Racism, White Privilege and CRT (Part 1)

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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, a ministry. My name is

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Mike Abendroth, and we've got kind of a different setup here today. Thankfully, Ben Mercedes is here in the beautiful studios in downtown

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Burbank, California. Are we in Burbank, Ben? We're not. I look outside, there's no fires.

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I think it's supposed to be a bright, sunny day, but it's a little overcast, middle of September, 2020.

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We're trying the Facebook Live today. I don't know if you can ask me questions. It's funny, when

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I watch myself here on the Facebook, I'm a little delayed, so this is going to be new for me.

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If you want to get in touch with us, you can do that via Twitter, at NoCoRadio. You can do that also via Facebook.

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There's both the No Compromise website and then the select Gnostic group that you have to be approved.

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I don't think anybody's done anything bad in that approved group yet, but I'm just waiting to kick somebody out, to have the privilege of just clicking to get rid of them.

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We still are planning to go to Israel in 2021. That's mid -February.

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If you want to go, you can write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com. Now, I don't know if anybody's got questions that you want to ask me while I am doing this

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Facebook Live, so I'm going to wait for some questions. If we don't get some questions, then maybe we'll look at the book of James.

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Lots of things in current events these days. I think, well, what's going on with current events?

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We've got an old editor from Christianity Today. He has just said he's

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Roman Catholic. I thought that was not surprising, but fascinating. Why do people leave evangelicalism and go to Rome?

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A while ago, I was watching Hank Hanegraaff, Francis Chan, and somebody else talk about sacerdotalism and Greek orthodoxy and all kinds of other things.

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You just can't make this stuff up. Years ago, basically the entire No Compromise Radio show was my response to evangelical craziness with Kooks and Barney's Awards and Heno and everything else.

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These days, I'm having a hard time keeping up. After all, at 60 years old and a lot of craziness, it's hard to just weigh in on everything.

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Frankly, what I think about all these matters, it doesn't really matter, does it?

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You can pretty much peg me for, I'm not into what Jen Hatmaker says,

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I'm not into what Francis Chan says, I'm not into what Christianity Today says. I don't know if I had made this announcement yet, but Christianity Today a while ago put out some article that was so egregious,

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I had to write to them and say, please take me off your list, I don't want your magazine anymore.

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The downside is I can't get access digitally to it anymore, but that's the way it goes. If you've got questions, you can always write me,

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Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com, or you can go into this Facebook live group. It looks like we have people watching, but no questions yet, so that's good.

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We've got these clear glasses. Maybe they're pretty trendy. They're only readers.

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The doctor said to me the other day, he said, all right, your long distance vision when you drive, it's bad. What I want you to do, if you don't want to wear your progressive lenses,

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I want you to wear readers when you drive. I said, really?

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Wear 1 .5 readers, you could see long distance. So that's how bad my eyes are when it comes to this.

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So today, since I see no questions, we're going to talk a little bit about law, gospel, the book of James, and how we go about interpreting such a book.

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James seems like it's a hot book these days because it talks about, in chapter two, partiality, discrimination, judging people by how they look on the outside, making determinations on the inside.

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So it's hot. People love to go to the book of James. But I want to remind everyone who's watching slash listening that when you look at the book of James, you ought to think

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Christianly, if I can make up a word, because James is a

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Christian epistle. And while it doesn't have anything about the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, it does talk about who

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He is, the Lord Jesus. It talks about His great glory, and it talks about Him being compassionate and a judge and other things.

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But really, when you think of the book of James, get it forever out of your mind that it's a bunch of Proverbs, just kind of random

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Proverbs. It's the Proverbs of the New Testament. No it's not. It's set up in such a way that it's one thought to the next to the next, kind of a string of pearls.

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It's a bunch of beads, not rosary beads. For the first time ever, by the way,

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I have a little rosary thing. It tells you exactly what to do as you go through the rosary beads.

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I guess Mark Galley or whoever that editor now is going to have to learn how to do that. I'm too old to learn how to determine the difference between Latria and Dulia, the two types of marrying, worship, reverence, veneration.

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I spend time in California, and if you drive between Northern California and Southern California, you can either take the nice, pretty route, or you can take the

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I -5. And I come across this little story that will help us frame the book of James in a

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Christian fashion and to make sure we understand that it's in the New Testament, and it is written in light of who

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Jesus is. How does a Christian live knowing that Jesus has paid for their sins and that he's lived, obeyed the law, he's died, died for law breakers.

