Don Green Interview

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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 ministry. My name is
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Mike Abendroth, I'm your host today. And we have a little theme, and that theme is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.
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And I don't think today is going to be an exception. On the line we have Pastor Don Green from Truth Community Church, Truth Community Fellowship.
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Don, welcome to No Compromise Radio. Mike, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you today.
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Well, Don, let's get to know you a little bit first. Tell me about your, I don't know, common ground with No Compromise Radio.
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I think we have some friends, some mutual friends that should bind us together in Christian love, don't you think?
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Yeah, well, I think so. I used to work for John MacArthur and Phil Johnson at Grace to You, and I was at that ministry for about 15 years before the
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Lord opened a door for me to come here to the Cincinnati, Ohio area and start a brand new church.
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And two years ago, we came out and had our first meeting, and our church has grown steadily, and the
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Lord has just brought a lot of people from a lot of different places that are just united around a desire for expository preaching.
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And so these are the, without qualification, these are the best days of my life to be in a ministry where people want to hear the
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Word and be in a position to give it to them. So I'm very grateful today as I talk to you. Truthcommunitychurch .org,
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did you come up with a name or did you move into that ministry there? No, we came up with that name with the founding families, and we just wanted to emphasize, in a postmodern world, we wanted our name to emphasize the fact that we believe in absolute truth, that Christ himself is the way, the truth, and the life, and that it's the
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Word of God that sanctifies. You know, Jesus prayed, "'Your word is truth, sanctify them in the truth.'"
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And so we felt like we wanted to communicate a lot of things with one word and centered around truth, and so that's what led us to choose that name.
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Don, just quickly, as I was thinking about this postmodern comment that you made, you used to be a litigation attorney in Chicago.
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What would law be like if it was filtered through the lens of postmodernism and no truth and no antithetical facts?
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How would that work? It wouldn't work, Mike. It's a great question, and I'm afraid for the long -term future of the legal system in our country as postmodernism continues to assault the foundations of the way logic and argument are supposedly made.
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You know, the whole structure of our judicial system in America is based on adversarial justice.
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You declare your facts, I declare mine, and we argue from those, and there's a common ground of the rules of logic that apply and the law that applies.
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But when you start to set aside any kind of absolute truth and you have your truth and I have mine, it really starts to pollute the area.
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And I left law a long time ago before those things started to come up. But you're going to see more emotional appeals.
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You know, you already see that playing out in headline litigation and things like that, things that have little to do with actual facts and law and application and more about emotional pleas and extenuating circumstances and all of that.
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And so it is concerning. Makes me glad that I'm not in law anymore and I can focus on the absolute truth of God's word.
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Speaking of which, I have your website in front of me, truthcommunitychurch .org. And what
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I do, Don, when I'm searching around for a church, I'd like to have some information about a local ministry.
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I'm doing a background check, if you will. I don't go to the pastor's page and look at his education first, although that is a place
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I stop. I always go to the sermon section to see if, in fact, the pastor is preaching expositionally, that is, sequential exposition.
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And so when I go to your site and I see Titus working through the book of Titus, verse by verse, tell our listeners why such philosophy of ministry and preaching is vital to local churches today.
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Well, we need to let God's word speak for itself. And it does that through its context.
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And verse by verse preaching is the best way to honor the context of a passage and to honor the flow of the author's thought.
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He didn't, the apostle Paul, when he wrote Titus, didn't write down a series of random statements that were jumbled together for us to pull out as according to our whim.
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He had a specific flow of thought in mind from beginning to end as he's instructing
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Titus as he seeks to establish a church there on the island of Crete.
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And so we wanna enter into that flow of thought of the author as much as we can to understand as best as we can the way the original audience would have understood it.
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We don't start from a 21st century perspective and say, what does this mean to me primarily? We say, what did it mean to Paul and to Titus when they were interacting, when
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Paul was writing to Titus, I should say, and then bring that forward. We go back into the context and then try to bring it forward rather than starting from the 21st century and saying we have to interpret it in light of our present circumstances.
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So I'm very committed to the principle of grammatical historical exegesis, and I'm blessed to have a congregation that doesn't mind when
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I spend an hour trying to do that Sunday by Sunday. Now Don, you were pastoring
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Grace Life, which is a fellowship group back at Grace Community Church. You did that with Phil Johnson.
