Is Love Blind

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. My name's Mike Abendroth. Today is Tuesday, and when Tuesdays roll around, when they rolodex around,.

When they stumble, mumble, fumble, bumble upon,.

Keith Jackson, remember that?

I'm rumblin', stumblin', fumblin'.

You kind of sound like Barney in the Flintstones. Hey, Fred. I could be Fred, you could be Barney. That's Steve's funny laugh, this is my real laugh. Well, on No Compromise Radio, we try to think about biblical topics in a very provocative way.

We want you to be driving down the street in your car and say to yourself, oh, golly gee whiz, it is 3 .38 and I've missed the first six minutes. Get on to WV &E 760.

Smack your head and say, wow, I coulda had a no-co.

Steve, today I have a very interesting topic, and you're trying to sneak over your eyes, and your eyes are trying to determine from my computer screen that sits to my left what we're actually gonna talk about today.

Is it poetry? Jean. I was so glad to get that cleared up by Dr. Woodbridge on the pronunciation of Jean.

Well, that would be a seminal moment in any young man's life, to discover whether it was Jean or genre. Do we have any conferences coming up at Bethlehem Bible Church? I don't know, do we? You schedule those things, don't you?

Oh, we have that Psalm 139, 119,.

29. It's the Hebrew canon, Psalm 151. The lost Psalm. I think they're gonna make a new national treasure from that lost Psalm. What is it? It's coming this fall, right? I said several times on No Compromise Radio, it was November.

That's the typical BBC conference, but they'll actually be here, Wretched Radio Conference, September. September. Yes, that's September. Has nothing to do with BBC, except we'll be the host church. The host church.

And I will actually be speaking, but. So it has something to do with BBC. It does, but it's not a regular conference rotation. Before we get in. Thanks for that clarification. You're quite welcome. Thank you.

The Jefferson Bible is in my hot little hands. That would be as in. Jefferson Davis? How did you know? How did you know? I just went down to Bull Run, er, Manassas, and this is the Thomas Jefferson Bible, and basically what he did was no different than what lots of liberals do today, and that is pick and choose.

Oh, that's a nice verse. That's a commendation to me. God's not mad at me. God's mad. With me. He's mad about me, right? Well, you know, you pick your. Preposition. Junction, junction. Yeah, what's your function?

So this is the last chapter of the Thomas Jefferson Bible, and of course he would excise anything supernatural,.

And so I wonder what. Kind of like the Jesus Seminar people.

That's exactly right. Remember when I first got saved, the Jesus Seminar people pretty much had lost all their marbles.

That's kind of a scholarly joke. Would you mind explaining that, Pastor Mike?

They would vote on passages of the Bible, and they would say, is this passage in the Bible or not? And based on their redaction criticism and liberal criticism. Redaction. Higher criticism, they would say, no, it really isn't.

So yellow meant that it really wasn't. Black meant that it was in. Red meant that Jesus said it. I don't know, and then they would vote, and about 1 19th of all the gospels were actually really real.

Yeah, and they attributed those to Q, you know, the, anyway, we're getting far afield and into the weeds, but yeah, they had this whole, they sat in judgment of the word of God and decided what belonged in the Bible and what didn't, at least when it came to the gospels.

Steve, remember when we went to Peabody Mass to the Christian discount bookseller, whatever it is, CBD, and we saw the gospel of Q there in the $1 section?

I didn't know Q was out there. Yeah, well, I mean, I went one other time and I foolishly said aloud, I dare somebody to find me a copy of Q. And wouldn't you know, Pastor Ted Bigelow was there,.

Overheard me and found one. Of course it's made up. There are no records of this gospel of Q or anything like that, but I thought that was funny. And Steve, remember the other moment when we were there and they probably still have them there 15 years later, the title of the book, is it okay to call God mother?

Sick. And then every time I saw that discount book, I would always say no out loud. And it was perfect for the Gordon Conwell egalitarians. Oh, they don't do that yet, but who knows, they might.

I wouldn't put anything past them considering you can get a degree there in postmodern theology.

Well, Steve, you're an equal opportunity basher, so let's get onto the positive.

Okay, well, can we just talk about the Jefferson Bible? I think that's what I was trying to start us out with. I think that's true.

And Jefferson, he's got a good jump shot, doesn't he? Connecticut boy, Connecticut man.

Thomas Jefferson was from Virginia.

Okay, after this Joseph of Arimathea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus. And Pilate gave him leave. He came therefore and took the body of Jesus.

And there came also Nicodemus. They took the body of Jesus, wound it in, that's what it says, wound it in linen clothes and with spices as the manner of the Jews is to bury. Okay, just a couple more sentences.

Now in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden and in the garden, a new sepulcher, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher and departed.

