James White discusses Rick Warren at Desiring God

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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 apostle
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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 king.
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Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. I'm your host,
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Mike Abendroth, and on Wednesdays, I like to have special guests and their authors and writers and speakers, and today is no different.
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On No Compromise Radio, we're thankful today. I'm very thankful to have James White, Dr. James White online.
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He's the director of Alpha Omega Ministries, as we say in New England, James, Alpha and Omega, welcome.
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And you skipped the and part there, I see, too, okay. Yeah, well, you don't drive down to the cape, you drive down cape.
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You don't go to the cellar, you go to cellar, down cellar. Okay, I don't speak that language, so I'll have to leave it to you.
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James is on the line today, and I specifically, James, wanted to get an update. You've been on the show before.
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What are you working on currently? And then I'd like to talk specifically about the Rick Warren Desiring God issue, but tell us what you're doing lately at Alpha and Omega Ministries.
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Well, I've been doing probably way too many debates. 13 this past year, which is far more than I'm accustomed to doing.
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Obviously, some of that's due to the fact that I've become involved with the folks at the Aramaic Broadcasting Network, which is a satellite network, and I've been doing a lot of TV work with them.
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We've been doing Answering Islam programs, Jesus or Muhammad programs. Many of these are live call -ins, so the
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Muslims will call in, and we have live interaction on the air, and that's really interesting, and doing debates with them and stuff like that.
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But I've done a lot with atheism this year, and I'll be perfectly honest with you, that's not where my heart is. There are lots of people that can deal with atheism, but there are certain aspects of that realm of apologetics that sort of fit into my area, especially biblical apologetics, the history of the
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New Testament, Bart Ehrman -type stuff that does sort of connect in with where my heart really is, and that is dealing with Islam, and the issues that come up in dealing with Islam.
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So I debated a fellow by the name of Silverman, who is the
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Vice President of American Atheists just a few weeks ago in New York, on, is the New Testament evil? And I was supposed to, that was the night
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I was supposed to be debating Christopher Hitchens, but obviously, due to his medical condition, that had to change.
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But back to doing a number of Roman Catholic debates, I debated Robert St. Genes twice in Santa Fe just a few weeks ago on the doctrines of grace, on the bodily assumption of Mary.
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I'll be debating him in a few weeks in Oregon on purgatory. So unfortunately, doing as many debates as I've been doing, over 100 of them now,
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I haven't been able to write for a number of years. So I'm actually going up to Bethany House in Minneapolis next week, and gonna be talking with them about the possibility of some writing projects.
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And if those come through, I'll have a good, solid reason to say, you know, I need to dial back the number of debates that I'm doing for a little while so I can actually concentrate on one area.
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And so that's what I'll be doing. I'm gonna be in Lima, Peru at the end of this, actually starting November 1st, doing pastoral training down there.
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I was in Australia last summer doing some debates with some Muslims down there and speaking at some conferences.
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In fact, I was there with a friend of yours, Phil Johnson, and we watched Australian rules football together.
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That was fun. And so I've just been, let's put it this way, I've already flown twice as many miles this year as I did last year.
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So me and the airlines know each other way too well. Well, have you ridden your bicycle as many miles as you have flown?
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No, no. Unfortunately, I'm at 50 ,000 on the flights and nowhere near that.
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Well, actually I'm at 53 ,000 on the bike, but that's lifetime. So that's not quite the same thing.
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That's all right, James. I was gonna ask you regarding Islam, and I have other topics I'd like to talk about today, but when you hear the proverbial religion of peace, to what degree is that true or false?
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We have a lot of false assumptions as evangelical Christians when it comes to Islam, and I know you've studied the religion very thoroughly.
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When I say religion of peace, you say what? Well, I remember back to seminary when my church history professor was the first person to really introduce me to the subject of Islam.
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And he said, now, Islam means submission. And certainly you hear the shalom, as in shalom, that root that is in both
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Hebrew and Arabic. They can make the argument that it refers to peace, but it's the peace that comes when the conquering general places his foot upon the neck of the defeated king.
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That's the kind of peace that is being discussed. And we do, unfortunately, have a lot of hysteria amongst evangelicals on the subject of Islam right now.
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There are clearly the radical, Quranic, individualistic type guys that are out there that are willing to do anything and think that blowing up planes flying into Detroit is somehow going to promote the cause of Allah.
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There's no question that those things are extremely important and relevant. But there are strong believing
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Muslims who have no intention of blowing themselves or anybody else up.
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They do believe, however, that the only way to peace for mankind is through submission to Allah.
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Now, we have to immediately step back and say, well, yeah, obviously.
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I mean, we would say the only true means of peace for mankind is submission to God and to what
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God says about how we should live our lives. We make that case all the time. We say to people that there are certain behaviors that are life -destroying because God has said they're life -destroying.
