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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, a ministry.
We have a theme here. Oh, by the way, my name is Mike Abendroth. And our theme is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. So there you have it. I have this new app on my iPhone that the kids like, and you can record something.
And then play it backwards, and then you can figure out how you sound with the Beatles record, John is Dead. I just watched the other day the genius movie put together by Ray Comfort. I thought that was interesting.
What am I going to talk about today? Now the last two shows that I�ve taped today, I taped, this will be show three today, I did a show on intinction. That�s one of my new favorite words, et cetera. Irregardless, one of my new favorite words is intinction.
And then I followed that show by what to do if you sin in your dreams, in your dreams. So I thought I better go mainstream right now. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about a new book that so far I have not received from Thomas Nelson, but they should send me a book, especially after this review, available wherever books and e-books are sold.
Let me just give you the kind of the ad slogan stuff for this. Do you pay a visit to Bedford Falls every Christmas? Does December feel incomplete without a reminder that no man is a failure who has friends?
Are George and Mary Bailey annual guests at your home during the holidays? Well three questions, every no compromise listener should listen to one and ask themselves a question. 52, one per week, heartwarming lessons crafted from the Christmas classic, It�s a Wonderful Life, Bob Welch, 52 Little Lessons.
Now I've been trying to write a few books, see if I can get them published, happy for day one. I was looking for a little larger publisher with my screenwriter and my agent. No, but I�ve sent in a lot of books to Thomas Nelson, but they always come back, rejected.
Maybe I should send them to Tommy Nelson in Denton, Texas, maybe that would be better. Maybe if I co-wrote a book with him, Tommy Nelson on Thomas Nelson, it would sell, I'm not sure. Well, here we have a heartwarming lesson, Times 52.
And so when I see this, I read some of the reviews on Amazon, moralistic, therapeutic deism. Now the show for a show sake, fine, I'm not going to tell the kids they can't watch the show. Someone was telling me about a legalistic church in the last week and I thought to myself, stay away from KOA, you're going to kill the people there with all that legalism.
But I will say this, moralistic lessons crafted from the hands of Thomas Nelson, it doesn't really stick in my craw with much glee, with much joy. I don't really like that. This is no different as far as I'm concerned from Leave It to Beaver Bible studies.
You can get VHS, not VHS, probably VHS too by now, VBS curriculum, Mayberry RF, is it D, RFD, FBI? Mayberry NCIS where Andy Griffith and DeGomer Pyle and what's the guy's name who played the fish in the Disney movie?
Limpet? Mr. Limpet? Who's Mr. Limpet? It's not Don Rickles. I want to say Rickles. What's the guy's name? Oh, come on. Don Rickles. That's not it. I can see his face. Anyway, you know, be good, be nice.
You don't need the gospel for that, by the way. You don't need the gospel to say lose some weight, be nice to friends, be warm and loving, have some inspirational, it's a wonderful life kind of moments, home is where the heart is, family's at the center, remember your top priorities.
The gospel, you don't need for that. So maybe I'm going to be tricked. Maybe this is a ploy to get moralistic people to buy this book and then slip them the mickey of the gospel, but I doubt it. And so this is one book that is going to be passed on by No Compromise Radio.
Well, you cannot run from indinction. Presbytery, Church of America's Blue Ridge Presbytery, in a 26 to 24 to one vote to ban communion by indinction, said, as Christ has instituted the Lord's Supper in two sacramental actions, the communicants are to eat the bread and to drink the cup in separate actions.
Gabble. 26 to 24 to one. I think it's going to be overturned. What else is in the news now? In this potpourri show today, I never write down Christian potpourri for 300 on the website because I don't know how to spell potpourri, and when I'm typing in the MP3 that goes to the FileZilla account to go to the radio.
See, here's what we do. The intro and the outro are added by Mario. I just send in the show to the, I was going to say churches, but the radio's website, and then it can be downloaded by Mario and redone and then re-uploaded, and then the radio station has it.
So that's our central docking station. But when you send things in through the MP3 through FileZilla, there's no spell check, no little red squiggly line underneath. So I don't usually say potpourri. But in this news-filled day here on No Compromise Radio, I found it interesting that the Adventists, i .e., Seventh-day Adventists, Seventh-day meaning Saturday, Adventists meaning Jesus is going to return, said that two decisions by their regional bodies to allow ordained female pastors were, quote, serious mistakes, end quote.