Wow, that's great. That's it. That's the last paragraph of the Jefferson Bible.

Well, do you have a volume two of that series?

Volume two would be 1 Corinthians chapter 15. Can you imagine without the resurrection? Actually, the resurrection was a supernatural event.

Without the resurrection, what? No hope, there's no hope for us.

It's interesting. This is the World Publishing Company, Cleveland, Ohio and New York, New York. Thomas Jefferson, the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth. And then it says in the front, edited with a forward.

Redaction. By the way, redact, to redact means to edit for those of you who may not have gone to seminary, like most of us.

So today on No Compromise Radio, on the time we have left, Steve, I'd like to talk about catchphrases. Okay. Certain slogans. Like, hey, batter, batter, catch. Yeah, hey, batter, batter. How about this one?

Let's talk about the theological ramifications of this phrase right here.

Love Is Blind and God's Omniscient Love

Love is blind. Well, love is blind, as a matter of fact. And I often, I say that with regard to young couples and in light of Jeremiah 17, nine, the heart is deceitful because people want to trust their heart.

And I say, well, love is blind. And I also say it's deaf and dumb, too.

It sure plays a mean pinball occasion in that love. Yeah, it does.

A deaf, dumb, and blind kid sure plays mean pinball.

Now, that is one aspect of the phrase love is blind. Steve, I thought about this the other day. And see, I'm a few days ahead of you because these are my notes. You're always a few days ahead of me. I've got a few more cogitations ahead of time.

Preliminary cogitations. Well, it's good that they're preliminary. I hope to change them. Can you imagine God's love for his bride, for the elect people, for Christians? It was not blind. He knew all the sins that we would ever commit.

And yet he still chose to give us his best. That is his son. He loved us anyway, even though he knew all about it. How about that?

Well, what's amazing is I'm just thinking back to the first moment where I recognized who Christ was. Still not a Christian, but having my eyes open to the truth. And when I read in Isaiah chapter nine about Christ being a wonderful counselor, and I just thought, because to me at that time, still involved in psychology and other things, and counselors were people who knew what you told them about yourself.

And I thought, Christ knows everything about me. And the concept that he would love me, I remember saying to myself, I go, I don't even like me. How could God possibly love me?

How amazing is that when you think about the creator of the universe loving rebels, loving enemies, loving those who would try to kill him, except our arms weren't long enough to do so. And so I thought, isn't that true?

God's love, it's not blind because he knows everything. His omniscient gaze knows it all, and yet he still decided to love us. Steve, you probably paid for some of those counseling seminars, and now we try to tell people we'll pay them not to go to psychological counseling.

That's right.

I mean, we would never refer anybody to a psychologist these days. But of course, like I said, I wasn't saved back then. But it really is true when you think about it. If God loved the same way we love, if he loved based on either appearances or actions toward us or anything of that sort, if he loved as we love others, there would be no hope for us.

Because if God were like us, we're without hope. I mean, the great thing is, is that he is nothing like us. We bear his image, but other than that, he's not like us.

Ephesians 2 .4, but God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved, and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

It's amazing to me to think that God would love me. And I think of those songs, Steve's, Jesus Loves Even Me. The other day, I had some correspondence from a No Compromise listener, and they confessed to me that they committed a horrible sin several years ago.

And they asked, could God ever forgive me? And what am I going to do? And the haunting nature of this sin. And I said to them along these lines, can you imagine the love of God? Of course the sin was bad.

Of course you should repent of it and from it. And this person had done that. But can you imagine that God knew you were going to do that before he ever chose you in eternity past? And so look to the cross.

That's our only hope, is to say, well, these sins bring me down. And I remember these sins, and they put me in a straitjacket. So look to the cross where God's love was shown at its apex.

And you know what's sad to me, is I think that there are some people who believe, you know, in their own mindset, maybe because of their background, maybe they were raised Mormons or Catholics or whatever religion, a religion of works.

And they're convinced because of their background that their sins are so bad, and they've sinned for so long that they cannot possibly be forgiven. Because they're thinking like they would think if they had all these things against someone else, they would never forgive them.

And that's exactly wrong. If God forgives great sinners who come to him humbly, and it's those people that he gives them the capacity to do it. First of all, he brings them to spiritual life, but it's not because people are good, it's because he is good, and he has determined that he's going to save those people.

So if anybody's listening and just thinking that they're beyond the point of being savable, that God's arm is not too short to save you.

Steve, the background or the origin of the love is blind slogan, I just learned this, coined by Shakespeare. And it appears in several of his plays, including Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice.

And here is Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. That was when you're tired, you go see the Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Menace.

