Evangelistic Ops

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.

Every Christian Is an Evangelist

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and today I'd like to talk about interesting evangelistic experiences, interesting evangelism. Here's the premise today. I would like you to think of yourself as an evangelist, not a paid evangelist per se, but I want you to think about your job as a witness for Christ Jesus.

It is your privilege, it is your duty, it is your obligation. We have the Great Commission, and you are to go make disciples. You make disciples by going, by teaching, by baptizing. You must not think that you pay the pastors and the elders and the bishops and the deacons of your church to go do the business of evangelism.

You are an evangelist. And one man said, you're either a missionary or an imposter. And so you need to go out with that kind of attitude. It's one thing to be in a church worship service, corporately singing the hymns, listening to good preaching, and then say, well, I can't wait to do that next week.

It's another to live your life as an ambassador for Christ Jesus where you are, at home, at work, in the marketplace, conducting business, and then go get together with the saints on Sundays and then corporately worship this great God.

In theology, we say the church gathers to be edified, that is on Sunday, for worship services or other days of the week, Lord's Day and other days. And then the church scatters to evangelize, gather for edification, scatter for evangelism.

There's not one verse in the Bible that says, invite your unbelieving friends to church. Now, if you do, that would be fine, but here's what I think you should do instead. Don't invite anybody to church until you've already preached them the real gospel, the full gospel, the good news gospel, the sovereign grace gospel.

And once you preach to them, then invite them to church. And so it's the old slogan where people say, the pastor says, you know, I get paid to be good, and congregation, you're good for nothing. In other words, I get paid to preach the Bible and you don't get paid anything, but then there's the subtle innuendo as well.

When you go out, you ought to walk out of your church thinking I am now entering the mission field. I know many missionaries who have been great missionaries at a home first, and then the Lord sends them out.

Contrarily, I know other people who want to be sent out by missions teams, by mission boards, by local churches, yet they're horrible witnesses. They're horrendous missionaries in their own backyard. They won't even do missionary work locally.

Why would God send them off internationally? They want to go off internationally because it's just more romantic. It's just more cool. It's just, oh, and now I get paid to do that. I want you, if you're listening via podcast or on WVNE 760 AM, I want you to think of yourself as an evangelist and as a missionary wherever you go.

Whether you go to Subway, whether you go to the post office, you are a Christian by the grace of God, and if you are such, then you know enough to talk about sin, the Savior, and salvation. You know enough to tell people about the guilt of sin, the grace of Christ Jesus, perfect life, death, and resurrection, and gratitude that should be response to those things, grace and guilt.

And so you ought to go out and go around and evangelize other folks. I mean, just the goodness of God, that today I had to go to the doctor's office. And so I went into the doctor's office as a podiatrist to look at some kind of thing on my foot.

I thought, yes, I'm getting to be quite old. I actually was going to get some new life insurance, and they said, well, how old are you? And I said, 49 and a half. And they said, well, we count the half.

Six months of gestation we count, and so we technically consider you 50 years old. I thought, wow, I'm getting closer to the senior citizen discount at Denny's, although I don't feel 50. I went to the podiatrist, now back to the story, and we began to talk a little bit, and I told them I used to work in the operating room, and the guy said, well, what do you do now?

The doctor did. And I said, well, now I'm a pastor of a Bible-teaching church. And he looked at me and he said, oh. I said, yes, West Boylston on the other side of the reservoir, Bethlehem Bible Church.

And he looked at me, I thought it was a joke, but he was quite serious, said, do you teach the Bible? I said, yes. He said, well, that's pretty easy, right? And I thought, well, you don't live in my world, but I'll play along, Simon says, or something like that.

And we struck up a conversation, and we talked a little bit about what the Bible says and how we teach it to people and why it's important. And he asked, well, how can we really know it's the Bible? And we talked a little bit about that.

Another nurse is now coming in, and she came in and she's listening. And then I was asked the question. And I was asked this question, what about new books today? Why aren't any new books being written and added to the Bible?

After all, over hundreds of years, there were additions to the book, and so what about now? And I said, well, there's lots of reasons. One, we have everything we need to know about God, and we have everything we need to know about forgiveness in Christ Jesus, redemption, heaven and hell, how to live now, everything pertaining to life and godliness, we need nothing else.

The scriptures are sufficient. Number two, the last book of the Bible, the last chapter in the last book of the Bible, says in Revelation chapter 22, that if you add anything to this book, that is, you add more books to this book, then you are going to be condemned.

