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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

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

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My name is Mike Abendroth here, just adjusting some of the volumes. Oh, that's so much better. You couldn't tell the difference, but these are my headphone volumes.

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Today, we are going to look at a variety of things that are stacking up on my desk.

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And so, today on No Compromise Radio, a veritable potpourri. I just got the stats, by the way, from Josh McDonald, our executive producer, executive director, executive grunt, and so far, they're on iTunes, at least, and maybe the website, not counting

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Facebook, 671 ,000 downloads of No Compromise Radio. I was encouraged by that.

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It took me a long time to do it, too. One after another after another, just to get our ratings up.

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So, I don't know, what's that, 1 ,000 people per show? So, anyway,

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I was encouraged by that. We did a show the other day, Steve and I did, on songs that were both good songs and bad songs, and it elicited some good emails and some bad emails.

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I got one here from Robin, and Robin says, by the way, I can't tell here if Robin is a man or a woman.

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It doesn't say, it says, sincerely, Robin. That's all it says.

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So, Robin, if you're a woman, welcome. If you're a man, you're welcome.

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Welcome. All right, they said, she said, he said, one of my favorite good songs is

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In Christ Alone, Geddy Townsend. I love when the congregation sings verse four a cappella.

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The whole song is basically the gospel. Well, Robin, I like In Christ Alone, as well.

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Verse four says, no guilt in life, no fear in death. This is the power of Christ in me.

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From life's first cry to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny. No power of hell, no scheme of man can ever pluck me from his hand till he returns or calls me home.

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Here in the power of Christ, I stand. That is a very good song. Now, what Robin did is she, he, also gave me,

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I'm just trying to see if I can find it to see here. A bad song.

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Here With Me by Mercy Me. And this is what Robin said. I think of people who are maybe coming to church for the first time and hearing this song.

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It is definitely a God is my girlfriend song, ugh. I used to love the song because I was only listening to the tune and not the words.

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The tune is actually quite beautiful and did deceive me for a time. Chorus.

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I can feel your presence here with me. Suddenly I'm lost within your beauty. Caught up in the wonder of your touch.

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Here in this moment, I surrender to your love. That is spooky. I didn't know that.

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I've never sang that song. I'm not even gonna tell you if I talk to my wife like that, but I would never sing songs like that to God.

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Verse one, I long for your embrace every single day to meet you in this place and see you face to face.

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You will show me, reveal yourself to me because of your mercy, I fall down on my knees.

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You're everywhere I go, I am not alone. You call me as your own to know you and be known.

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You are holy and I fall down to my knees. I can feel your presence. I think it was John MacArthur who said that he'd been a

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Christian for 50 years and he'd never felt God's presence. I don't know what that feels like.

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I think maybe when Job felt God's presence, he said, I abhor myself. When Jeremiah felt

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God's presence, he said he was black, the state of his soul was black, not white and pure.

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Isaiah, when he felt the presence of God, I think he said he was undone. When Peter felt the presence of God, he was too exceedingly afraid.

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And Paul said that he was a chief of sinners. So I don't know. Miscellaneous one, bridge,

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I surrender to your grace. I surrender to the one who took my place. Well, written by Barry Grawl, Bart Miller, Brad Russell, Dan Mukalala, Jim Bryson, Mike Schnitzer, Nathan Cochran, Peter Kepley, Robbie Schaefer.

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CCLI song number 4312143. Okay, next,

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I hope they get better. Tom Rainer, T -H -O -M -R -A -I -N -E -R -T -O -M.

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Is the president and CEO of LifeWake Christian Resources, a

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Southern Baptist wing. And he has a website, and I don't really read it that often, but occasionally

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I'll take a look at it, especially if somebody forwards me an interesting deal. Seven trends, seven new trends in the pastor search process.

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So that caught my eye. When churches try to find pastors, what do they do? And actually some of the No Compromise listeners have actually contacted me, and I have tried to help them find a new pastor.

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I was going to say, and they tried to get me to be their pastor. But that's not true. It's been, let's see,

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I've been here, this is going into my 16th year now. And so far I've gotten one,

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I've received one form letter from Tim LaHaye that he sent out to all the master's grads,

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Minnetonka Bible Church, I believe, complete with a temperament survey on what kind of temperament

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I had, psychological survey. My brother got one too. I thought I was doing great, and that was when

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LaHaye was selling all those books. So the number one author in all the world wanted me to be the pastor of this church,

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Minnetonka Bible Church. I want to say it's 2001. It was the only contact

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I've ever received. Come please, come be our pastor please. And then to kind of come to find out, it was just, you know, a form letter.

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But I do help churches in the area. Some not in the area. How do you find a new pastor?

