Romans 2:13

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. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry, to season maybe nine.

Steve Cooley, welcome. Season nine, really? Can you imagine? Episode number 22. Designated Survivor season nine.

He's still in the bunker. It only made it through two seasons. So sad. Actually, on Netflix, I saw their season three.

Is there? Yeah, yeah. Hmm. The only reason I know that is because someone sent to me a

BBC interview with Kiefer Sutherland about - Oh, they're doing season three. No, it's done. Oh, wow.

It's online. Oh. Yeah, and he is in some kind of country band or something, and so he does rodeos and other things.

In season three? No, but he does country rodeo stuff, and he's also -

Oh, okay. Oh, Finnish. Yeah, I've watched a few of his videos. One of them, it's like it's shot in LA, just stands on a street corner and kind of gathers a crowd around him.

I think that's what they did in the Second Great Awakening. Whitfield has his advance men.

I just finished a book this summer, The Divine Dramatist, by Harry, I think his name's Stout.

Anyway, they had the men getting ready ahead of time, knowing

Whitfield would show up because you need to have an audience. While a lot of the book had to do with his acting and kind of his gestures and stuff like that,

I will give Whitfield credit regularly and often. He preached the sermon, You Must Be Born Again, and God blesses his word.

I try not to preach in an effeminate way, but I'm sure

I have other things that I do, and so he blesses the word anyway in spite of me. Yes, he does.

I know. Yeah, thanks. And you too. Like he doesn't you, he needs to do more through you than me, true or false?

Amazing work. How can it be? Last week, we were talking a little bit about things that happened this summer.

I don't think we kind of finished it. We were talking about from Josh Harris to other things.

What about, let's talk a little bit more about this Revoice deal, and you got the PCA, Presbyterian Church of America.

And for our listeners, because probably a lot of listeners are Baptist, maybe. Probably.

Right? Yeah. Kind of like Master Seminary folks or something. Or non -denominational, you know, leaning towards Baptist.

Non -denoms, yeah. And so if you look at Presbyterian churches overall, you've got the

PCUSA, and they're the liberal ones. And you might have a rogue pastor who's preaching the word, right?

So this is just in general. Isn't that funny? You're in a liberal denomination. How do you offend them? By preaching the

Bible. And then you have, well, there's all kinds of EPC, but generally in our circles, and you have the

PCA, and that's kind of, Tim Keller's in the PCA, so is Ligon Duncan.

And then you've got OPC. Who's in the OPC that we know? Fesco. Truman. Anyway.

Bob Andrzejczyk. Yeah. He's OPC? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Only Perfect Church.

That's OPC. That's right. Is the IFCA, are they Presbyterian? Not hardly.

No, the first word is independent. Independent and Presbyterian don't go together. That would be a good...

No. Is that a denomination? Independent Presbyterians? No. But if you're R .C. Sproul, he was

PCA for many years, and I think St. Andrews, maybe even to this day, is in fact independent.

Really? Yeah. That seems like a contradiction, right? I know. That's a no -no, unless you're

R .C. Sproul. And we just give him a pass, right? But anyway, you've got the

PCA, and there's different philosophies of ministry in the

PCA. They all have to affirm the Westminster Standards, I believe, Westminster Confession, larger and shorter catechism.

But they've got this whole revoiced deal in the St. Louis, Missouri, not Senate, Presbyterian.

That'd be Lutheran. Yeah. And they're not doing anything about it. And I think next year, the

General Assembly, where they all get together and meet, all the elders, I think it's there. And Rosario Butterfield basically said, when is somebody going to file charges?

And then my friends say, who are PCA, well, you know, these things take time. All right.

Well, if it takes that much time, it's taking too much time, right? If you've got questions about the nature of God at Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia, and the

Senate, the Presbyterians working through it, it needs to go faster. Well, it's almost,

I don't know. Time is not, in some cases, time helps. In other cases, time does not help at all.

And the issues here are so big, I can't see what waiting is, you know, going to accomplish.

Steve, somebody, and I think it's Terry from Ohio, sent me something from NOCO Radio, some quotes from The Justification of a

Sinner by William Pimble, and it's a Sola Deo Gloria book. I have it at home and haven't read it yet, but I wanted to because I love books on justification, right?

I want to encourage people to read Buchanan on justification, Fesco on justification, Horton on justification,

Calvin on justification. Those are important. So he sent this to us, and the publisher of Sola Deo Gloria is

Don. Yeah, well, I see you covering up his, yeah. Because he,

Terry, writes, instead of Don Kistler, K -I -S -T -L -E -R, he does the

New England for us and he adds in four to five A's at the end and then an H. Don Kistler.