It says in chapter 22 of verse 18, I testified everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book. If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city which are written in this book.

And he said, well, that's quite interesting. I like that answer. He said, I asked my Catholic priest that question and he didn't have an answer. Well, we began to talk. The next thing you know, we're talking about heaven.

We're talking about hell. We're talking about things that pertain to salvation. And I said, you have to be perfect to get into heaven. And he said, where does it say that? And I said, well, let's take a look at it from two different perspectives.

One, Jesus said that in Matthew chapter five, verse 48. And he said, I'm going to go home and look that up. I said, that would be great. Two, James chapter two, verse 10 says, if you break one law, you're held accountable for all the law.

It's not like a BB gun going through a window. It's like a sledgehammer smashing this pane of glass. It's just all done. It's no longer perfect. And so I said, if you are God, first of all, I said, if you think about heaven, is your view of heaven that it's a perfect place?

Yes. When people sin and God takes sinful people and brings them up to heaven uncleansed, then that heaven is no longer perfect. And he said, yeah, I never really thought about it that way. I said, so God has to declare you righteous.

God has to forgive you. God has to punish his son in your place for you to get to heaven. And he said, oh, that's very interesting. And so I said, well, I have to come back in two weeks for another treatment.

Get your Bible questions answered and ready, and I'll try to answer them in two weeks. Well, fascinatingly, I said to myself, this could prove out to be good. The nurse came in with a notepad and said, what were those verses again that you were talking about?

And I gave her Matthew 5, verse 48, James 2, verse 10, and Colossians 2, the chapter we were talking about, how Jesus, when he pays for a sinner's sin, he pays for their past, present, and future sins.

It is a complete salvation. It is a salvation that is so wonderful, nothing else needs to be paid. It is a salvation that is complete, that is, every sin that you have ever committed and will commit is placed on Christ Jesus, and then he bears the holy wrath of God and satisfies the wrath of God, and that's called propitiation.

Colossians 2 is a great chapter. Listen to this marvelous text. When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive together with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us, and he has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

When he had disarmed the rulers and authorities, he made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through him. And so Jesus has a complete victory at Calvary between Good Friday and Easter morning, resurrection Sunday morning.

Jesus goes and proclaims to the spirits who were in prison that he is victorious, that he has completed his great victory, and he made a public display of them, having triumphed over them. And so we have this complete forgiveness found in Christ Jesus that is good to tell other people.

The way MacArthur always does it is by saying, oh, what do I do for a living? I go around all over the world and tell people how they can have their sins forgiven in Christ Jesus. Every sin they've ever committed, you could have forgiven.

Are you interested? And so John has the idea that he is going out into the marketplace, into commerce, because he is a witness for Christ Jesus. I thought about it the other day. You can go to Walmart and there's all kinds of people and high turnover.

You never really see the same people there twice. But you go to your local butcher shop, your local bakery, and you get to know the people. And so I'm not one of these anti-Walmart people, anti-big business people, but I am a let's get to know local people because then you can get to know them on a personal basis.

I did leave the podiatrist and I went to Walmart and I said, well, it's snowy out today and people are afraid of the snow. I said, are you afraid of the snow and the weather and the road? She said, no.

And I don't know why I said it, but I said, are you afraid of anything? She said, no. And she said, are you? I said, I'm afraid to stand before God on judgment day without my sins forgiven. And I just thought I was on a roll.

We might as well talk about it. And we talked a little bit more and she said, oh, she said, my sins are forgiven. And by then it's off to get to the next person in line and here's your receipt. And did you get all the groceries out of their spindles in the Walmart spindle area that sometimes rob you of groceries?

We need, you need to think like a missionary would think. You are where you are for a reason. You know who you know for a reason, providentially. You have the neighbors you have for a reason, providentially, and you are a recipient of the good news.

Good news. I just looked out the window of the good news. You know the truth. You have been known by God. You love because he first loved you. Wouldn't you want to tell somebody if you had the cure for cancer and you didn't tell your friends dying of cancer, I'd think of you pretty poorly.

And so you have better news than the cure for cancer. And that is Christ Jesus, the God-man, the one in whom the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form, the firstborn from the dead, the one who has trampled down Satan, death, hell, and sin.

And he knows sinners personally. And you know that truth. And you need to realize that your friends have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. If they're not a Christian, the personal relationship is one of mortal enemies.

