Top Ten Books that Changed Pastor Mike's Life (Part 2)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, "'But we did not yield in subjection to them "'for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel "'would remain with you.'".

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Reading, Psychology, and the Sufficiency of Scripture

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth. I have, again today, I have five total, so I'm gonna do one of these a day for quite some time. Five days, matter of fact. I have a free book to give out, Be Perfect for Gifts.

Buy one for your pastor as well, one for yourself. It's on Thomas Nelson, a publisher. Glorifying God, a year-long collection of classic devotional writings by Thomas Watson, great English Puritan, probably my favorite Puritan, easiest one to read.

If you're gonna dabble into Puritan writings, this is the best one to get. It says on the book that it looks older, kind of a cool burgundy. It looks like a classic old book. It says, A Man Who Inspired Charles Spurgeon and a Nation, compiled and adapted by Patti Hummel.

And Patti and I are friends, and I would love to get this in your hand free if you write me at info at nocompromiseradio .com and tell me that you're listening, either through WVNE or Facebook or iTunes or the website, and we'll get you a copy of that book, Glorifying God by Thomas Watson on Thomas Nelson.

Also, if you'd like to get my new book, that is on the website, people have asked about it, and this is my second book. You can pull up the other one on Amazon. This is called The Sovereignty and Supremacy of King Jesus, Bowing to the Gracious Despot.

That is to say, if you don't understand God as a king, you don't understand God fully to the extent that scripture reveals him. Additionally, if you think of a king as, well, we get rid of our kings every eight years, we vote them in, vote them out.

Well, that's not a, you know, a president's not a king. Even going to England, they don't really understand kings these days either, because for the new people, there's a constitutional monarchy there, not a true king with absolute power, with absolute authority, who is absolutely sovereign.

And so if you'd like to get this book, you can go to our website. It's a lot cheaper than the Amazon site, or you can do whatever you want. And we would love to, I don't know what we'd love to do. Maybe I should give one of these books out.

I think I tried to give one out on Todd Friel's Wretched Radio Show that I have been hosting a little bit lately, but I don't think anybody emailed me. So let's see what happens. I hosted Todd's show a couple Fridays in a row and was thankful for that, the ministry there.

And like I said before, I think we could call our joint ministry Wretched Compromise. I think that'd be better than No Radio. So welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry, always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

And we are very thankful to be on the station, WVNE in Worcester. I think we're still on Boston Praise Radio as well, but that would, I'm not sure about that. So today, today is a continuation of the series of the 10 books that most influenced me as a newer Christian, the top 10 books.

Now, last time we looked at The Attributes of God by Arthur Pink. And today we're going to look at the second book, not necessarily in order. I just picked this up off the stack here of the 10 books. And this book is very influential in my life and everyone listening needs to read it.

But let's talk about reading a little bit in general, first of all. When people say, oh, well, I'm a visual learner. I learn visually. Well, there's probably something to be said for that. And I do not think psychology can help you become more like Christ.

Psychology can't help you say with good motives, no to sin and yes to Christ Jesus. Psychology is not needed by the Christian to change behavior for sanctification because everything we need in the scripture pertaining to life and godliness, we have 2 Peter 1, verse 3.

And so God did not forget something when he put the Bible together. And when he compiled it, he knew exactly what he was doing. And I believe in the sufficiency of scripture. So if you believe in the sufficiency of scripture, you don't believe that psychology can help Christians say no to sin and yes to righteousness.

Now, psychology can analyze behavior. Psychology can probably help modify the behavior of unbelievers. But when it comes to true sanctification, the role of psychology and sanctification is nil, nada, nothing, zed, zero.

And so if you say, well, but it is good for this reason or for that reason, then you are denying the sufficiency of scripture. We have a scripture that's inspired by God, breathed out, and it's profitable for all kinds of things.

It tells us what's right, what's wrong. It picks us up and points us in the right direction. That's correction. And then it helps us to be trained for all kinds of things in righteousness. So why? So that preachers, and then by implication, other people are adequate, equipped for every good work.

And so what's the word for adequate? When you think of equipped for every good work, God has thoroughly rigged out the ship of scripture before it set sails across the Atlantic. And he didn't forget oranges, so you're going to get scurvy later.

He didn't forget an extra mast, so when yours breaks, everything he wants to be in there, everything every church will ever need. If Jesus doesn't return for a 1 million years and we are living on Mars, we will have the sufficient scriptures.