Yeah. Kistler. Uh -huh. Okay. I thought that was pretty funny. William Pimble.

I mean, that sounds like a kind of a, I don't know, Civil War commander's name, you know.

General William Pimble. So, I'm trying to think if there's anything else this summer we want to talk about in this kind of summer recap.

Seems like there's been more going on than that. I mean, it's just like everything's blowing up. Everybody's going out of ministry and,

I mean, it hasn't really been all that much fun. I think there have been some other people, right? There's probably

James McDonald's stuff, and he's made some overtures, I think, to get back into ministry.

Tullian, Josh, Mark Driscoll, Driscoll's back. Yeah, he's starting.

Oh, his controversy this summer was, he was on a radio show and he's blasting Five Point Calvinist, and I think he tried to walk that back a little bit, but I think that's what happened because now he's in the charismatic realm, right?

Yes. Okay. And have there been any other controversies this summer, I wonder? Some kind of Twitter spats or anything?

We should, like, keep a list because it just seems like it's been longer than that. It's really been kind of a, in terms of evangelicalism in America, it's been a downer of a summer.

I think we're in a recession. Matter of fact, we are.

I was reading Romans, and here's an interesting, this has nothing to do with summer recessions, but the very commandment that promised life,

Romans 7, 10, proved to be death to me. And it's interesting.

Earlier in chapter 2, he's talking about if you obey God's word, why would he keep you out of heaven?

I mean, right? Yeah. I mean, just obey. Right. And of course, it's only hypothetical because of Adam's sin now as federal head, but here's what

God expects, do this and live, obey and you're in. And Paul says, the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.

Why? Verse 11, for sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment deceived me and through it killed me.

And then to make sure you realize that there's nothing wrong with the law. So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

You could almost say right there, but I am not. I know. It's fascinating.

Chapter 2 that I just referred to is that verse in verse 13.

It's kind of a litmus test. Are you Catholic? Are you Protestant? For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.

And of course, if you look, and I know I'm preaching to the choir, Steve, but if you look in context, chapters 1 and 2 in the first part of 3 are talking about the need for everyone to have perfect righteousness, and nobody has enough, so you need the

Lord Jesus. Chapter 2 isn't sanctification. Chapter 6 and 7 are. But Steve, you don't know how many commentaries make 2, 13 into a sanctification thing.

If you have to be a doer of the law to be justified, how much do you have to do? And so you watch these evangelicals write about that.

Yeah. And it's fascinating to me. Twists themselves into pretzels. Yeah, to kind of make a generalization.

And it's almost like the Roman Catholic thing where sincerity counts, and motives count and everything, but God's standards are perfection, and if you want to get to heaven based on your own merit and work, it better be perfect.

That's why we should realize we don't have that, and we've sinned and fallen short, and therefore we need

Christ -perfect righteousness to get there. But it's fascinating to me, even with Calvin.

He said, if you take that view of Romans 2 as something to do with sanctification, little children should laugh at you.

They should laugh at you. But my problem is, they've probably been laughing at me for years because I think

I just read that, out of context, I'm thinking this does have to do with sanctification.

How sanctified must I be? Do we need to go through the BBC archives and see if you have any

Romans 2 messages? I'm afraid. Shred them. I'm afraid that maybe even S. Lewis Johnson, in his

Romans commentary, said something similar that I think he probably would change.

I should have changed for him. And actually, I think later on in his life, in late 90s, he did teach the view we're talking about right now, but the material

I was using was from the 80s, and there's only so much you could do. Well, you could, you know, parentheses like they do in the

Bible, right? This isn't really in the original text. Oh, okay. So, when Jesus knelt down and was drawing in the sand and not in the best manuscripts?

The end of seven and beginning of eight, yeah. Uh -huh. You know, that reminds me of when MacArthur would quote J. I. Packer, and Packer has some things that are very noteworthy in terms of quotes, and when you read the intro to Owen's Death of Death and the

Death of Christ, that whole thing, you just go, that is brilliant. I mean, could there be anything as,

I mean, that's to me one of the most important works in all of evangelical

Christianity is that intro by J. I. Packer. And then, of course, he does some

ECT stuff, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, and everything else. So, I'll never forget that time that MacArthur was quoting

Packer, and he said, the early Packers. And it kind of reminded me of Bart Starr and Horning and the early

Packers. They were really good. You have E .P. and L .P., early Packer, late Packer. Well, let's talk about that for a second, because we all learn and grow, right?

We're all maturing, and when you listen to your pastor preach, and you think, you know what?

What did he teach 10 years ago? What did he teach? I think even

MacArthur, he had some things about justification in the Romans commentary. Lee Irons said,

John, you know, here's the way that should have worked out in terms of the Reformation theologically.