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He was not one, but he died for them, and then he was raised from the dead. How do we live? James tells us how do we live in a very

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Jewish way. But here's the funny story. You don't get these funny stories unless you turn into the

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Facebook Live. So there's a lady, her name is Dodie Gradient, and she was a schoolteacher, and she thought she'd travel across America.

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And she was in a truck with a camper, and she prayed after her water pump blew up.

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Maybe she should have prayed before her water pump blew up, but she had her water pump blow, and she didn't know what to do, and nobody seemed to help.

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And so she prayed this, please God, send me an angel, preferably one with mechanical experience.

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So pretty specific prayer, right? Adoration, confession, Thanksgiving, supplication. Four minutes later, according to this story here in Our America, I don't know what kind of magazine that is, but according to this story, a huge Harley drove up, ridden by an enormous man, can you say that these days, sporting long black hair, a beard and tattooed arms, jumped off the motorcycle, went to work on the truck, got everything fixed.

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And when he rode away, she said, she saw the paralyzing words on the back of his leather jacket,

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Hell's Angels, California, send me an angel.

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And I thought, you know what, that is such a good illustration of judging people on the inside based on what they look like on the outside.

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And of course, the only one with the privilege and the prerogative and the authority to make any kind of judgments, of course, is the

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Lord Jesus. And he judges not on externals, but he judges the heart. And so I want to talk a little bit today about James chapter two, in light of all the craziness of white privilege, white fragility,

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CRT, critical race theory, who's teaching it, who isn't.

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This is a place that they like to go, right? Racism, latent, binary, who knows what they call it.

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But here's my point today. Here's the one main point. I don't know how many minutes I'm in, 10 minutes into the show and I haven't really said much.

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I'm kind of getting used to this Facebook live stuff. I have to kind of warm up, right? Dear Lord, send me an angel.

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And Ben showed up. I am not going to let critical race theory people and Marxists rob me from James chapter two.

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James chapter two is important and it's wonderful and it's convicting, but I'm not going to let them steal it.

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It's something that we really have to deal with, but I'm not going to do it using their vocabulary, their eisegesis, their, well, you know what, this is a racism, you're going to have to deal with it for the rest of your life.

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You can never be forgiven. It's never eradicated. It's always here. It's systemic. That is all garbage.

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If you buy into that, I've got news for you. You want to buy into it. It's a narrative that you're hankering for and you want, and so I just wish you wouldn't do that.

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You don't need it. You don't need to understand the scripture with these new insights of critical race theory and this ungodly pagan sinful way.

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If you're falling into that, uh, you're getting used, you're getting manipulated and maybe you don't know it, or maybe you like to be manipulated.

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I'm not sure. But James chapter two, uh, is, is an important truth that we can simply grammatically redemptively historically, plainly read and understand.

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You say, well, I don't really like James. James, maybe it's a, what did Luther call it? A, a straw epistle because there's not a lot of gospel in it.

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Did you know Luther also said in that same preface, if you want to have all the news and not just some of the news,

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Luther said about James, I praise it talking about James and hold it a good book because it sets up no doctrine of men and lays great stress upon God's law.

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Those are good words from Luther. You know, it's easy to just kind of cut and paste, but we want to understand what the

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Bible says about partiality and receiving people based on what they look like.

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And the first verse is probably all we'll get to today, but James chapter two, verse one, amazingly, shockingly, uh, baldly just says this.

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Remember he's got kind of that pungent kind of punchy preaching style and, uh, you want to set up and go, oh, so just listen to what he says.

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My brothers show no partiality as you hold the faith in our

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Lord Jesus Christ, comma, the Lord of glory. I don't want you to have any partiality shown towards anyone because in essence, when you compare yourself and them to the

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Lord Jesus, uh, we're pretty much all, we're all ungloried, less than glorified, less than full of glory.

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He says, show no partiality as you hold faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the

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Lord of glory. There's to be no partiality. There's to be no judgment that's not full of equity.

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I guess I could probably put it this way. What if I told the church this Sunday that I'm keeping an updated 2020 into 2021, um, member contributions to help me decide on when

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I'm available to see people at the hospital or for counseling. What would you say to me? I'd like to know how much money you make.