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Give me some inside scoop on Phil. He's a friend of mine as well, but tell our listeners something about Phil that we would not normally know about Phil Johnson.
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Oh, you're trying to get me in trouble. No, no trouble at all.
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I'm just trying to, the inner workings of Phil, because people think that he just writes for John and he does this and he's the muscle behind MacArthur or something.
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I don't know, but Phil is such a genuine, kind guy. I just thought maybe you'd have one of those stories. Yeah, no, the thing that I always loved about Phil was his humble spirit.
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And I understand that from close up. Our offices were five feet away from each other for probably close to 10 or 12 years.
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And so I worked very closely with Phil, not only in Grace Life, but also in Grace To You, and our lives were entwined together.
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It made it one of the difficult aspects about leaving California to come to Cincinnati. And I consistently saw
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Phil on a day -to -day basis as living out biblical humility. He was more than happy to put himself below someone else in ministry, or happy to take the blame if something went wrong, even if it wasn't his fault.
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And so in those general ways, I would say that, seeing
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Phil up close with his humble spirit and just his utter devotion to the
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Word and to the ministry that the Lord has given him made a significant impact on my life.
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I like a man who, when a man is willing to take the blame for something that he didn't do, and I saw
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Phil do that repeatedly, you know that he's operating from a model of biblical humility rather than pride and self -promotion.
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And that's what I, if there was anything above all that I could have the great audience that Phil has see about him, it would be that which
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I saw up close, but Phil would never speak to himself. We're talking to Pastor Don Green today.
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Don, I often talk to my wife about the perils of Facebook and people using that media for negative things and for just boring, boorish things as well.
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But you posted something, I believe yesterday or maybe the day before, responding to a
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Desiring God article about same -sex attraction. And so I was glad that you were trying to use
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Facebook for something that would be positive as you would critique this. Give us an update on what the article, the
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Desiring God article was, and then why you felt the compulsion to respond to that.
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Well, thank you, Mike. Obviously, the whole issue of homosexuality is dominating the news continually in our modern culture.
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It's very influential in the church. And I came across the article from Desiring God yesterday morning.
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And the author of the article, it was not John Piper, but one of his staff members made this statement.
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He said that I am exclusively oriented toward the same sex.
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And I'm quoting here, this is true of me, whether or not I'm experiencing a specific attraction at any given moment.
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As I sit here writing, I'm not experiencing an attraction to another man, but I'm still exclusively attracted to men.
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So at this moment, though, I have a homosexual orientation. I do not believe I am sinning in this regard, close quotes.
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And so it's raising a very important issue that we have to come to biblical grips with.
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The author went on to say that he resists temptation as best as he can, and he's trying to live a celibate life.
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And so, you know, kudos to him for that. But the fundamental question is of whether homosexual orientation is acceptable to God, even if you don't act on the desires, is one that has great pastoral and theological implications that I personally didn't think the article recognized.
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And so earlier this year, I had done a series on homosexuality in the nation of Singapore.
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I'd done a series of five messages. One of them was specifically on this issue of same -sex attraction and whether it's okay to be attracted to the same gender as long as you don't have sex.
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And I had a whole message on that. So what I did yesterday was I just copied and pasted my sermon notes into my
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Facebook post and put those online, because I had dealt with the issue pretty thoroughly and felt like it was a view that needed to be heard, even though the circle of my
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Facebook audience is much, much, much smaller than the sphere of Desiring God's audience is.
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I just needed to put my voice out there when the issue had been put into play by a prominent, influential organization.
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I had dealt with that in my own ministry long before this ever came up, and I felt a gospel responsibility to respond to it, because I think the teaching is important on this issue for the church going forward.
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The article is entitled, Is It Sin to Experience Same -Sex Attraction? Desiring God, December 17th, 2013.
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Nick Rowan, R -O -E -N. And Don, if you were going to talk to folks struggling with the same -sex attraction, what would you tell them as a pastor about dealing with that very issue?
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Well, my article on Facebook was really designed to do that, and I think that the most important thing to understand is the fact that we are oriented towards sin, whether it's homosexual sin or heterosexual sin or greed or pride or whatever it is.
