Legalism in the Church (Part 4)

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

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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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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.

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This is your host, Pastor Mike Ebendroth. Today is Tuesday, October 20th, and Tuesdays we have

Steve Cooley in the studio. Welcome, Steve. Thank you, Mr. Ebendroth. Well, we're talking about legalism in this series that you've come up with,

The Baker's Dozen for Legalism, and we're going to talk a little bit about Halloween today, and I knew you were going to talk about Halloween and wanted to talk about Halloween because I think today is the first day

I've ever seen you in a Freddy Krueger outfit. Thank you for noticing. I don't know.

Boy, wow. So, you could have dressed up like a little, you know, angel or fairy or some kind of football player or something.

Well, I ordered my Martin Luther Con, you know, costume and they lost it, and this is all the head left, so.

Well, Tuesdays we talk to Pastor Steve and we discuss issues in the local church. Could be counseling issues, could be ecclesiastical issues.

It could be anything that we really want to talk about, and it's good to talk about what the

Bible teaches. At No Compromise Radio, we want to say, we want to be biblical number first, number first.

Yeah, I haven't eaten all day. I have to go have this procedure. We want to be biblical number second.

Always biblical, always improper diction and grammar, always in that order.

Amen. So, we've been talking about legalism and moralism and how people add things to the gospel, and today we want to talk a little bit about Halloween.

It's coming up soon, and Steve, what's your general take on Halloween? Well, you know, I think I've gone through a bit of a journey with regard to Halloween.

I mean, I grew up in an unbelieving household and we certainly celebrated it, and then when my kids came along, you know, we took them out.

I have some very good memories of them going around the neighborhood dressed up as Care Bears. That was pretty fun.

Teletubbies? No, but, you know, then after we got saved, we sort of, there was almost like a backlash.

Oh, we don't want to participate in that and we're not going to do that, and, you know, we're going to just turn off the lights and pretend we're not home, you know, that sort of thing.

And now I think I'm at a point where I can just kind of, I don't, I was telling you earlier,

I don't like the ghoulish aspects of it, and I mean, I hate that, but I can at least enjoy the little kids coming around and I don't want to be the bad guy in the neighborhood kind of thing, so.

Well, I think we have the same kind of thoughts, and this happens for lots of Christians in lots of different areas. For instance, if you have a background in alcohol and drunkenness, you get saved, you become a teetotaler and you abstain, and then you realize, well, the text doesn't demand that of me.

If my conscience does, I'll follow my conscience. Maybe the same thing for rock music. I was a punk rock disc jockey.

I got saved. I just trashed all my albums. Hey, don't get ahead of us. That's next on the list.

Okay, I remember one guy said, well, I can't believe you sold all those albums to other people and make them stumble, these other pagans stumbling.

I thought, no, I sold all those and I bought the Lenski commentary series. Good move. For us, for the

Lutherans in the audience. He does great work with the text, you know, with the Greek texts. Speaking of Halloween, Steve, you said something earlier that I really liked.

When we are so anti -Halloween that we turn the lights off, and by the way, you do whatever you want.

That's basically what we'll talk about today. If you have issues about Halloween and you have a certain conscience issue or biblical issue, then

I want you to follow the Bible first in conscience, second of all, and I want you to treat other

Christians with love if they disagree with you. But I don't want to be known as the neighbor who says he's a

Christian, who says he's a pastor, who says he has a joy -filled life, and for the most part, I really do.

I have a wonderful wife and kids. But I don't want them to think as we slam the door, don't open the door on the little pink

Care Bear outfit girl who's dressed up like some angel or some kind of, I don't know,

Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtle for that, and then slam the door, don't open it, and then that family walks away thinking, we sure want to be like them, don't we?

That mean family that sits in the dark every Halloween that has no joy. Well, it's become even harder now that our dogs are there, and so anytime somebody comes to the door, they just want to bark, so it's pretty hard to do that.

But it really is an opportunity to talk to people, to parents, to little ones and whatnot.

I mean, again, there are some costumes that I would just prefer not to see, but for the most part,

I don't get offended, and my goal is to just try to be the nice guy in the neighborhood. Well, when we first got saved,

Kim and I would hand out candy, and we would hand out tracks. The bad news is we didn't really think about that till the last second.

We had to go down to the local bookstore, and the tracks were very moralistic and very corny.

You know, corn candy. Is that corn candy still? They still sell that? It's candy corn. Candy corn, that's exactly right on No Addiction Tuesday.

We want to make sure we get this right. I'll tell you, the only thing I've had all day is some coffee, and it's just starting to freak me out here a little bit.

But we would hand out tracks, and we would talk to people, and I found out on the internet today there is scripture candy from the makers of fish mints.