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He's our creator. He knows best how we should live. And we don't leave it up to the scientists or the ethicists.
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We believe God has spoken. Well, the Muslim believes the same thing. And when you listen to what are called the radical
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Muslims, one of the reasons they're called radical is they say, well, Islam will someday rule the world.
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Well, we believe every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. So we have to get beyond the knee -jerk reaction type stuff and get down to the why's and wherefore's.
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And I think a lot of us are scared to do that in our culture today. We're scared to say what the
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Bible actually says about the fact that Jesus Christ, how's he described in the book of Revelation?
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He shall rule them with a rod of iron. He is king of kings and Lord of lords. You know, we sing that, but since we don't have kings and lords anymore, we sort of figure that's safe, but that's actually a statement of absolute rulership and authority.
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And certainly there is the sense in which that is true even now in the spiritual realm, the king of God, things like that.
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But there comes a day when all the nations are judged by Christ.
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And Islam is saying something similar to that, but that's where we finally get into what's really meaningful.
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How does Islam bring that submission about? And how does Christianity bring that submission about?
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What are the differences between the two on these levels? And why is it that there are some people who think that terror is enough to bring about submission to Islam, whereas a
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Christian would never think that. That's where the spiritual element comes in. But unfortunately, I'm hearing very little of that.
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What I'm hearing are people that are more than willing to, in essence, make a buck off of fear -mongering in regards to Islam that does not promote any type of meaningful understanding and certainly does not promote meaningful communication between the two sides, which is highly unfortunate.
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So we need to go a little bit deeper than a lot of the stuff that is being thrown out there on the airwaves these days.
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James, I just had two thoughts. My first thought was hysteria sells. Therefore, that's why we have that.
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My second thought was, I was just listening to you talk and speak and preach, and I thought I was listening to The Dividing Line.
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And then I realized, oh, I'm interviewing James. I better have another question ready. This was really weird.
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Well, it's the same voice, I suppose. It is. Well, we're listening today to Dr. James White.
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You can hear him on The Dividing Line. Just go to aomin .org. That's aomin .org, and you'll have a whole panorama and a panoply of good resources there from the
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Reformed faith to the books that he's written, from The God Who Justifies to the
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Roman Catholic Controversy. James, what I'd like to talk about now is John Piper, probably six months ago, asked
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Rick Warren to come speak at his conference, the 2010 Desiring God National Conference, Think the
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Life of the Mind and the Love of God. It was just last weekend, and why
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I called you or emailed you earlier this week was I wanted your opinion on this whole issue.
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I think one of the things you do is, at least when I quote John Calvin from the pulpit, I'm trying to bring in an authoritative source because they might not believe me.
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So if I say a bunch of things, they might not believe me, but I thought to myself, who will be willing to speak the truth at the risk of somehow being ostracized, oh, they're bashing someone?
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I listened to Rick Warren's message and wanted you to, and I have some comments, but I want to hear about your comments first of all, and why are people so in love with this marriage between Piper and Warren?
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Well, we should, I think, mention that I only listened to it under protest because you forced me to, which means that I did not even keep up with it.
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I saw, all of us are so connected anymore that you almost have to purposely disconnect yourself not to see the various amount of chatter that's out there.
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And I heard some discussion of it, but I just didn't want to get into it.
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When I saw all the stuff that was going on during T4G and stuff like that, I was just like, I've got too much else to be doing,
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I'm going to try to avoid all this. So at your request, I downloaded and listened to the material just last evening, and I was once again left somewhat, as everybody was,
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I think initially, when John Piper invited Rick Warren to be there, and of course he wasn't, there were personal reasons why he couldn't be there, so this was a video presentation.
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I was just taken aback because I've never been to a Desiring God conference, personally. If I'm not speaking,
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I'm generally not going because I'm too busy. I've got too much other stuff going on to be able to do that kind of thing, and so I've never been there, but I have a mindset as to what
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I would expect at a Desiring God conference, given the people who've spoken there in the past, and what kind of presentations you'd expect to hear.
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And so I was taken aback when I first heard this, because I've heard a little bit of Warren.
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I have not, I just don't spend my time dealing with that aspect of things. You know, we're both cyclists, so when
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I'm out there on my bike listening to stuff, I'm listening to Sheikh Yasir Qadhi lecturing on Tawhid, or I'm listening to Robert Syngenis in the last radio debate we did on the subject of purgatory, preparing for my next debate.