Now here's the thing that makes me so fascinated by this, and of course I live in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Lancaster, Massachusetts, not Lancaster, PA, although that's a fun place to go visit. If you'd like to see good works get you to heaven and abuse on sanctification, that's a nice place to visit.
Uber nice. Somebody's got a church there that I know. I can't remember who it is. Good church, I mean. New England's regional headquarters or the headquarters for regional New England for the Seventh-day Adventists is in Lancaster.
So when you go to the grocery store right down the street, Shaw's, which is technically in Clinton, but on the same street that the Atlantic Union College would be in and all their regional headquarters.
And by the way, a cool little bookstore. I went to their bookstore and it's all Seventh-day Adventist stuff, but it smells funky because they sell mill and peat moss and I don't know, other kind of vitamins in the back, probiotics.
What do you call different meals? There's oatmeal, there's cornmeal, there's hungry man. Anyway, that smells all very interesting when you go into their store. Anyway, you go to that store, you go to Shaw's, the grocery store down the street, you see a huge tofu section.
Why? Duh, it's not because New Englanders are wanting to be that healthy. It's because they are Seventh-day Adventists and Ellen G. White said through allegedly hearing from God that kids shouldn't have eggs, husbands shouldn't have any red meat, they might start acting crazy, you don't want to harm your kids by giving them meat.
So anyway, let's throw them back under Old Testament law. That'll do with a few exceptions through a lady who should have been reading the sinful dreams responses in Richard Baxter's book, but I'm sure she didn't know who Baxter was.
Well, here's the funny thing. Can't ordain women if you're a Seventh-day Adventist. Soon it will happen because once they start having the conference to talk about it, decisions by the Maryland-based Columbia Union Conference and California-based Pacific Union Conference came as the worldwide church bodies in the midst of a broad study, no pun intended, they're the ones who wrote it, of the theology of ordination.
It's from Christianity Today, December 2012. Well, I just find this fascinating and very, very non-illogical. Not non-illogical, but very illogical. It's not logical. Why? Because you have the religion, they would say, founded by Jesus Christ, a man, but basically when you put Ellen G. White's writings on level with Scripture, some put them over, some put them under, but still included, you've got the Scripture plus Ellen G. White thinking she speaks for God.
Why would you not have women ordained? Now, I don't go for women ordination because if you read the Bible, it's super simple, and you can play all kinds of tricks and have your carnival mirrors out and smoke and cultural trajectories and hermeneutical hypotheses, but it's very simple.
You read 1 Timothy chapter 2 and 3, and it is S-I-M-P-L-E, B-I-N-G-O. Well, I just can't believe that they care about it, because if the religion starts, if the sect starts with a woman, then what do they care?
So anyway, that's just my two cents worth today. Dinesh D'Souza, who was a Catholic apologist and he became the president of a Christian college, said something that I thought, what kind of—this could come right out of the Message Bible—leaders should know better.
We all learn, we all struggle, we all grow, we're all sinful. I get the curve. But if you're the president of a college—okay, I'm not a president. I think I'm the president, CEO, C-F-O, C-E-E-O of No Compromise Radio.
I think pretty much the buck stops here. I'm at the top of the list. No Compromise Radio is in apposition to and equal to Mike Abendroth. And if I know, and I'm a nobody radio host, if I know that if you're not divorced yet, you shouldn't be dating, how can this apologist?
He said, quote, I did not have any idea. I had no inkling. That it is seen as wrong. See how he said that? Very, very smart presidential talk. Not that it is wrong, because then he'd be admitting wrong, but it's seen as wrong.
I didn't have any idea that it's seen as wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced, even though separated. I didn't get that. I'm a Christian apologist by self-proclamation, and I'm the president of the King's College.
Well, of course, he stepped down, and the King's College pretty much is getting what they deserved. And that is, if you're going to be a Protestant institution and hire a Roman Catholic, then probably bad things are going to happen.
So here's my question. I did not have any idea that it is seen as wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced, even though separated. So when people at Bethlehem Bible Church and No Compromise writers write and say, my wife left me, she's an unbeliever, and I met this new girl, could be the girl of my dreams.