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The fact that we are oriented toward it does not justify it. It does not make it right.
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It does not make it holy and acceptable to God. We have to understand,
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Mike, and I know you know this as well as I do, we have to understand that the
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Bible deals with our hearts, not just our external behavior. Jesus said that sinful desires come out of a sinful heart.
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The Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20 not only condemn the external human -oriented sins of adultery and theft and lying, it condemns coveting.
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It condemns heart desires, wicked desires. And we need to understand that the purpose of salvation is to redeem us and to remake our hearts and fashion them after the image of Christ, who has no kind of internal temptation to those things in His own being.
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All of His temptations were external to Him. But we also have to understand, and this is so crucial to the gospel, and that's why
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I was so eager to put that on my Facebook post, it absolutely blunts the force of the gospel to make it only about internal,
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I'm sorry, makes it only about external matters and conduct. The whole thing that convicted the apostle
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Paul and led him to salvation, he said in Romans 7, was that the law condemned his covetous heart.
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And that made him turn to Christ. He realized the blackness and sinfulness of his heart.
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And so we have to help people understand as pastors, we have to help them understand that God looks at our heart, 1
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Samuel 16, verse 7, and not just our external conduct. And that is when the gospel has its most penetrating power, when people are under the proclamation of the word of God, and they understand that this word is examining their heart, not simply looking at them as the outer man does.
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Talking to Don Green today. Don, this issue is not going to go away for evangelical
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Christians, whether it's Phil Robinson and the Duck Dynasty comments that he made, or the polygamy ruling in Utah.
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Do you think that we, as evangelical pastors, are going to see kind of a dividing line between those churches that will stand up and say, this is a sin.
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This is how the gospel applies to this sin of homosexuality. These are the dangers.
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In my mind, I think there's going to be some division sooner or later between those who will stand up and say, this is what the
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Bible says, and apply the gospel to it. And those who say, well, if I talk about it, then I'm going to lose my audience, or I'm going to lose my license, or I'm going to lose my freedom.
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Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And that was actually one of the other messages that I preached in Singapore on this.
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You know, Mike, for a long time in my naivete, I wanted to avoid going public with the issue of homosexuality for as long as I could in one sense.
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I was afraid that it might be a distraction to the gospel and a distraction to expository preaching to focus on a hot button issue like that and know that every word that you say is going to be distorted once it gets into the hands of your opponents.
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But here's some of the thinking right along the lines of what you were saying, that as I thought through it, we can't avoid the issue.
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And you're exactly right. This is going to become a dividing line between a vanilla brand of superficial evangelicalism and those that are actually pursuing a gospel -centered ministry, seeking to be biblical, and realizing that homosexuals need to be rescued from their sin.
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We need to be able to deal with that. There was also a part of me that didn't want, that there was a sense of propriety.
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You know, I grew up in a pretty conservative area. There was just a sense of propriety about talking about these things so openly.
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But here's what I kind of concluded. We can't ignore this issue. It's not going to go away.
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And we can't stop it. The homosexual lobby is strong. The media supports them.
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And it's always going to be in our face, so to speak. And so what we have to do is we have to be willing to step up and respond to it.
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The Bible speaks to it clearly. And if we are going to proclaim the whole counsel of the word of God, then from time to time, we're going to have to address this, address it in a gospel -centered way that invites homosexuals to come to Christ.
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I don't hate homosexuals. I'm not afraid of them. I don't have anything against them. I just know that they're like any other sinner.
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And as an ordained minister of the gospel of Christ, I need to bring the gospel to them. In part, that will include convicting them of their homosexuality, but in a much broader sense, we need to confront them with the whole counsel of God's word and trust
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Him to use that in their lives. Don, it reminds me of Luther's quote, if I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God, except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking,
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I am not confessing Christ. However boldly I may be professing Christ, where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved.
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And to be steady on all the battlefields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.
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Yeah, that's really convicting as a pastor, isn't it? And humbling and ennobling at the same time.
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Amen. Let's talk a little bit more about the same -sex attraction. So when
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Piper writes in his book, Let Marriage Be Held in Honor, and this is a quote from the article that Nick writes, it would be right to say that same -sex desires are sinful in the sense that they are disordered by sin and exist contrary to God's revealed will.