And the opposite of sufficiency in scripture is deficiency. Deficiency. So if you don't think scriptures are sufficient, then they are deficient. And so on No Compromise Radio today, I don't think psychology can help in any way, shape or form.

So when it comes back to the topic at hand, I'm a visual learner. People can say, you know what? We observe people learn visually and they seem to have more of a knack of it. But here's what I want to tell you on No Compromise Radio that ties into teaching, that ties into reading, that ties in for you to read, of course, the scripture, but I want you to read other books that teach you about the scripture.

So when people say, I'm a visual learner, that's kind of, I don't want to say it's a pet peeve of mine, but it's just sad because people are so influenced by people that they shouldn't be influenced by.

When people say, I'm a visual learner, I say, well, God isn't a visual teacher. Now, I have to kind of amend that just for a second. God is a visual teacher when it comes to natural revelation. Natural revelation, I'm looking outside today and it's a rainy New England day.

What's new? And it is yellow outside. At least the trees are green, yellow, orange, red. It's a autumn day. It's a beautiful day in terms of the tree color. Death is beautiful. The dying leaves are beautiful.

And the sky is gray. The sky is depressing. The sky is sad. I guess that when it's raining outside, that means God's crying, as one person would say. John Eldredge would probably say that, allegedly. Oh, it's so funny.

Eldredge said sometimes he sees hearts and then he realizes that that's a sign from Jesus, that Jesus really, he loves him in his new book, Beautiful Outlaw, that I don't recommend. And he actually said in the book that he saw a heart in the shape of a cow pie.

A cow pie shaped like a heart and that was a sign that God loved him. It's kind of a little playful thing of Jesus. And so we had a barbecue. We had a church-wide pig roast. We had two church, two pigs, two churches, two pigs, and we roasted them at our new property.

And we were celebrating the Lord's faithfulness because we owe nothing on our old property and we just paid off the mortgage for the land and the building, the old one, and we had a big pig roast to celebrate.

And we had some baked beans. And the baked beans had some bacon and some brown sauce or whatever. And one of the beans, it actually was probably deformed. And so instead of being a single bean, it was a double bean, but came into one and it was exactly shaped like a heart.

I kid you not, Cindy Ferrer took a picture of it and it's shaped like a heart. And so see, God even showed us his love for us in the heart, in the bean. And Jesus is just so special. He's always reminding us about how he loves us.

General Revelation and Special Revelation

Well, back to general revelation. God does speak visually. That is to say, his creation, Psalm 19, reveals just how great he is. It talks, Romans 1, about power and wisdom and how wise God is and powerful he is.

And so I'm not against saying God is a visual teacher, but he's not only a visual teacher. Let me just read Psalm 19 just for a second to help us. Psalm of David, the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours forth, day to day pours out speech and night to night reveals knowledge. There's no speech nor are there words whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the ends of the world.

In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom, leaving his chamber and like a strong man runs to its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of them.

And there is nothing hidden from its heat. Sometimes it's hard to read ESV after I've been reading NAS for 20 years, but that's my problem, isn't it? So God does visually reveal himself in natural revelation.

The problem is after man's sin, after Adam's fall, after the corruption of mankind, we cannot interpret natural revelation the way we ought to and we need something more specialized. We need special revelation.

We need a specific word from God and that is called scripture. So from Genesis to Revelation, we have a special revelation and the rest of Psalm 19 talks about this instruction from God, the law of God, how God reveals himself that way.

And the way he does that is not visually. I guess it's visual if you look to a book and see words on a page or a scroll or a skin of an animal. But God's way of teaching today, the main way of teaching today, the primary way of teaching today is not visually.

God is not a visual teacher when it comes to special revelation. And so the sooner you get that through your noggin, the better because you're just going to make excuses for yourself the whole time by saying, you know what?

I just am not a good reader. I come across people all the time and the first time they've ever really read a book with understanding, with a desire to understand, the first time they've ever really dived into a book has been after they've been saved by God and they're trying to read the Bible.

And practice makes perfect is an old slogan and the more you practice, the better you get. And the more you read, the better you read. The more you read, the faster you read. The more you read, the more you retain what you read.

And so I want you to read because if you say you're a visual learner, then I'm telling you that you're trying to buck God's system and God has given you information about him in a book. So you better figure out how to read a book.

That's why it's important for us to educate kids on how to read. I tell my kids, you go to school for lots of reasons. One reason is so you can learn how to read so then you can read the Bible, the end and the means.