I said, okay, if I date her, okay, if I go do things, if we court, if we work towards marriage together, if we talk like that, the answer is no. Until you're separated, then you can't do it? Of course not.
Until you're divorced. Going through the big D, I don't mean Dallas. That word, divorced. Now, you want to try to play games as a president. I'm not saying he did this. But if you're a president of your own mind, you want to play games, well, carrizzo, the word for divorce means to separate.
And so separation is really a divorce. Well, if the government thinks you're divorced, then you ought not to be dating at all. Forget what our views on divorce and remarriage might be. If you're still married, technically, that is, through the state, you ought not to be thinking about other women, or if you're a woman, thinking about other men.
So for the president to say that, I just find that pretty amazing. All right, what else do I want to talk about on No Compromise Radio? Christianity Today, they're killing me. They're killing me with this edition in December 2012.
You know, they talk about some topics that are, you know, life-threatening and life-sustaining and some of the most important things that you could ever talk about. And they're writing about that. I guess if you run out of things to say, then you have to come up with things like this.
Under discussion, they have a little section, and then they have five or six people chime in. Because this is a blog-influenced world, and what do you say? Your own two cents. What do these panelists say?
I'm still waiting for my first phone call from Christianity Today to be on their panel, and I've never been on a panel of anything. Well, Todd Friel had me on a panel once and asked me some questions, and he asked me all the hard ones.
Trevor Waxey, yeah, he gave him the slow slide or curveballs. No, he didn't. He gave me those. I still owe Todd. So under discussion here, should churches discourage belief in Santa Claus? When you have to write that, it's about time to kind of seal things up.
You don't really need to have a magazine any longer. You could just go online. You can just have Rupert Murdoch buy it out or something. You know, you can just kind of just stop. You can insert Jim Morrison here and the rest of the doors.
This is the end. Beautiful friend, the end. And then you can have it, the Apocalypse Now soundtrack with the helicopters in the background. Now listen, the answers are what's crazy. Michael Chandley, Executive Director of International Network of Children's Ministry, says, the true story of St. Nicholas is about a life lived radically for Jesus.
Right on, baby. Santa teaches us how to give us joy, give with joy, and receive gifts with gladness. See, it's a double deal there. You learn to give, you learn to receive. Don't discourage belief in Santa.
Instead, spend time encouraging people to put their belief in God. You got to be known for what you're for and not what you're against. All right, I'm going to replay my pet peeve series. I think that got me in some trouble the first time I played it.
I think I need some time off. So coming up in the next four months, we're going to do the pet peeve series. And that's one of my pet peeves. We want to be known for what we're for, not what we're against.
Well, then you're not Pauline. You're not Petrine. You're not Hebrewine. You're not Johannine. You are, of your own mind, I think we won't say anything against any false doctrine or false people because we want to be known for what we're for.
By definition, Christianity is a propositional religion full of propositional truths. And if you deny one truth, the opposite of it, its antithetical reverse or inverse is going to be wrong. So now the other one, though, is even more interesting to me.
Under discussion. This is a big discussion. This is Christianity today. Should churches discourage belief in Santa Claus? Now we're moving down the from yes to no area. Yes is green along the bar. No is red.
And I'm reading the two middlers here. The two in the very middle. But if this is towards more of the no side, okay? I'm trying to think of how many sermons I've preached against Santa since I've been here.
Churches should be in the business of encouraging belief in Jesus, okay? Not micromanaging which bits of folklore parents choose to include in their family holidays. Santa gives us opportunities to show our kids the love Jesus brought into the world.
Wow, see, I didn't know what that meant. All the time that I put the carrots out and waited up late at night thinking I could hear something when I was a kid. See, I didn't know that. Now here's the most interesting part of that.
It's written by Karen Dahlstrand. I hope that's not her maiden name. Rivadeneria, okay? That is her last name. Forget the folklore stuff. Remember, we're not micromanaging which bits of parental folklore they choose to include in family holy holidays.
Well, she's known for this, according to Christianity Today. She wrote something. And her book is called Mama's Got a Fake ID. That is such a Santa belly laugh. I couldn't laugh directly into the microphone that Phil Johnson approves or else it was going to be screaming in your ears.