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And I will say that most congregations are ill -equipped to find a new pastor.

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That is why it takes so long. That's why everything gets bogged down in committees. Now, sometimes the pastor dies and then the church doesn't know what to do.

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But if the pastor's doing things biblically, then he will train up through the doctrines of the

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Bible and through the sufficiency of Scripture, strengthen men, train men, strengthen the congregation, and they will know what to do.

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So one day I'm going to move to Minnetonka Bible Church, or I'm going to die.

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Maybe they'll kick me out. Maybe that's another option. And then what's the church going to do? What I sure hope they don't do is get a committee of people who have a lot of money and influence and then decide who the new pastor is going to be.

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What I sure hope they don't do is to get some men and women together to get a new committee and a board to find the pastoral search committee for the call and find a new pastor.

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If you want to get a committee together underneath the elder board so they can search through websites and resumes and get that information to the elders, that will be fine, but it is the elder's responsibility to help find the new pastor.

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Now, whether you want to vote as a congregation or not, I don't care about that as much as I care about this.

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The elders should pick. They're the qualified men and they are the men that should pick other elders and they are the men that should pick other deacons.

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Of course the congregation should notice that, should realize that, should see that. The evidence of God's grace in the life of the new deacon and the new pastor recognized by the elder board.

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But when you divvy up the responsibility of picking the new pastor to the church, which can include some unregenerate members of the church, and to other people who ought not to be doing this, you are running into all kinds of problems.

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Well, let's have some Stevia tea. How about that for a second? No Pete's Coffee. I was in California, I had some

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Pete's. It was great. I wanted to tell them I promoted it on No Compromise Radio. Get a free sample, but I didn't have the heart to do it.

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So Rainer said here, seven new trends in the pastor search process. Number one, social media has become a major reference to check on potential pastors.

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More churches and pastor search committees are looking at blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media venues of potential candidates.

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One search committee member told me he had read four years of blogs of the pastor their church is considering.

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He said that he could tell a lot about the leadership and personality of a pastor by reading his articles and how he interacts with those who comment on the blogs.

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That is a great way to do it. First of all, I'm not really a blogger. I always said

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I would never blog, but the other day I was thinking just what happened if I would, just fantasizing about blogs as the publishers of books want you to blog.

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But anyway, you can find out a lot. Tabidi is one of those men when he writes on his blog, super kind to people, super nice to people.

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He's not harsh. He's trying to be understanding. Just based on his blog responses,

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I like him better than I did before. Not that I didn't like him because I had a lot of respect for him, met him, but I really like him a lot more since then.

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But people put, let's think about this in general, even if you're not a pastor or a pastor search committee member, why do some people put what they do online?

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It is crazy to me to see how they act on Facebook, on Twitter, on the blogosphere and whatever other social media.

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It's just out there. You can't undo it. At least when you're writing a book, you have to think through, the editor thinks through, the publisher thinks through and back and forth and around and the agent and all these things.

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And I'm not saying Christians shouldn't blog, but Christians ought to be careful. I'm not saying Christians shouldn't be on Facebook, Christians shouldn't be on Facebook, but they better be careful.

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Look at me. If you're not care, Facebook by definition is like a gun or like sex or like alcohol.

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It's Facebook, there's no problem with Facebook per se. It's just what you do with it.

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And if you wanna be a grandma and check on the kids and see how they look and updated information about your grandkids and nieces and all that, then what am

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I supposed to say? But all this look at me, me, me stuff and then tirades and other things, better be careful even to try to get a job.

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If I wanna hire someone and pay them a lot of money, I'll probably go look at their Facebook account just to see how wise they are.

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What else does this say? Two background checks are more common, criminal and credit.

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I found that very interesting. A credit and criminal background check. More leadership questions are asked.

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We had problems with the past two pastors. One church member wrote me, but none of those problems had anything to do with their theology.

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They just had terrible leadership skills. So how do you lead?

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Although I think that one's pretty dopey because if God has gifted you and he has given you the gifts and the grace found in the qualifications of 1

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Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and you are a man of the word and you try to live out what you preach and you preach the word systematically,

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I think you can lead. Churches scrutinize the prospective pastor's church website, finding information, evaluating the pastor by the content of the site.

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I think that's a good thing to do. By the way, if you're going to go to a church on Sunday and you've never been there before and you haven't checked out the website, you should.

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You should just go to the website, check it out. Here's what I do when I'm out of town and need to find a church.

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We just do home church. Just kidding. On Sundays, our family, me personally, if I'm by myself or out of town someplace,

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I just go worship the king on Sunday with other saints. That's what I'm called to do. And so it's never a question, should we or shouldn't we?

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Do we get up in the morning? Mom and dad, are we going in the morning? We just go. Our kids don't, they would never think.