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I just have too much to be doing to be worrying about these guys. But what I have heard, it's been interesting, he did speak, he was invited to speak at the
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ISNA conference last summer, the Islamic Society of North America. And now that caught my attention, because here you've got about 28 to 30 minutes to say something to 30 ,000
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Muslims. What are you gonna say? Well, he said nothing. He did nothing other than, well, we all need to cooperate in social issues, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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And if I could be given an opportunity to have 30 minutes at ISNA, wow, what an opportunity that would be to give a testimony of who
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Jesus Christ really is, and he's not just a prophet. And it can be done in a respectful way, it can be done in a way that Muslims will understand, they'd know exactly where you're coming from, they'd hear what you were saying.
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That's not what was done. So I criticized that. I posted it on my blog and said, wow, what an utter waste of 28 minutes.
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But when I fired the discussion up last night, what I was not prepared for was an hour's worth of pious platitudes, about 350 of them, just strung together these little pithy sayings that just went all over the landscape.
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And all I could sit there and do other than bang my head on the desk every time he quoted the living
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Bible or the message, which just drives me insane when you don't use a real Bible translation to try to make your points, all
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I could do is sit there and say, if he comes up with one more pithy little statement that is just one of these little, oh, maybe
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I'll remember this, no shallow little things, I'm going to beat my gut for having made me listen to this.
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I really am. And I think I will the next time I'm invited out, which I probably won't be anymore anyways.
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Well, you won't be invited to Desiring God either. Oh, I'm sure I won't, because it's just not what you expect to hear at Desiring God.
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I'm sorry, but when I did type out just one thing, I happened to be in my chat show all the time, when he said, the greatest limitation on your ministry is your own imagination.
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And I just want to go, what? What on earth are you talking about? I mean, if you really bent over backwards, you could come up with some way maybe of trying to find some way of contextualizing some of these statements and reading something decent into them.
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I mean, if you really, really, really, really bent over backwards, you might be able to do that. But should we, when we're going to a conference, we've spent a lot of money to get there, should we be bending over backwards to try to find some way of creating something orthodox out of this?
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Something meaningful out of this? Or are we there to actually hear people who have prepared something that actually is exegetically sound and has some meaningful insights, and it's not just the type of thing you'd expect to hear at a beginning
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Christians class? Well, James, I was also taken aback, I'll be perfectly honest with you, by how many times we heard about how huge Saddleback is, how many converts they've had, how many missionaries they've sent out.
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Of course, they're not full -time missionaries. It's visiting missionaries. But all the rest of this stuff, I was a little taken aback by that.
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I was like, okay, I've heard that now about 47th time. I'm really not certain that that's really helping me with the subject, that I'm really not sure what the subject is anymore anyway.
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Well, didn't you find it interesting when he said, if you're going to learn, you have to be humble? And then he said, I read all 26 volumes of Yale Edwards.
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I'm reading Karl Barth. I give 91 % of my money away. We've baptized 22 ,000 people, and I learn from my critics.
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I read them, and you just learn from people that you agree with. I just could not believe what I was hearing.
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Yeah, yeah, but I don't think he hears it either. I don't think he realizes how that sounds to other people.
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I really don't, and there's just this huge disconnect in my mind between someone sitting there giving us warmed -over psychology as if it's biblical theology of the mind, and someone who says,
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I've read all of Jonathan Edwards. Well, okay, maybe your eyes went over the words, but there's a disconnect between what the words meant, the worldview that communicated, the depth of the theology, and what you're still doing.
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And personally, I got all the BART I needed when I was at Fuller Seminary. I don't know how anybody can read all that stuff.
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I mean, I guess for some people, but what's the use in reading all this stuff if there's no application being made, if it's not making an impact?
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I mean, we did hear about how you have the theological term of the week on the back of the bulletin, but there has to be something more to it than that.
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It's like the sermon that I've preached a couple of times, I preached the first 2001, five points is not enough.
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If that doesn't impact how you do worship and your view of God and the church and things like that, then it's just one element of things has been disconnected.
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And that was the feeling I kept getting, was utter disconnection between the various points that were being made.
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Again, if you bend over backwards, you could probably say, well, okay, there's something I could take out of this point.
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I can leave the draughts beside. I mean, I have to read liberals all the time. And once in a while, liberals get things right, but you're constantly having to dig through stuff to get to the good stuff.
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And that's not what you should be doing at a Desiring God conference. I think that at least at a
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Ligonier conference or at the Shepherd's conference or Desiring God or whatever else it might be, you should be feasting without having to be constantly picking through all the gristle to find a little bit of meat.
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That's so true. When I go to conferences and smaller pastors attend these conferences to get fed, if I would have sat there
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Desiring God last weekend, I would have thought I can never measure up to Rick Warren and all the things that he does and says and the resources that he has.
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I can see how pastors of small churches would be very, very guilt -ridden. And that made me think to myself, why is he not preaching?
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I mean, I know why he's not, but the men at a Desiring God conference should not be talking about moralistic platitudes and be good and perfectionism.