They would kill Jesus if they could, but they just have a veneer, a sheen of sophistication and of small-g kind of godliness according to society. And so they don't do that. Well, they can't do that.

But you need to tell them the truth. And so look for people to tell the truth too. And when you meet someone, you go, oh, look who God placed in front of me. The two great commandments are love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

And so when you see someone in your path, providentially, you ought to consider that person a neighbor. And when you meet people, you need to be able to turn the conversation into a discussion on the Bible.

And I think that's a very wise advice. And there's a technique. I don't mean a one, two, three-step technique, but there's got to be some thought process that goes into this. How can I get from the Red Sox and the Bruins and the Celtics and the Patriots to talk about eternal things?

I'm all for watching a football game here or there, but there's got to be a way that we can transition from temporal to spiritual, from earthbound to heavenbound, and we just need to do that. Who else is going to tell your friends?

Who else is? Your Roman Catholic neighbors need to know the truth about free and sovereign grace. And we want to be kind. We don't want to be offensive. But the gospel is offensive. And if you see someone live in a pagan life, an unbelieving life, a life that shows that they're enslaved to sin and self, they need to be rescued, and God rescues through the preaching of the cross.

That's Romans 10. There's a message about Christ that needs to be delivered, and you are the messenger. Faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. By the way, I just was looking at Romans chapter 10, and maybe this is the podiatry verse, Romans 10, 15, how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things.

Maybe I'll tell that to the podiatrist in two weeks. Friends, you are an evangelist. You are a missionary, and you on judgment day, not for your sins, not that judgment day, not the great white throne, but the Bema Seat judgment, 2 Corinthians 5, verse 10, that judgment day that you'll have to give an answer.

So why don't you just go out into the world and think everybody around me is here for a reason. I remember one man came into my office, and he said, I live with my girlfriend, and I've got some problems, and I've got some anxiety problems.

And I said, well, you know, are you sleeping together? I mean, intimately sleeping together, because who knows, maybe they were sleeping on, he was on the couch and she was in the basement, I don't know.

It had been six years, eight years, that they were living together and sleeping together. And I said, well, I just have one thing that I need to talk to you about that's more important than anything else.

And that is what the Bible teaches, what God says about your state of living. You're living in an unrighteous state. And that unrighteous state proves that you're not a Christian. 1 Corinthians 6, verse 9, or do you not know, you should know, that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Do not be deceived. It's easy to be deceived, because we have friends and relatives and loved ones, and it's easy to deceive ourselves, because we think we're going to keep Jesus as Savior, but not make him Lord till later.

Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor homosexual, et cetera, will inherit the kingdom of God. And for the Church of Corinth, they used to be that way, but they're not anymore. That's why they're called saints.

And so we need to remind people that, as I reminded this young man, you are not going to go to heaven if you die tonight. You have no claim on heaven. Now, I don't personally know the people's hearts, but based on your own testimony, you have no claim to go to heaven.

If you die tonight, you're going to bust hell wide open. Well, that particular man had to go to the hospital for an anxiety attack, and I don't want anybody to get hurt. I don't want any kind of physical problem to happen to anyone.

But I was actually glad in one sense. And that sense is this, that I was glad that the person had a conscience, and they realized there was a heaven, and there was a hell, and that they were going to go there.

And what I said was true. What the Bible says was accurate. It was reliable, and it should cause you to have a wake-up call. I made a call not too long ago to a young man who grows up in the church, learns about the Bible, understands what Scripture says, and what happens to a young man.

Young men, many times a woman will come along, and the man's desire to have a girlfriend, to live in society, many times it's a sexual thing. They'd rather have sex with a woman than follow the Lord, and they just need to be told in kindness and in love, and without people yelling and being angry.

I said, you know, I want to talk to you like I'd talk to my son, that there's a reason why you're not at church anymore. There's a reason why you're not studying the Bible anymore. There's a reason why you're not attracted to the things of God, and that is because if you were doing those things, it would be difficult to sleep with your girlfriend with a clean conscience, and you would be in the middle of the act of sleeping with her, and Bible verses would be coming to your head, and you'd be realizing fornication is a sin.

It dishonors God. It is a vile sin in the face of God, and that is not what God has intended. God has created sex, and God has created intimacy for those in marriage. It's a good gift when it's taken rightly and used in the right place, but you can't read the Bible because you're gonna have sin come to your conscience because you'll have Bible verses popping in your mind, and that would make it no fun, and so I said, I'm not mad at you.