John says you're right. And I think maybe the New Romans commentary was even dedicated to Lee Irons or something.

So, you're learning and growing. And so, in our own lives, it's the same thing. I'd hate to have you pull out some old

BBC sermons from 20 years ago. There'd be some truth in there, but there'd be some cringeworthy moments.

Let's go back even further, Bible study. Let's go drag through some of Janet's notes where she used to like take word for word.

Oh. Well, we should all be rejoicing that the Word of God is powerful, whether it comes from Sinai, or it comes out of a donkey, or closer to donkey than Sinai, it comes out of me.

Right? It's the Word of God. It can come out of a false prophet. I mean, think about it.

I mean, I think it was my brother who got saved through the ministry of a guy at Navigators in Lincoln, Nebraska, who then ran off, you know, left his wife and kids and ran off with some guy.

Right? And think about people that have heard the message from us, and we don't live up to what we preach.

Well, how many people, you know, I mean, just as we, if we went through the last four or five years and just started naming all the pastors who are no longer in ministry, you know, and how many people did they lead to, you know,

Christ, even though they themselves may or may not be saved, but they're certainly not living in accordance with what they taught.

So yeah. Yeah, you see that you watch people flame out of ministry. And did

God use them as they preach the word to churches and all that stuff, even though maybe something was going on behind the scenes and it's the word of God that's powerful.

It says in Thessalonians that it performs its work in those who believe, right. And from examining our hearts as unbelievers to show that we need the

Lord, Hebrews 4 .12, to sanctifying us, sanctify them in truth. The word is truth.

Thy word is truth. I'm glad. And that's why, you know, even when people get to know us and they're just like, these guys are just regular guys.

It's not us. It would never was us. You know, and if you were relying on us, you know, it's like Paul in 1

Corinthians there where he says, you know, my, I didn't come to you in persuasive words of wisdom, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It's not me. It never was me. Why? Because your faith is supposed to be on the word of God and in him and not in us.

Great point by Steve here on No Compromise Radio. You can write us info at nocompromiseradio .com. Steve, I think one of the things that's happened in my life theologically as I've grown and I've realized that my standing before God legally is not based on anything that I've done.

It's all based on the work of Christ, that it's helped me to not take myself so seriously outside the pulpit.

In other words, when I'm preaching, I mean, I want to be faithful to the text and I want to communicate accurately to the people with as much biblical passion and persuasion

I can. But outside the pulpit, you can goof around and joke around. And I think 20 years ago,

I would have been much more serious outside the pulpit as well. And I think that was because I didn't really have the right view of my legal standing and maybe

I was trying to act a certain way. I don't know. But I really, I can, I think there's a, there's kind of a breath of fresh air in my personal life outside the pulpit, to me personally,

I mean. So would you say you were more image conscious? Is that what you're saying? You know, wanting to be the right, like the pastor guy all the time?

Is that? Yeah, I think so. And still even now, I mean, if I go to the grocery store, I don't want to be a jerk because it'd be sinful anyway.

And then they're going to say to me, what's your email address, bbcpastor at bbcchurch .org.

Oh, so what do you do for a living? By the way, that has helped me so much because if I'm on the phone with someone and customer service and they're not helping me and you know me,

I can, I'm fairly, I'm dogged when it comes to like certain things getting done health wise or customer returns and just wanting justice.

And so then at the end, I have to tell them, that's what I, I'm a pastor. Oh, what do you do for a living?

Right. Well, I guess, I guess it goes back to this. Since our righteous standing is based on the righteous one,

Jesus, the righteous, as he's called in first John chapter two,

I just don't, I just don't think I have to really, I guess my self -righteousness is going down.

I still am self -righteous. I don't like it when I am, but I don't have to act as self -righteous as I think

I used to because I'm not trying to keep my standing before God based on my actions.

Does that, does that make sense? Which yes, because it's all just, and I think this is the reality is that we're just coming to realize that us keeping our standing is false, right?

It never was about us. We just thought it was about us. Right. And, and I've been talking to a young man and he's been struggling with assurance in his

Christian sanctification. And I think when he looks at his life, he sees his life in an honest way, which leads him to despair.

Failure. Yeah. Right. So, so if you're going to focus on your own righteousness and not the Lord's righteousness primarily, that's one option.

The other option is my problem. And my problem is, okay, I get saved, came from a licentious life and I stopped a lot of things right away from swearing to other things, swearing, drinking, bunch of stuff just went, went.

Then I thought me stopping those things somehow contributed to my standing.

See, I could actually do these things, right? You know, going back to Romans chapter two, verse 13, I could probably make myself think that's a sanctification verse and say, yes, in fact,

I, so, so I think, I think unlike the honest despairing, I tried to look at my life.