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And therefore based on that, uh, I'll tell you if I can be around to help you with funerals and weddings and counseling and stuff like that.

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I'm sure somebody probably does that. We don't do it here. I don't know what anybody gives unless you send a letter to the church and it doesn't say anything and the secretary's not here.

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I might open it up. But besides that, you would say that that's showing partiality that that's wrong.

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It's, it's inappropriate based on what somebody makes and you're going to minister to them the free gospel of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. So I think we all know partiality when we see it in other people and we hate it and we don't like it.

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But when it's in us, it's a little trickier because sin deceives because we can't trust our hearts because we're prone to do things that we ought not to do.

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But again, when you're talking about some of the terms that I pulled up, intersectional feminism, social justice, uh, privilege, uh, whiteness, white spaces, microaggressions, microinvalidations.

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I don't know, maybe I could use that one to my advantage. A microinvalidation. What is that?

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Let me just read this. Characterized by communications that exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of people from marginalized groups.

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Well, I think I could use that. A microinvalidation. So I come from a marginalized group.

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It was my grandmother who, during World War II, being a young lady coming from Germany, they would take her lunches every day by force and throw them in the outhouse.

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And so I think I'm a marginalized group, a German living in America.

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Hey, Ben, do you think I can get any reparations for that at all? I'm sure.

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Ben's in the background. He's behind this light and I think he just gave me a microinsult. Ben, a microinsult is communications that convey rudeness and insensitivity and demean a person's identity.

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I think he just did that to me. That's a microinsult. Well, maybe he could have some microforgiveness for that, what do we call it?

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Maybe it was not a sin, maybe it was just a boo -boo. Listen to the passage again. My brothers, show no partiality as you hold faith in our

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Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. Now, he just got done talking in chapter one about true religion and how the tongue needs to be reined in with true religion, right?

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Chapter one, verses 26 and 27, helping the poor and widows. And so, you can see we move now to chapter two.

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A true religion is going to assist poor people. Here, the context is going to be poor and rich, we'll see in just a moment.

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But if you're going to play favorites, if you're going to be partial, if you're going to discriminate, that's going to hurt these people, not help them.

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James is clear. If you're playing favorites based on what people look like, you ought not to do that.

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He throws it emphatically forward at the beginning of the sentence. And it's something that we're going to learn today,

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No Compromise Radio viewers and listeners. It's called a neologism, neologism, neologism.

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So, neo and loge are logos, N -E -O -L -O -G -I -S -M.

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And basically, it's a compound word based on an Old Testament phrase, and it means to receive a face.

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And so, that's what James is saying, partiality and discrimination is, I look at your face and make a determination on who you are spiritually.

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And that would be wrong. We can't just look at people and make all kinds of judgments on who they are spiritually before the

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Lord. We have to admit, that's what we do. We play favorites.

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We judge by appearances. But man looks on the outward appearance and God looks on the heart, 1

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Samuel 16, 7. So, here's the punchline to all my show today.

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What the purveyors of racism, systemic racism, white privilege, white microaggressions, whiteness invalidations, and all that stuff, what

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I never really hear them talk about. Now, of course, I haven't gotten out there, so this is only anecdotal. They're heavy on, don't be a racist, don't be partial, don't be prejudice.

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But it is void of the second part of the verse. They never talk about the glory of the

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Lord Jesus. I don't think you can solve any type of partiality, discrimination problems, unless you have the object of your faith, the

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Lord Jesus, whom is portrayed here in James chapter 1 as the glory.

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Literally, that's a translation. Faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the glory. So, what comes to your mind when you think of glory?

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I hope you're thinking in Old Testament terms with Shekinah glory, with the glory that was associated with the wilderness wanderings, and the pillar of cloud, and the pillar of fire.

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I hope you're thinking about the transfiguration. I can imagine, at the transfiguration, when

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Peter, James, and John go up to that mountain with the Lord Jesus, and there's that bright light, and it's kind of where we get the word metamorphosis, too.

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What Jesus was on the inside was coming out, and you have the glory, and basically, the men are just babbling, and they don't know what to do.