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But to be caused by sin and rooted in sin, now with italics, does not, end italics, make a sinful desire equal to sinning.
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Sinning is what happens when rebellion against God expresses itself through our disorders. What's your take on that statement?
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Well, I'd be happy to give you my take on that if I thought I had any idea what he was saying at one level because it's, you know,
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I saw that statement and read it two or three times and gave up on trying to make any sense out of it.
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I think it's a nonsensical statement and it's very, very confusing. Let me put it this way in terms of what
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I think that the overall article is trying to say. The thing that's so troubling and it's so superficial in the thinking about this article is that it's obvious that the writer of the article is saying that when, and we would agree with him on this, when he goes into having a targeted lust toward a specific individual and he allows his heart to go in that direction, he is sinning.
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That there is a targeted disposition toward a particular man. And that is sin and I agree with him on that.
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Here's where I think the whole tenor of the article and what the quote from John Piper said,
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I think this is what they're completely missing. You know, Jesus said in Mark chapter seven, verses 21 to 23, that it's out of the heart that evil desires come.
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And he's addressing the heart and the heart needs to be converted. What the effect of this article, even if it's not intended,
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I don't think the author had really thought through everything that he'd said. And when you've read in this area, you can see how superficial the breadth of his reading is for what he said, because there's so many important things that he didn't address.
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That being said, basically what this article says is that the targeted disposition toward a man is sinful.
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However, the controlling disposition of my heart being oriented toward homosexual attraction is not sinful.
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That's okay. And I believe that that is a complete misunderstanding of the gospel and what
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Christ says about the nature of sin. It's the desires for an individual man can come out of a controlling disposition.
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And it's not just that we need to control those targeted desires. The whole disposition needs to be changed.
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The whole disposition needs to be repented of because the very disposition, by his own words, the very disposition of that man is oriented toward that which
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God calls an abomination. And so we can't have a heart that is settled and self -approving in a disposition toward a level of life that God absolutely condemns in his word.
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It turns the gospel on its head, and it also has very practical ramifications in the realm of sanctification for those who are struggling with those desires.
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So Don, if I try to link this to heterosexual sinful desires, is this apples and oranges?
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Are these the same things where we have a different sex attraction? Is that also just as bad?
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Is it equal? Is it along the same level? Or are you saying it's different? Well, I would say this.
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I've been married to my wife Nancy for over 25 years now. And if I had a settled heart disposition toward wanting other women that I never acted on,
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I would be guilty of the very heart of adultery, as Jesus said in Matthew 5,
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I think it's verse 28, that we have to realize that our hearts are supposed to be sanctified, not just our outer conduct.
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And so there would be sinfulness in a single man or a married man accepting a disposition of his heart that was not toward marital monogamy.
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Now, having said that, and so at that sense, there is a comparison that the dispositions are both sinful and that heterosexuals and homosexuals are both guilty of this.
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I think that there is a violation of God's created order in the homosexual disposition because from the very beginning in Genesis 2, he ordained that one man and one woman would be the exclusive expression of sexual intimacy within a marriage relationship.
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And the homosexual orientation violates that heterosexual design that God wired into creation.
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And so it's a controlling disposition that rebels against the very order that God established from the beginning.
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Talking to Don Green, pastor of truthcommunitychurch .org. You can go to his website to hear some of his sermons in Titus and you could probably follow him on Facebook as well.
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Don, this all leads me, as we've got one minute left, to my thankfulness and I'm sure your gratitude as well to the
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Savior Christ Jesus who, I mean, who can begin to love what they hate and hate what they love as unbelievers are so enslaved to sin and thinking wrongly, their will's wrong, their emotions are wrong, and then for God to regenerate us and have us washed and renewed, this is something that only
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God can do. Rules and laws and moralism can't save, only the gospel can, and we're glad for that, aren't we?
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Well, that's exactly right. And Titus 3 speaks to that, that we were once foolish ourselves, deceived by various and enslaved by various lusts, but the kindness of God appeared and saved us through a work of the
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Holy Spirit on our hearts, justified us and made us heirs of eternal life. The gospel was able to transform me, it's transformed every true believer, and it is a message of hope to those who are enslaved in this homosexual lifestyle and disposition.
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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.
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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE its staff or management.