And if somebody said to you, hey, Pastor Steve, how do you measure up to, to Titus chapter one in the qualifications for an elder?

Now, of course, both of us know how to be humble and say, you know, and, and even honestly, there's no way we could match up to these things.

Well, I mean, come on, when you got the letter way back when from Grace Community Church saying, you know, we want you to be a deacon, you know,

I, you know, just review, you know, first Timothy three, what is it?

Seven, whatever it is, whatever the verses are, seven to 12 or something. And you just read that and you just go, well, uh -huh.

Well, if you guys think so, well, what's so freeing is our legal standing is based on the righteousness of Christ, which is perfect.

And therefore, in light of that, we'd like to show fruit and evidence of a changed life. Even like we talked about last week on Romans chapter six.

But the good news is, Steve, we could just be honest, right? So when I talk about marriage in Ephesians five years ago here, and Kim's sitting in the front row,

I was dying. But I did a marriage conference a couple of weekends ago in Burbank, California. And while I was still dying,

I wasn't dying as much because I realized, you know what? I, I could admit to her all my failings in marriage and still get up and try to say, but this is what

God expects. And here's who God is. And here's how God loves. Pete Well, I mean, the big, the big problem would be if you get up there and you just say, now,

Ephesians five, 25, I'm going to read that and I'm going to tell you how I've lived it out. Jeff I want you to learn from the master.

So what I end up doing is saying, session two was marriage blunders. And I said, and by the way,

I'm an expert at these. So that's why I have a leg to stand on, right? Okay. How about this?

We've got about four minutes to go. When I was in the pastor's home class at master's seminary, and I know you had to take it too.

One of the things we had to do was to rate the different rooms of the house and how we did, and then our wives would rate them too.

And so how was the dinner table in terms of talking about the Lord and, you know, having family devotions and on a scale of one to 10 rate that.

And then we had to rate the living room, you know, for hospitality and this, that, and how to rate the bedroom and, you know, and all this stuff.

And so what do you do? Because you have to hand this in to Dr. Mayhew. And do you rate yourself like an eight?

Well, maybe if I rate myself as a five, they'll kick me out of seminary. I can't really do an eight because my wife, what's she going to do?

But I just wish I would have known what I know now. And I just could have said, maybe last week was an eight, but this week's like a two.

I don't even remember that particular exercise. The one I mostly remember is the, you know, the designing the perfect date thing, which was so easy for me.

But I don't know. I don't remember most of that class. I mean, I remember sitting there with the guys and just kind of, you know, looking around.

So, and knowing that this was like the stretch run, right? I mean, this was - Right. You paid all this money.

It's the last semester. Yeah. It's all done, you know, so. Well, dear

Christian, as John Bunyan once said, 300 years ago, he said, my righteousness has been in heaven for 1700 years.

I like that. And so for us, our righteousness has been in heaven for 2000 years.

And no matter what your marriage problems have been or are, the Lord looks at you in Christ Jesus.

That's why union is so important. And because of that, and because I have his spirit, the

Holy Spirit, I'm now free to love my wife, not at the expense of my relationship with the

Lord in terms of standing, but I'm just free to love her. And if I fail, I fail. God's not going to love me less.

I mean, I think some dads love their kids more unconditionally than certain people's view of God in terms of how he loves their children.

I totally agree because the idea that we fail God and therefore, you know, he's like,

Steve, I don't know, man. I just don't know.

You know, but that's how a lot of times we perceive it. But the truth is, like you said, our righteousness is in heaven.

Our righteousness is done, right? We let ourselves down. You know, do we sin?

Yes. Is it against the Lord? Yes. But Jesus paid for that.

It's done. It's finished. You know, ours is to work out our salvation, to live in light of what he's done.

And, you know, as you talked about the righteousness being in heaven for 1700 years and now 2000 years, and I'm just like, and it is an incalculable value.

Let's just say that it is no less now than it was 300 years ago or 500 years ago or 1000 years ago, and it never will be any less.

As long as the Lord tarries, it still has the same value, and it's the same righteousness always.

It is, you know, so much better than any kind of concept of treasury of merit or anything else.

The perfect righteousness of Christ. They're permanently and available to us, and it's ours.

We own it. Pete And after the Lord tarries too, it'll be there. Pete Yeah. Pete Because he'll be there. Pete Yeah. It's our, you know, it's our surety of salvation.

It's done. It's finished complete. Pete And because of that, do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.

Pete Preach it. Pete All right. Mike Abendroth, Steve Cooley, No Compromise Radio, info at nocompromiseradio .com.

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