And so here on No Compromise Radio Ministry, I want you to be a reader because primarily God is not a visual teacher and he doesn't want you primarily to be a visual learner. Of course, people learn visually.

They see their dad, how to change the oil. You do it, watch and listen and an auditory learner and all that. But here we use our eyes to look and to read. And frankly, I'm very glad to have scriptures because we can now have scriptures in our hands and we can stop, re-read, back up, ponder.

It's just not a steady flow of information like the TV or even in a radio. I guess radios you could now with iTunes and stop and back up, but we have the scriptures and God teaches in this non-visual way.

And so when you look at Psalm 19, the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.

The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. So in No Compromise Radio Ministry today, we're going through the top 10 books that rocked my world that I want you to read.

And so just if you read one a month, you'll be set. You'll be reading a lot more books than the average person. So the book today I wanna recommend, top 10 book. The second one that I wanna recommend is Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God.

Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, written by J .I. Packer. Now Packer's done some things recently and even in their late middle 90s, 93, 94, whenever ECT was, Evangelicals and Catholics together.

With his Anglicanism, he said some things. You go back when Martin Lloyd-Jones was alive and Jones had to say to J .I. Packer, we're gonna have to split here for these theological reasons and I would side with Lloyd-Jones.

There are certain things about Packer that you have to be careful of. I remember MacArthur one time said the old Packer said, meaning he was stronger back in those days, certainly knowing God, great book as well.

But here the Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God by J .I. Packer, and I think you'll find this book great. I think you'll like it. I think you'll say to yourself, you know what? Nothing to be concerned about here.

IVP book, InterVarsity Press, and it says in the back, if God is in control of everything, does that mean that the Christian can sit back and not bother to evangelize? Or does active evangelism imply that God is not really sovereign at all?

Dr. J .I. Packer, Professor in Historical and Systematic Theology at Regent College shows in this book how false both these attitudes are. In a careful, incisive, penetrating study of the biblical evidence, he shows how a right understanding of God's sovereignty is not so much a barrier to evangelism as an incentive and powerful support for it.

Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility in Evangelism

So, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. It doesn't take a thinking Christian very much a thought to begin to study the Bible and say this. Hmm, God's sovereign. God's in control. God's the king. But then it also doesn't take very long for them to say, so if God saves who he wants to save, why should I pray?

If God saves who he chooses to save, then why should I evangelize? How can both of these truths be true simultaneously? And of course, we know the longer we mature, it's okay to hold two truths. These aren't irrational truths.

These aren't illogical truths. We just can't understand them because we're finite, eh? B, we're sinful, and so sinful finite creatures have a hard time understanding infinite truth by an infinite God.

That's just par for the course. And so if God's word clearly teaches both, then we embrace both. And that's a sign of a mature Christian, learning to embrace both truths at the same time. That both Paul wrote Romans and the Holy Spirit wrote Romans.

That Jesus is fully man and Jesus is fully God. Embracing two things that we can never get. God is one, yet the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, although the Father's not the Son and the Son's not the Spirit and the Spirit's not the Father.

Three gods, no. One God, three persons, a triune God. That's difficult, but we just accept it because that's exactly what the scriptures teach. And so people say, well, you know, no compromise radio is hyper-Calvinistic.

May I just say that when people say that, it shows their ignorance historically. Historically, the definition of hyper-Calvinism would include many things and you can go to Phil Johnson's website to learn more about that.

But you ought to understand that historically, hyper-Calvinism means one, that those people that you're trying to slam don't believe that there's a love of God for the non-elect. And I believe there is a love of God for a non-elect.

There's a love of creation for the non-elect. They don't have the love of salvation, the love of a savior for the non-elect because they're not saved. Number two for hyper-Calvinism, hyper-Calvinists don't believe in evangelism and we do.

Number three, hyper-Calvinists don't believe in prayer and we do. So just because someone's more Calvinistic than you are, that doesn't make them a hyper-Calvinist. Hyper-Calvinist is a historical term, meaning no love of God for the non-elect, among other things, no prayer, no evangelism.

And so this book helps you figure out how do I hold both truths to be true at the same time? There's a second way in which you acknowledge that God is sovereign in salvation from Packer, page 15. You pray for the conversion of others.

In what terms now do you intercede for them? Do you limit yourself to asking that God will bring them to a point where they can save themselves independently of Him? I do not think so. I think that what you do is to pray in categorical terms that God will, quite simply and decisively, save them, that He will open the eyes of their understanding, soften their hard hearts, renew their natures, and move their wills to receive the Savior.