I'm not angry at you. I just want to tell you the truth. I said, I think you respect me because I tell the truth, and here's just some more truth. Your friends will tell you the truth, so we want to be careful.

If you meet with people and you talk to them about sin, like Romans says you should, and how wrath of God is revealed against unrighteousness and ungodliness because men suppress the truth and unrighteousness, and they say, like someone said to me years ago at my house, oh, we have a new little baby, and the baby's about six months old and very cute and all that, and this particular person said, my baby's never sinned, and then they said, well, frankly, they're probably about 30 years old.

I've never sinned either, and so what do you do with something like that? I mean, that's just kind of a softball. Today, the person would say their daughter's a sinner because the daughter has grown up, and you don't have to teach sin to those who are fallen creatures in Adam, and we need to just address it.

If there's people thinking that they're not sinful, that they just have a disease, a syndrome, I've got some kind of mental illness, some kind of spiritual illness, it's not really a biblical issue, then there's no hope for them.

Proverbs 28, 13 makes it clear, and the clear teaching from Solomon there is if you've got a sin and you want to cover it and rename it or disclaim it or blame it on environment, blame it on God, blame it on something else, then there's no mercy for you, but if you've got a sin and you call it sin and you repent of it and confess it and you agree with God about what it is and how vile it is and turn from it by the grace of God, you get mercy.

You get mercy. And so society just changes everything around. I met someone once and they said, the problem with Christians is they don't love each other, and I think anger is really wrong and sinful.

And then I said to this particular person, well, you've just told me that God did something very bad to one of your children, and there was some kind of horrible thing going on, and now you're angry at God.

So I guess it's okay. It's wrong for other Christians to be mad at each other, but it's okay for you to be mad at God. People talk about forgiving God, I'm angry at God. Friends, you might have a very difficult, difficult, difficult life, but your life will only get harder if you want to blame God for something.

God is generous, God is good, and He makes the rain fall on even unjust people. He gives marital bliss and matrimony and intimacy between husband and wife. He gives children, He gives taste buds, He gives all kinds of fellowship and delights to people.

And so those people are even sinful and would kill Him if they could. God is good and never to be blamed for any kind of sin. He's never blame-worthy at all. What you need to do if you're listening to WVNE 760, NoCompromiseRadio .com, you need to consider yourself a missionary.

You want not to read great missionary books by David Brainerd, Aron William Carey, or Adoniram Judson sent off here, I think the first American from the American soil ever sent from America to go to another place to preach the gospel, Salem, Massachusetts.

You ought to consider yourself a missionary. Don't read about the great missionaries and say, oh, that's a wonderful story. You are a missionary. Matthew 28 is clear, clear, clear. You are a missionary and you ought to go make disciples by teaching and by baptizing.

You say, oh, I don't know enough. Well, if you're a Christian, you know enough about sin and the Savior. But why don't you study more? I've always found it fascinating that when I study a book of the Bible, study a passage, study a point of theology, the Lord gives me opportunities to bring it up in my conversation with other people.

And when I have a point that I need to look at, then something comes up and I go, oh, I just studied that. It wasn't luck, it wasn't fate, it wasn't happenstance. It really worked out wonderfully because the God had used that in my life because I was studying it.

So what do we do? We say to ourselves, we are missionaries, and that we go out and have the privilege to obey God and tell people about Christ Jesus. Then you don't have to worry about numbers. You don't have to worry about having people signing the cards and doing all that stuff.

You just go tell people about how they can have all their sins forgiven in Christ Jesus. How about this for a good prayer? Lord, help me turn all conversations, every discussion to you and your Son and your grace and mercy.

Help me spin the conversation towards the Bible. Give me wisdom to make things go straight to eternal conversations. And then you get the blessings of that very thing. God is so good, He answers a prayer and then He gives you the fruit of it as well.

Ephesians 2, verse 10, "'There are good works prepared for every good Christian. "'Now go walk in them.'". Go walk in those good works that were prepared before eternity started. After I talked to the podiatrist, after I talked to the woman at Walmart, after I talked to other people that I mentioned today, I felt great because God rewards you with the feelings of goodness.

You are a missionary. NoCompromiseRadio .com, go preach the gospel to every creature. God bless you.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE in staff or management.