By the way, it's trademarked, and it contains wrappers. The paper has some kind of scriptural reference.

My guess, it's probably out of context. And then they also have Steve Evangecandy with this quote on the back, the only candy with color -coded gospels on every wrapper.

Mm. Well, I guess if there are some verses, it would be better than no verses.

But here we want to talk about just legalism in general and moralism in general.

There are lots of things in the Bible where we don't know exactly what God thinks.

He doesn't tell us every little detail, and we want to be careful that when we are around other people who don't do what we do and think the way we think that we don't judge motives.

The Bible says that love believes all things, and the Bible hopes all things. And so if people are slower in their sanctification, then we need to love them.

If people are faster, we need to love them. And I guess as a pastor, I don't want to have to resort to guilt trips and manipulation to try to get people to do what

I do. Well, and consider this. Let's say that for whatever reason, suddenly

Halloween was outlawed. Would that convert one soul? Would that change one person's mind about Christ?

Would that convict one heart of their own sinfulness and their need for a Savior? And the answer is absolutely not.

So it's not a question of Halloween being immoral, a violation of God's law.

First of all, it's not anywhere in the Bible is it prohibited. But secondly, it is not inherently a matter of the heart.

This is not something that is inherently wrong. And for those who have their conscience against Halloween, I just hope you're consistent and your conscience should be against Christmas as well.

And some people don't celebrate either. And for that, I commend them for being at least consistent. And so if you say, well, there's pagan backgrounds and pagan origins to Halloween, well, the same is true for Christmas.

The same is true for lots of different holidays. I read today, Steve, you'll get a kick out of this on the

Jack Chick website, Chick tracks. Yeah, I was just thinking about him when you were talking about bad tracks earlier.

Yes, and so he said that Halloween, or one of his writers, William Schoenenbellen said that the number one satanic holiday of the year is

Halloween, but he doesn't call it a holiday. He calls it a helladay. Brilliant.

He said, when you sup with the devil, use a long spoon. Now, one thing he does say in there that I liked, he said, if you're a

Christian parent, God has given you a precious responsibility in your children.

He said, then remember their ability to resist spiritual wickedness is much less than yours. If you allow your children to participate in Halloween, trick -or -treating, costume parties, you are allowing them to play on their own.

He said, if you allow your children to play on the devil's turf, and Satan will definitely press his home court advantage.

So I agreed with this first sentence, and then the rest, would you please deconstruct that for me? Well, it sounds like Satan is a modern day

John Wooden with the full court press. That's just foolishness. Certainly the world is influenced heavily by Satan, his minions, their thinking.

We don't think that this world is getting better and better. We think it's getting worse and worse. That's what the Bible tells us.

It's not a matter of whether we think it or not. But the very idea that participating in going and getting candy from people is somehow turning them over to Satan is a bridge too far.

Well, I guess it's more like the Ouija board, Steve. I mean, tell me, just like with cigarette smoking, there might be bad motives.

It might be bad stewardship. You might not wanna be hooked on nicotine, et cetera, et cetera. But we just would like to know, where's the

Bible verse that says you can't dress up like a pink bunny and go knock on your neighbor's door or your father's door or your grandfather's door and say, you know,

I'm here to have some candy. If you don't wanna say trick or treat because you see some kind of druidic, pagan background in it, then just knock on the door and get some candy.

I know some churches, Steve, they won't even have the faux alternative night because it somehow reeks of the recognition that we've taken

All Souls Day and turned it into Halloween. Well, and again, you know, I would just ask, if we're not somehow bowing at the altar of Satan, if we're not making it a day of sacrifice and worship of Satan, if it's just a thing for kids to go around and get candy,

I think some of the fears might be overblown. Now, I've said before, earlier, I don't like some of the more grotesque things.

I mean, I've been to homes, you know, on the outside where they have, you know, body parts or what,

I don't, all that stuff just makes me cringe because it really is kind of a celebration of things that ought not to be celebrated.

Death, dismemberment, horrible things are nothing to be, you know, celebrated, nothing to have a party over.

But, you know, like you said, kids dress up as pink bunnies, little princesses coming to the door.

I mean, I just don't get it. Well, I think what we have to do as Christians is this.

If you're a parent and you don't want your kids to trick -or -treat, I don't know if I've ever even let my kids trick -or -treat. We usually go outside and spy on the trick -or -treaters and try to scare them is what we usually do.

We try to make a game of it. Truth be told. Truth be told. If they want to go out this year and they've got the right costumes,

I probably won't even care. But if you're a parent, I would do this if I were you.

You want to always be a teacher. You want to always teach them things and sit down. What a wonderful teaching opportunity, a teaching moment as people call it, and say, let's say you say no to trick -or -treating.