Now let's see. Ruth Moon compiled these under discussion debates. And so she got Scotty May, professor of Wheaton College, Leon Wirth, executive director of Parenting and Youth Focus on the Family, Phil Vischer, Veggie Tales and What's in the Bible, Dennis Holm, professor at Azusa Pacific, and Michael Chanley.
I read his deal there, executive director, International Network of Children's Ministry. And, you know, I guess I can see we've got a Wheaton College professor and we've got Veggie Tales creator. And so I kind of see, can't you tell that these things all coalesce, right?
But then we've got the author of Mama's Got a Fake ID. Oh, do I get to expense this book? What do I do? What do I do with this, with this magazine? I mean, and lastly, I have to tell you, see, if I didn't convince you in the last part of No Compromise Radio that Christianity Today is just off their, their, their deep end.
They're just, I don't know who, who are the executive directors here since they're never going to invite me to be on here. Mike Abendroth's new book, allegedly. Editor, Mark Gally, G-A-L-L-I. Executive editor, Andy Crouch, C-R-O-U-C-H.
Managing editor, Caitlin Beattie. Ted Olson. Who else? Some names in here that I recognize. Let's see, Tim Tebow. Just kidding. Tim Stafford. He wrote a book I liked. Timothy George. Scott McKnight. Thomas Oden.
J .I. Packer. Wow. Editors at large, Daryl Bach. Colin Hansen. Rob Moll. I've had him on the show, actually, on The Death Book. That was pretty good. Philip Yancey. And Mark Knoll is a contributing editor.
Who else is in here? Ajith Fernando. He's a DTS guy. Roger Olson. Armenian anti-Calvinist. Okay. Well, we've come quite a ways from Carl Henry and Harold Lenzel, haven't we? Can't we all agree with that?
I agree with that statement. I think we have. Well, back here, there's another section that's fairly new. It's written by Rachel Marie Stone. And Rachel Marie Stone, she has a book coming out that's called Eat with Joy, Redeeming God's Gift of Food.
That's in her varsity. And she blogs. And she has a section here called Her .Menudix. Her .Menudix. So clever. I'll grant her that. And her title this time, and this is very important. You know, if you're a Christian, you need to know what's going on today, don't you?
Breastfeeding in the Back Pew. Why are we so uncomfortable when nursing mothers imitate God in church? Don't look behind you. She's imitating God. Well, it wasn't that long ago when I did a show on imitating God.
Ephesians chapter 5. And for some reason in the Hebrew, in the Septuagint, and in the Aramaic, and then specifically in the New Testament Greek in Ephesians 5 .1 and following, I did not see something about lactation.
Somehow I didn't see that. How widespread the no breastfeeding rule is in U .S. churches is hard to say. But one thing's clear. Our squeamishness over breastfeeding has little precedent in the church.
Instead, Christians have long celebrated this aspect of Jesus' early life. Church father Ephraim the Syrian wrote a collection of hymns on the Nativity, including this, which connects the humble picture of Jesus nursing from his mother Mary's breast to Jesus' general provision as king of all creatures.
It goes like this. The lofty one became like a little child, yet hidden in him was a treasure of wisdom that suffices for all. He was lofty, but he sucked Mary's milk, and from his blessings all creation sucks.
I have no words. I have no words. She goes on to talk about Ephraim's tender images of Mary nursing Jesus known as Maria lactans, lactation, flourished after the 13th century when theologians and artists began contemplating a fully human Christ.
Now here's what she says at the end, and I think this should be the last issue Christianity today ever puts out because of this kind of article right here. May we come to see the breastfeeding women in our midst, not as sacrilegious temptresses, but as living icons of God's own care for us.
I don't think it's sacrilegious at all for a mom to breastfeed a baby, and I think if she covers up in church and she wants to sit there, that's fine. We have a mother's room. If she'd like to go there, that's fine too.
But this is a little too much even for me regarding her minutics. Uncomfortable when nursing mothers imitate God in the back church. She quotes Isaiah 49 and Isaiah 66 to try to come up with her minutics after, of course, she's quoted these church crazies.
Mike Abendroth here, NoCompromiseRadio .com, and we want you to write us if you have questions, comments, suggestions, improvements, donations. Info at NoCompromiseRadio .com.
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 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.
The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.