Well, or for me, because I grew up playing these games, these board games, and there was a game called The Merchant of Venus. So I always have a hard time saying Merchant of Venice. It's always Merchant of Venus to me because it was a board game, like Monopoly kind of game.

Here, catch this casket, it is worth the pains. I am glad tis night, you do not look on me, for I am much ashamed of my exchange. But love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that they themselves commit.

For if they could, Cupid himself would blush, to see me thus transformed to a boy.

But we've pretty much hit the heights of No Compromise Radio. Shakespeare performed by our very own Pastor Mike, right here on the air.

Jol. Jol. I would like to see Jean-Luc Picard do Shakespeare, but I think he does it under the guise of, what's a guy's real name in? Worf. No, no, no, Patrick, Patrick somebody. Swayze. No. No, Patrick Stewart.

Patrick McEnroe. Okay. I'm looking at Romans chapter five, and it says, but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And so, we are very glad at No Compromise Radio, and Steve was, I want to commend Steve for bringing out the point that there are people who are listening today, I'm sure, there are people out there in the world who think that their sins are so great that they could never be forgiven.

And we want you to know that even though your sins are great, there's a greater Savior than your sins.

I mean, I've heard people say, you know, do you really believe that Jeffrey Dahmer could be saved? I mean, here was a man who not only kidnapped people and killed them and cut them, you know, did horrible things.

I don't even want to catalog all that he did. And you know, yet the reports are that he was saved while in prison, and then the prisoners killed him. But if he was saved, if God regenerated him and gave him faith and he came to believe on his own, on his own, no, you know, if God saved him, no matter what he had done, could he be saved?

And the answer is yes. I mean, was Paul a murderer? Yes. You know, did he get saved? Yes. Was David an adulterer? Yes. You know, did Solomon have hundreds of wives? Yes. And all these men, God saved. I mean, is there a sin, you know, that can be committed today that cannot be forgiven?

People say, well, you know, there's one sin that cannot be forgiven. That is the sin of unbelief. What do you think about that, Pastor Mike? The sin of unbelief cannot be forgiven. I even read that the other day.

Did you? It was probably in some Arminian magazine.

And I would say, I hope it Well, I have it delivered to my home every month.

That would probably be a TBN magazine. Arminian Today. No. Well, I hope unbelief can be forgiven because I unbelieved for 29 years. I was a master at it. No, I didn't believe for 29 years. So that can be forgiven.

Certainly Jesus died for the sin of unbelief. And that gets us to all kinds of atonement issues. But Steve, I was thinking about the scandal of the cross, the offense of the cross, as you were talking about Jeffrey Dahmer.

It is scandalous to people to think that they can live their entire life as a wicked, horrible sinner, as Dahmer was, and convicted of that. And then reports, like you said, that he trusted not in himself or his own works and his own righteousness, but in Christ's righteousness.

And if he did, he's surely in heaven. Conversely, you can have a lady like Mother Teresa who can live her entire life supposedly for others. And she did many, many altruistic, philanthropist type of things.

But if she died believing in her false gospel, she doesn't go to heaven. And the carnal mind, the unbelieving mind,.

That is a scandal. All emails to mike at nocompromiseradio .com.

Well, it's true. When you ask Mother Teresa about who Christ is and what grace is and what real faith is and how God saves people, and even her desires, her desires were not to get everybody to renounce Hinduism and to believe in Jesus, the only God.

Her desire was to incorporate Hinduism into Christianity. And so I want her to be in heaven. My point is this, if she died believing the gospel, quote unquote gospel she was talking about and trying to live out, there's no hope.

So you can have somebody who's a scurrilous, scandalous man his whole life. You can have someone else who lives her life serving others. And neither of those things matters in the sight of God because it is Christ's work alone that saves.

Well, you know, getting back to Thomas Jefferson, where we started, you know, if Thomas Jefferson, I mean, what was the message he was trying to give in his Jefferson Bible? You know, by just having it end with the tomb and with the stone rolled in front of it, no resurrection, you know, and that Jesus was just any other man.

Well, if he's just any other man, then he didn't die for the sins of others. Not only that, he said a lot of things that would not be true. And why would we even study him to the point of editing a Bible about him?

What would be the point? Steve, I have this Bible here and it looks kind of old.

And I noticed you've marked it up quite a bit.

I'm sniffing it right now. And it looks like it smells smoky, although it doesn't.

Well, I mean, certainly we wouldn't want Thomas Jefferson, we don't want anyone to be in hell. And, you know, the simple point is that whether it's Thomas Jefferson, a man who would widely be seen as a good man, although we know certain things about him historically now that would not have been known back in the day, but whether it's him, whether it's Mother Teresa, or even, you know, someone that is not spoken of in polite company like a Jeffrey Dahmer, if he was saved, then he's in heaven.