This is why we don't. This is why mom and dad don't prefer to. These are some of the bad things about it.

And so we as a mom and dad aren't going to do it, but we'd go do something else for fun, or we do X, Y, and Z.

And so these are mom and dad's convictions. But don't sit down and try to open up your Bible to Deuteronomy 18 or some passage that talks about mediums and spirits and witches and say, the

Bible tells us that we can't go out and trick -or -treat. If you want to say we want to run far away from the power of darkness, and we're supposed to flee from Satan and all these other things,

I just think you're going to do yourself a disfavor to your kids because they're going to grow up and say, you know, my mom and dad used the

Bible out of context to influence our behavior. Why don't you just say I'm the dad, and dad says no tattoos, no alcohol, no smoking, and no little pink bunny outfits.

And can I tell you something confidentially, as my pastor likes to say, just between us girls, I used to say that to my kids all the time.

Well, why can't we do X, Y, or Z? Because I'm not going to allow that. And guess what?

They respect that. That's better than saying the Bible says that thou shall not do that because they're going to get old enough one day, and they're going to realize you use the word of God like cultists use the word of God for their own ends.

And we don't want to do that. We want to be clear. When the Bible says adultery, fornication, uncleanness, idolatry, greed is sin, then we say we affirm that, that is sin.

But there are lots of issues where we don't have the exact answer. We have to use principles, and that's why we're having this series on Tuesdays.

We don't want to equate biblical directives and imperatives for personal opinions.

And the key is exactly what you're driving at. The main issue is, if you let your kids go out trick -or -treating, if you take them trick -or -treating, if you don't let them trick -or -treating, you ought not to look at somebody who holds the opposite opinion and think that somehow they're less godly than you are.

I mean, you don't want to wind up being the church lady from those old Saturday Night Live skits. Well, who else would go trick -or -treating?

Satan? That's just not the kind of mindset we ought to have as Christians.

That's the pastoral response and the right response. If you have convictions and people in the church have other convictions, then we are to put the welcome mat out for them.

We love them. We don't look down on them. By the way, if you're right in your convictions that you shouldn't celebrate

Halloween, then God alone has given you that correct view. And so you should say, I have received this from God, and so therefore it's not from myself.

I have no pride. I should be humble people. Deuteronomy 18, I just looked that up,

Steve. It says, Deuteronomy 18 .10, there shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who casts spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.

For whoever does these things, verse 12 goes on to say, is detestable to the

Lord. And because of these detestable things, the Lord your God will drive them out before you.

You shall be blameless before the Lord your God. And so the text is saying, you ought not to do any of those things, but I think you could actually, quote unquote, celebrate

Halloween without doing one of those things. That's right. It does remind me, though, a couple of years ago when you and I were in Louisville sitting in that restaurant and somebody came up and they gave us some kind of tract or something and I think they were trying to get us to go to one of those sort of weird people to go have our fortune told or something like that.

And that would be the issue that's addressed there, not dressing up in a costume.

Now, me personally, if my daughter, I have a couple of wonderful daughters now grown, if they had wanted to dress like a witch,

I would not have been too fond of that idea. But like I said, some of my best memories are of them before we were saved, them dressing up like little

Care Bears. They were so cute. My wife did a great job on the costumes and it was a lot of fun.

Well, my only comment there is, Steve, touch not God's anointed, and do His prophets no harm.

I think sometimes we as Christians make mountains out of proverbial molehills.

That's what a legalist does. A legalist looks at these things and says, we're going to somehow ostracize other

Christians for trick -or -treating. And I have to tell you, Steve, just like you've admitted earlier, when I first got saved and I knew people let their kids go out and trick -or -treat,

I just couldn't believe it. It was just appalling to me that that would happen. Now, I've either grown lax or I've matured, or maybe there's a combination of both of those, but I realized this, and here's what we're after, nocompromiseradio .com.

If you want to email us, it's info at nocompromiseradio .com. Tomorrow, hopefully,

Mike Horton will be on the show live. But what we want to do is this when we think of legalism.

Romans 14 and 15 talks about accepting those who are weaker in the faith. My question to the congregation out there, the audience who's listening, what is in chapters three, four, and five in Romans that if you misunderstand, you will think wrongly about legalism?

The answer is, if you get Romans three, four, and five down, justification by faith alone, you will realize that nothing you put on your body regarding costumes, nothing you put in your body regarding food or alcohol or food offered to idols, can change your status before God Almighty.

And it's just, ultimately, it comes down to, and we've said this time and time again, you just don't want to be in the habit of setting a standard above what the

Bible does. Let people have their own convictions about non -essential matters.

You have your own convictions. Let other Christians have the same. And I think we'll all be rejoicing together in heaven rather than battling over inconsequential matters in this life.