You ask God to work in them everything necessary for their salvation. You would not dream of making it a point in your prayer that you are not asking God actually to bring them to faith because you recognize that that is something He cannot do.

Nothing of the sort. When you pray for unconverted people, you do so on the assumption that it is God's power to bring them to faith. It's in God's power to bring them to faith. You entreat Him to do that very thing, and your confidence in asking rests upon the certainty that He is able to do what you ask, and so indeed He is.

This conviction, which animates your intercessions, is God's own truth written on your heart by the Holy Spirit. In prayer, then, and the Christian is at his sanest and wisest when he prays, you know that it is God who saves men.

You know that what makes men turn to God is God's own gracious work of drawing them to Himself, and the content of your prayers is determined by this knowledge, J .I. Packer. So how wonderful is that?

Can you imagine? Packer says you're sanest, you're wisest, you're thinking most clearly when you're praying, and you're praying God save people. You don't say God manipulate their free will so they do whatever they're supposed to do, but not coerced by you, not made by you to do something.

Excellent advice by J .I. Packer. Even Arminians, when they pray, they pray Calvinistically, God save people. Here's what Packer said on page 24. We ought not in any case to be surprised when we find mysteries of this sort in God's word.

Sovereignty of God, evangelism. What does it say? What does the text say? For the Creator is incomprehensible to His creatures. A God whom we could understand exhaustively and whose revelation of Himself confronted us with no mysteries whatsoever would be a God in man's image, and therefore an imaginary God.

Not the God of the Bible at all. For what the God of the Bible says is this. My thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than yours.

Isaiah 55, eight. Here's what J .I. Packer said in his book Evangelism, the Sovereignty of God on page 29. Only by letting our knowledge of God's sovereignty control the way in which we plan and pray and work in His service can we avoid becoming guilty of this fault.

For where we are not consciously relying on God, there we shall inevitably be found relying on ourselves. And the spirit of self-reliance is a blight on evangelism. Such, however, is the inevitable consequence of forgetting God's sovereignty in the conversion of souls.

Why do I have this beeping? Why am I having this beeping here on No Compromise? I think I got a computer here unplugged and now it's now plugged in and I'm hoping I'm not gonna get this beeping anymore to interrupt me.

Holding Sovereignty and Responsibility Together

All right, here's what we have on No Compromise Radio. I'm trying to sell you this book on IVP, Evangelism, the Sovereignty of God. J .I. Packer, one of the top 10 books that helped me so I could once and for all put to bed this issue.

Sovereignty, responsibility. God's in charge. I have a duty to respond with prayer and evangelism and I don't have to freak out about it. You know, letting these things lie side by side as two Bible truths is a sign of maturing.

You don't have to force mental closure to quote my old professor, George Zemeck. In what follows, we shall try to take both doctrines perfectly seriously as the Bible does and to view them in a positive relationship.

We shall not oppose them to each other for the Bible does not oppose them to each other. Nor shall we qualify or modify or water down either of them in terms of the other for this is not what the Bible does either.

What the Bible does is to assert both truths side by side in the strongest and most unambiguous terms as two ultimate facts. This therefore is a position that we take in our own thinking. Spurgeon was once asked if he would reconcile these two truths to each other.

I wouldn't try, he replied. I never reconcile friends. Friends? Yes, friends. This is the point we have to grasp. In the Bible, divine sovereignty and human responsibility are not enemies. They are not uneasy neighbors.

They are not in an endless state of cold war with each other. They are friends and they work together. I hope that what I am to say now about evangelism will help that make be clear. So then he goes on and he has great things to say.

The Bible never says that sinners miss heaven because they're not elect, but because they neglect the great salvation and because they will not repent and believe. The last judgment will abundantly prove that it is not the want of God's election so much as laziness, the love of sin, unbelief and unwillingness to come to Christ which ruins the souls that are lost.

So J .I. Packer has many good words and he was gonna be helpful. Can you or I, by our earnest talking, break the power of Satan over man's life? No. Can you or I give life to the spiritually dead? No.

Can we hope to convince sinners of the truth of the gospel by explanation? No. No, we can't do that at all. So No Compromise Radio today, we're promoting Evangelism, the Sovereignty of God by J .I. Packer, one of the top 10 books I've ever read.

You need to get on Amazon and get that book. Always biblical, always provocative.

God bless you. 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 six. 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.