And as good as those other people may seem to have been, as important as Thomas Jefferson may be to the history of this country, if he didn't believe in Christ alone for his salvation, if he saw Jesus Christ as just another man who was buried, well, then there's no hope that he's in heaven.

The Gospel Must Be Proclaimed, Not Forced

All right, let's go to the next one where we're talking about slogans, catchphrases, things that people say that we will turn into theological points. You can take a horse to water, but you can't make a drink.

Absolutely true.

I mean, you can give... I mean, I don't even know how many times I heard the gospel before I was saved. I really have no clue. I know the first time I probably was made aware that Mormonism, my former religion, was not true, and that would be on a Mormon night at Disneyland.

We would drive out after spending

Okay, just now, just slow down just for a second. I've got to process that. I know our listeners do too. They're probably veering off the road. The Mormon night at Disneyland.

Yeah, they would shut the park down and we would get to go through. We would have a little ticket around our neck, like a Christmas tag or something like that. How do you get your bicycles in there? Well, as long as you had a tie and a little elder tag.

But we would go in for like five hours and just have the run of the park. And we were leaving one night and they were handing out tracks. As the cars had to slow to get out of the parking lot, they would hand out these tracks and you kind of take them and you're going, well, I don't know what they're giving us.

Probably something to do with Disneyland. And it said, Joseph Smith was a false prophet and you're going to hell. And you're just like, I think we're being persecuted for the sake of righteousness. That was kind of our response.

But how many times, I remember even my favorite grocery store was taken over by, I think it was Ralph Reese's church there in West Covina.

It was like with guns and knives and stuff taken over?

No, it was purchased and then turned into Oh yes, West Covina. Yeah, Calvary. That was by your house. I used to go there. Yeah, it was about maybe a mile from where I grew up. Wow, it was Safeway? Yeah.

Wow. Safeway. I used to go there and get the Craigmont sodas.

I can't believe it wasn't taken over by Albertson. I think they were owned by the Mormons.

Yeah, but I mean, and I remember being bitter about that. Some guy coming in, preaching the Bible.

The slogan, you can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. What we're after today on No Compromise Radio, and it should be encouraging to you if you like to evangelize, and encouraging to you if you'd like some of your loved ones saved.

You have the command, you have the mandate, you have the privilege to take the gospel, the good news of Christ Jesus, his life, his death, his resurrection, his miracles, what he said, et cetera. You have a privilege of giving the good news that God saves sinners to your loved ones, but you can't make them to believe.

You wish you could. I want to do that, but that's something only God can do is to take a stony heart and make it a heart of flesh. To take a depraved heart and make it a real, live heart. To make people alive.

Ephesians 2, Colossians 2. So isn't it good news, Steve, that the only responsibility we have is to take the word of God to the people, to proclaim it, pray for them. God's the one who gives them a new nature, and then they guzzle down the word of God.

It's great news.

And just quickly to give another illustration, I had a friend who was a professing Christian, but lived a life that really didn't match up with it. And after I got saved, I kind of got the fever, and so we had him over, and Janet made some of her world-famous pizza, and had him over and just kind of buttered him up, and then I gave him the gospel, and I was just kind of expecting him to agree with me or whatever, but nothing changed.

I mean, this was a guy who said he was a Christian, so years later, I'm out here, and all of a sudden, he's wanting to get together with me to go to church, but he thinks I'm still in LA. And I go, well, that's gonna be a tough drive for me, but it worked out that we could get together a few months after that.

And when I gave him the gospel, he agreed with everything, and then he said, would you pray for me? And I said, yes, and I prayed, and then I was ready to say amen, and he started praying. And everything he prayed, I just thought, wow, if he believes that, he's saved, and he was saved, and his life has just taken off since then, so I was all worried about the methodology and the timing and everything the first time, and the second time, God had done the work, and I didn't have to worry about anything.

Sounds like God's a complete savior. Absolutely, from beginning to end, salvation is all of the Lord. Read the book of Jonah.

Steve, I am so happy to be able to preach the gospel to people, and then I just let it go. I don't have a responsibility to save people. A man asked me last Sunday, two Sundays ago, do you ever feel pressure when you preach to people out on the streets and evangelize them that you have to save them?

And I said, with a true and straight-faced face, I don't feel any pressure at all, because I realize I can't do anything about it.

It's a privilege, and it's also a privilege sometimes to just watch the Lord work, and we're not in control. I mean, one of the basic foundations of Christianity is God is God and we are not, and it's true in salvation, too.

We don't save, God saves.

Well, God knows all your sins and still saved you if you're a Christian, and God does all the saving. That's why we want to extol Christ Jesus on 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 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, its staff or management.