Well, and we've got a problem in a local church when everyone knows your personal convictions. So if everyone at the church knows that you're anti -Halloween or pro -Halloween, for that matter,

I think that's a problem. You should say to yourself, why do I have to make these things known?

When you can't even articulate justification by faith alone, you go back to the moniker, just as if I've never sinned, although that's partially true, but not totally true for justification.

If everyone knows you're against any kind of cigarette smoking, all alcohol's bad, homeschool's the only way, and Halloween's a hell a day,

I don't think you should make those things known to everyone in the church. You should be known for your kindness and for your love and for your ministry and not putting your conscience on someone else.

Might have something to do with that T -shirt that they're putting out now that says, real Christians don't celebrate Halloween.

That might be a - That one, but sadly, it's in orange and black. I mean, we put pumpkins out.

I have some pumpkins out, and we'll probably end up carving them. And we always have carved them, even though early on,

I didn't want to, but Kim kind of coerced me to do it. And so you carve them and you bake your pumpkin seeds, and we even grew our own pumpkins this year for the first time.

But they weren't dedicated to Satan. They weren't given over to the druid god of pumpkins.

They're just something that we associate with the fall. Do you know, Pastor Steve, because you weren't here on Sunday, you were at another church preaching.

In our sanctuary, in our church auditorium, we have a couple pumpkins.

No. Yes, yes. I'm appalled.

I hope they haven't been dedicated to Marduk, or Bell, or someone like that. Maybe we should carve them out to, say,

John 3 .16. Why don't we stand for what the

Bible stands for? And when the Bible instructs us to do something, and the culture's telling us we have to do the opposite, then

I think that'd be a good time to stand against the culture. Let me give you a quick example. Here's the example.

Remember Daniel in Daniel chapter one? Of course, I know Steve remembers that. Daniel with these other young men, probably in their late teens, maybe middle teens, we don't know exactly, these men in whom there were no defect, they were good -looking, they had intelligence, and they were brought in by, who was it?

Nebuchadnezzar in chapter one, verse one, and they were given all kinds of education in terms of agriculture, probably astrology, astronomy, mathematics, different kind of language, and then they were given, and they accepted that, they were given new names, too, and they accepted that.

Here, I found, Steve, the names. Daniel, he was assigned the name Belshazzar, that means, may

Bell protect my life, pagan name. Daniel took it. Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were given the names

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and so Hananiah means

Yahweh is gracious, Shadrach means commander of the moon god, Aku.

Mishael means who is what God is, Meshach means who is what

Aku is, Aku Aku, and Azariah means whom Yahweh helps, but Abednego means servant of Nebo, the god of vegetation, and they still did it because it wasn't a sin to study their literature, it wasn't a sin to have your name changed to commander of Aku, the moon god, but the day they were told in the next verse to disobey

God, they said no. That's where they drew the line. But Daniel made up his mind that he would not defile himself with the king's choice food, with the wine which he drank, he sought permission from the commander so he might not defile himself.

Why, Exodus 34, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land and they play the harlot with their gods and sacrifice to their gods and somehow invite you to eat of his sacrifice.

Yeah, again, I mean, if somehow this turns into some kind of a worship event for you,

Halloween does, well, then you've got an issue. And frankly, I have known people who have kind of more of a mindset like that.

The Mexican culture has the Day of the Dead and they get up in all these garish,

I was gonna say uniforms, but costumes, and they participate in all manner of things.

And ultimately for some people, it becomes more than mere culture, more than mere symbolism and a day that they really relish.

And I would kind of question that kind of thinking and that kind of fealty to that idea of celebrating death and that sort of cultural thing.

Yeah, this Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, whoever the new people are, I don't know if it's

The Ring, The Saw, all these other kind of shows that are out there, it's just gratuitous violence. And what we wanna do is we wanna say, we live and eat before the

Lord. Romans 14, verse 12 says, so then each one of us will give an account of himself to God.

And so if you can stand there on whatever night it is on Halloween and say, thank you,

God, for this night, we wanna worship you as we just go have some fun with the kids and get some candy and dress up like Care Bear, then you can do it.

And if you can't do it, then stay at home, but I'd say give some candy out to some of the neighbors and make sure it's good stuff, not the cheap stuff.

And we're already stocked up. Oh, you are? I'll tell you, it's looking good if you come by our house.

Well, the other thing that we wanna do here at No Compromise Radio is to get you to think biblically.

Open your Bibles up. Here's your assignment. Read Romans 14 and 15, and then at the end of the day, you'll say,

I think I better make sure to take care of myself before running around being the snooty police to other Christians in church.

And that's exactly right. Good, well, it is No Compromise Radio. We are here on Tuesday.

We'll see you tomorrow, God willing. 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.

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