefore we'd like to obey

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God's law, but we're going to need the Spirit of God to do that. This is something we call duplex gratia, and this something is

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Christ for pardon, that is justification, and Christ for power, the ability to live a holy life.

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God sanctifying us because of the work of Christ. And therefore, when it comes to our own obedience, we have to remember that it is the power of Christ in us.

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Christ has given us the Holy Spirit, He dwells within us, and He's the one who enables us to live a righteous life, to say yes to righteousness and no to sin.

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All right, next one. Better be pruned to grow than cut up to burn.

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That's true. And when you think about John chapter 15 and abiding in Christ, I was out there today trimming up some things, and you trim up rose bushes a little bit so then they have all kinds of beautiful flowers and roses and that they would bud better, and that's exactly what happens.

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And so instead of God cutting us up, since we're not His enemies anymore, He prunes us so that we might be fruitful.

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I mean, I'll just give you my own illustration, and I've talked about this many times, and I think

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I'd still like to be less of a scolding preacher, although I don't think I scold anymore.

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I still would like my demeanor to be one of grace, more than even now that I do, but I recognize that I used to scold people, used to be a legal preacher, kind of had that legal temper, not understanding lots of theological things, and also not having, have really studied the book of Hebrews and then simultaneously somebody calls you as a doctor from Boston and then they tell you you have cancer, and therefore you go, oh, the

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Lord pruning. The Lord pruning. Mike Hibbenroth, No Compromise Radio.

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Random quotes. I was going to do three shows on this, but now I'm just going to do two. Zeal without doctrine is like a sword in the hand of a lunatic,

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John Calvin. I don't know. Maybe we're rescuing the show, or redeeming No Compromise Radio's bad

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Playhouse TV shows. Zeal without doctrine is like a sword in the hand of a lunatic.

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Oh, before I talk about that verse, episode four, Implications of Law Gospel, now on AGTV, American Gospel TV.

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There are five total episodes. Brennan Kimber just got done editing the fourth one, and I watched it, double -checked, and he does excellent work.

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Law Gospel, four shows so far, Introduction, Law, Gospel, and now Fourthly, Implications.

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Fifthly, some kind of, you know, you want to be careful and watch out when you conjoin the two, mingle the two, put the two together, because law isn't gospel and gospel isn't law.

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And zeal without doctrine is like a sword in the hand of a lunatic, because you're just swinging randomly, and at everybody, and you're fired up, you just don't know why you're fired up.

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And of course, it's the exact opposite of the Lord Jesus when He goes in the temple. Zeal for my

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Father's house has consumed me. I think He knew plenty of doctrine. You can bet the bank on that, that the

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Lord Jesus had a reason to do things, and they were for the holiness of God and for His Father's glory.

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I don't know why Blanchard has a quote here by Harry Emerson Fosdick.

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That's not good. Here's one, Luther, so you're expecting pungent.

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You're expecting Twitter. I have such hatred of divorce that I prefer bigamy to divorce.

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Wow. My mom and dad divorced.

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They did end up getting remarried when I was conceived. I don't know how great their marriage was, but I'm thankful that they got married and stayed together until my father died.

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Divorce is certainly awful. Of course, God forgives all kinds of sins and can make good things happen out of bad situations, but it is bad.

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Right? There's a lot of talk about homosexual marriage and transgender and all that other stuff, and yet lurking behind us is a man who's been born a man and a woman who's been born a woman and who have said till death do us part, and then for unbiblical reasons, getting divorced.

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Very, very sad. Alexander White, only once did

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God choose a completely sinless preacher. Boom. Only once did

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God choose a completely sinless preacher. That gives me hope, because it's the gospel that's got power.

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I'm not ashamed of the gospel for it's the power of God to salvation to all who believe, to the

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Jews first and then to the Gentiles. And I said to the congregation on Sunday here at Bethlehem Bible Church, that gives me hope that it's not just, it's not me.

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Of course, I don't want to sin and be a hypocrite and I'd like to adorn the gospel,

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Paul talks that way, but I don't live the gospel and I'm going to sin, but the power of the gospel.

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The person that preached the gospel to you and you responded by the Spirit's power, with faith, were they perfect?

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You say, well, it was my mom and my dad, they're the ones that preached to me all those years and I believed. Well, I'm sure they were kind and nice and godly and righteous, but they weren't perfect.

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And so the point is made that we can all evangelize and then preachers can preach and radio shows can radio show host, even though they're sinful.

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God uses us, so all the glory, all the laud, all the honor goes to Him, not to us.

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Mike Ebenroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry. If you want to write, you can.

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Sometimes I've been known to, well, here's a way to get me to call you and I regularly call the listeners if they write me an email.

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If it's such a long email that they send to me and I don't want to just respond back with a couple sentences and I think

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I probably need to talk to them because they don't want to write anything, then I call. So if you send me a long, long, long email, it will cause me to feel guilt that I can't just respond with a few little snippets and then

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I'll say, by the way, what's your number? And then I'll give you a call. So I try to call NoCo listeners once every once in a while.

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And then I usually say when I call them, has Todd Friel ever called you? I don't even know what's happening with Todd Friel.

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Is Todd Friel still a Christian? Is he still on Christian radio? I text

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Todd once in a while and I don't get any texts back. I used to do radio shows for him. By the way, the reason why

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No Compromise Radio is as expansive and is as influential and it is as large as it is, is pretty much thanks to Todd Friel because I would guest host his show,

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Wretched Radio, I don't know, 20, 30 times, something like that, 20 times maybe. Two -hour shows, three segments per hour, six segments total.

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I'd have all my papers out here. It's one thing if I do a show for myself, by myself, but to do it for someone else,

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I don't want to mess up. So anyway, I remember I did one final show and I couldn't get the audio to work and then that was the final show.

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That's the way it goes. All right. No more quotes from Evangelical Press's book,

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Sifted Silver. For the most part, I thought those quotes were pretty good, randomly chosen.

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John Blanchard, Off to Heaven, and I'm thankful that he's especially written that one book and that's called

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Whatever Happened to Hell. My name's Mike Avendroth, this is No Compromise Radio Ministry. I hope you have a good summer and vacation.

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One more live show and I'm going to take several weeks off and we will, Lord willing, see you back live or close to live in August.

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No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Avendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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