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And there appear Moses and Elijah. When you see yourself in light of this glory of who

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Jesus is, then you're not looking at other people, or you shouldn't be, because it's just you and Him, the

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Lord Jesus. And therefore, whenever I hear micro,

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CRT, systemic, racism, this, that, and the other, and I don't hear a heavy dose of the glory of Jesus Christ, then

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I just tune out, because this is not how we do things. This is not the

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Christian approach. Well, here's what one writer says. The stress on Christ as glorious heightens the gross inconsistency of allowing favoritism and discrimination to be associated with faith in such an exalted person as Christ, end quote.

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Did you get that? That's the issue. Can we talk about racism?

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Do Christians sin with showing partiality and discrimination? We know the answer to those things.

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But once you have your eyes fixed on who the glory of Jesus is, who

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Jesus is the glory, then all kinds of other things come with that. The glory of Jesus actually is further shown in complete forgiveness, right?

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In justification, in regeneration, in cleansing.

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And once you get the glory of Jesus involved in this, you're going to have some good news, because anybody can criticize.

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Anybody can complain. Anybody can show, here's what the problem is. But I need to know the biblical solution.

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So, I remember once we had the alarm go off in the house, the carbon monoxide alarm, which seems louder than even the fire alarm.

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Everybody's running around. It was so loud, two in the morning. And people are, you know, it hurts my ears, dad, this, that, and the other.

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And I think I said something like, you're not helping the problem. You know, we need to find a solution.

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And so, I guess if the solution is we never can find a solution because we've got to line our pockets with all these training programs across corporate

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America and everything else. Well, I understand that. I don't agree with it. But here, the grasping of the greater glory of the

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Lord Jesus Christ takes care of the problem. Or it should. It's the solution.

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What's the Christ -centered solution to all this? The focus on the glory. So, one of the first things you should do is you should do a study on what does it mean to understand the glory of God and how infinite

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He is? How incomprehensible He is? How excellent He is?

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The shining forth of all His attributes simultaneously, to use the words of Sinclair Ferguson.

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When I would see that, then how could I look at somebody else who, in this context of James, is poorer than I am?

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Or if they are, you know, have less pigment or more pigment or any other thing. They have one arm, not two arms.

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Or they have who knows what. How could I—I can't look sideways when, essentially, it's

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Isaiah before the holiness of God. And what's Isaiah doing? Looking around to see who else is around there?

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No, no. He's on his face. He's on his face. It's like Joshua, the high priest in Zechariah.

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He's got proper clothes on for the priesthood, but then what happens? There's a stain because there's a problem.

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And you can study that on your own so I don't have to be too crass when it comes to what the stain is. Dear friends, we have to look at things from a

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Christian perspective. And I also have to look at the time. 21 minutes in, so we have a few. So far, I see no questions on here.

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So we just keep talking. That's what we do. Remember Moses said in Exodus 33, 18, show me your glory.

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Can you imagine the radiance, the—there's a word that I never used until I was a

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Christian effulgent glory. And when you see the

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Lord Jesus that way, you ought not to be thinking I'm better than somebody else because standing before the thrice holy

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Lord of glory, we realize how sinful we are. Exodus 40, and the glory of the

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Lord filled the tabernacle. 2 Chronicles 7,

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Solomon's Temple, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple. We're talking about the majestic glory.

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We're talking about the glorified Savior. So he says, my brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don't show favoritism.

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1 Corinthians 2 says they crucified the Lord of glory. So in light of that, how could I play favorites?

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How could I show some type of partiality, whether it's social, whether it's economic, whether it's anything else?

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I think we really ought to be thinking we're the biggest sinner in the room whenever we walk into that room.

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And I don't think Paul is exaggerating when he says, I'm the chief of sinners. I'm the least of apostles. I hope that's the way you think of yourself because here's how you think of yourself that way, not when you think of anybody else.

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But when you think about the Lord, the second you start saying, you know what?

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I'm better than the people who are walking in the gay pride parades. You don't understand the gospel and the gravity of sin.

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The second you began thinking all those other people, what they do, and now the big thing is with Netflix and pedophilia and cuties and 11 -year -olds and sexual and all those people that do that.

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They're the really sinful ones. Of course, that is sinful, obviously. But when you understand who you are in light of God, the glorified one, then that's really when everything starts to come together.

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You and the Lord of glory. Well, my name is Mike Abendroth. This is No Compromise Radio. I think we'll try another

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Facebook live here in just a few moments. If you've got questions or if you've got concerns or if you've got millionaire friends, you can write us.

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Mike at NoCompromiseRadio .com. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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

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

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