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That's why they need to preach who Christ is because I know when I don't measure up, I have a great mediator.
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And of course for Warren, he just throws a few things out that Jesus said, but we never really hear about the person and work of Christ.
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And that's kind of what Piper's known for, isn't he? Well, that's certainly been my thought.
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Again, there seemed to be such a major disconnection between what you would expect at Desiring God and what you got there.
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That certainly seems... Again, I've not been to one, so maybe I'm wrong, but I have this ideal in my mind and I have listened to certain presentations from other people in the past and there seems to be this focus upon an in -depth presentation of biblical truths and exegesis and overall deep theology.
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And this was, again, just so many platitude after platitude after platitude and they were disconnected from one another.
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There was no consistency in it. And I was just left going, I really wonder how this was responded to.
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I really wonder how people reacted to this. I would love to have been a mouse in the corner to see what the real responses to this type of thing was because I'm sure a lot of people were sitting there and I tried to lay aside my prejudices.
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Obviously, I have a prejudice at this point because I think there's a lot in the ministry model of Saddleback and purpose -driven this, that, and the other thing that strikes me as being just extremely accommodationist and pragmatic and so on and so forth.
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But still, just sitting back and listening, I was left going, where's, using the old phrase, where's the beef?
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Where's any type of anything that connects all this together? Where's the theme? Why am I just getting platitudes, these little pithy statements that I've never found to be useful whatsoever?
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Maybe you remember some of them, but I just don't find that to be a mechanism of communicating to other people. I don't.
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And so, maybe I'm just the wrong person to listen to this type of thing, but so much of it was this psychology, this psychobabble.
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It didn't really seem to come from a biblical worldview at all, and I was left pretty amazed by what
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I heard. Well, when Warren said to come to me, all you who labor quoting Christ in Matthew 11, that was a felt need, by the way, he said.
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Oh, twice he repeated that these were felt needs. The mental illness, the felt needs.
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I don't think he's that great a communicator, but I too have a bias, and when you deny penal substitution and total depravity,
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I've got a problem. Here's a question for you, James. I know you're an elder at Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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If you were an elder who was at Bethlehem, would you send Rick Warren an honorarium check for that psychological moralizing message?
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Only if we had already agreed under contract to do so. I mean, obviously, we would never have invited him to speak in the first place.
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I don't understand the reasoning. I'm not gonna speak for John Piper, but I don't understand what the reasoning was.
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It was obviously meant to be somewhat controversial, and John doesn't mind controversy along those lines.
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Okay, fine, whatever, but we never would have been, just give an example.
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We had two guys show up at our church a week ago Sunday when I was preaching, and the first thing one of the guys asked me was, what do you think of Rick Warren?
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And my response to him was, well, he's not really on my radar. It's certainly not an issue in our church. No one here is reading
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Rick Warren, so I don't invest much time in him.
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I'm doing other things. He seemed very disappointed. They showed up again Sunday evening and cornered me after the service before our fellowship meal, and basically was saying, this man is a demon -possessed non -Christian.
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He has infiltrated the church, and you need to poll your congregation to see who's been influenced by him, and we'll be happy to help you to deal with Rick Warren in your church.
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Now, you've had these folks show up, too, you know, these guys, because, and you can sort of guess what my first question to them was.
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My first question was, so what church are you members of? Well, we're members of the body of Christ.
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Ah, okay, and that led to Hebrew 1317, and et cetera, et cetera.
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Let's just say that they didn't stick around for the evening fellowship meal. But there you have the imbalance of somebody who actually stood there quoting what page and line number in the
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Purpose Driven Church was a statement by Rick Warren demonstrating that he's friendly toward people who have spirit guides and stuff like that.
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Now, maybe that's true. I don't know. No one can be an expert on everything, and when they started telling me, well, you're not exposing the unfruitful works of darkness,
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I'm like, hey, buddy, what in the world are you talking about? Let me remind you of where I've been over the past number of years.
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You've never stood in front of a group of Muslims and told them Muhammad was a false prophet, but the point being that some people just get so focused upon this guy, and certainly if you're in a church that's been deeply impacted by him,
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I can understand why there would be more of a focus than we would have. But I don't understand the fascination that would exist with Rick Warren amongst anybody who has what
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I would call a decent diet of meaningful theological sources upon which to feed.
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We've got about 20 seconds. Was that a rebuke, James? Did you just rebuke me on my own show? About what?
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I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. No, it was not. No, it was not in any way, shape, or form.
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Well, we've been talking to James White, Alpha and Omega Ministries, aomin .org. The time went by so fast,
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James. I appreciate all your ministry and your insight today, and thanks for listening to that message last night, and thanks for the call.
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Hey, thanks for having me on. God bless. 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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