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Well, maybe we won't go tomorrow. So maybe there's a nuclear bomb or something, I might say something.

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But short of that, short of Deval Patrick saying that there's a state of emergency, then we're going to go.

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So all that to say, I get online and then I go straight, not to the Statement of Faith. I don't go to where the pastor's been, the education of the pastor.

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I go to the sermon series in media and I just try to see if the general theme is verse by verse, sequential exposition.

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So 1 Corinthians 1, 1 and 2, 1 Corinthians 1, 3 and 4, 1 Corinthians 1, 5 through 8, et cetera.

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That's what I'm looking for. Now there's a topical sermon here or there based on a text, I don't care about that.

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But just in general, I'd like to know if they have verse by verse sequential teaching because that teaches me that this church has a high view of God's Word, a high view of the sufficiency of the

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Word, authority of the Word, power of the Word, that Christ is central in the

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Word. And then I go to where the pastor was educated and this isn't a perfect thing to do.

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Neither is the first one, although it helps. I know there are Jewish synagogues that go through Genesis verse by verse type of thing.

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And then I find out where the pastor's been educated so I get an idea of the slant, then I look at leadership and I can tell if it's elder rule, if it's deacon board rule, if it's trustee rule, et cetera.

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Then I look at the building to see if I like the parking lot and look at the pictures. Just kidding. So what else does

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Tom Rayner say? Fewer search committees are going to the prospective pastor's church to hear him preach.

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They think that might be disruptive. You know, you have about eight guys, they all show up in suits. Oh, hi, do you live around here?

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No, but they're afraid to say because they're checking it out. I think that the elders should sit around on occasion and say, if God were ever to move me, what do we do?

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What's the strategy that we're going to have when you get promoted and leave? Are you travel overseas?

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Are you go back to your home country? Are an opportunity for you, associate pastor comes up for you to be a senior pastor someplace?

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Are, if the senior pastor ever moves because we all know this is the

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Lord moving and this is a good reason to leave. So I think you should sit around and talk about those things.

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And I have personally said to my elder board that if I ever get contacted by someone to go somewhere, which one in 16 years, form letter, that I would let them know and that I would pray about it and they could pray about it too.

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And just holding people loosely, holding people like with Luther, if you take your hands and open them up, spread your fingers apart, there are five slits between your, four slits between your five fingers.

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And Luther said something to the effect that those slits are so that you can hold money and people lightly because it just goes right through, they go right through your fingers.

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So I don't think there should be the sneaking around. You don't have to tell the congregation necessarily. Oh, you know, some people are gonna come and hear me preach and I don't know if I should go or not.

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I love you and I don't wanna leave, but I wanna do what God says. Not what he says, but I wanna follow

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God's leading and feel his presence. So today, no compromise radio.

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We are just going through a variety of things. Right now, looking at the seven trends in the pastor search process,

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Tom Rayner. I don't know why I can't talk today. I have no idea. Number seven, more churches are asking questions about the emotional intelligence of a candidate.

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Now this one is really D -U -M -B. To quote Joey Ramone, D -U -M -B, everyone's accusing me.

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Is he self -aware? I mean, really, short of somebody who's a vegetable, everyone's self -aware.

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That's part of the definition of humanity. Is he moody or temperamental? How motivated is he?

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Is he empathetic? I think motivation's good. I don't know how you're gonna, what are you gonna do?

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Ask questions? Are you moody? Are you empathetic? Does he have good social and interpersonal skills?

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No, in one sense, I kinda like some of those things. I don't want somebody to be kind of a dweeb, pastoral dweeb, but what if he's qualified according to first chapter of Titus and 1

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Timothy 3, but he doesn't really have great social skills? All right, so let's just keep going.

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We are looking here. I've got very, well, let's see, what shall I do? Tozer, Tozer's here.

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I've got a song here that I wanna read, lyrics. God moves in a mysterious way, thinking about songs.

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William Cooper, it looks like Cowper, but it's Cooper. Reportedly the last hymn he ever wrote, and of course he was

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John Newton's friend. The subtitle behind this all goes,

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Cowper often struggled with depression and doubt. One night he decided to commit suicide by drowning himself. He called the cab and told the driver to take him to the

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Thames River. However, thick fog came down and prevented them from finding the river. Another version of the story has the driver getting lost deliberately.

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After driving around lost for a while, the cabby finally stopped and let Cowper out, or Cooper out.

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To Cooper's surprise, he found himself on his own doorstep. God had sent the fog to keep him from killing himself.

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Even in our blackest moments, God watches over us, so says cyberhymnal .org.

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But I love the song. I quoted some of it when I was talking to Richard Harisick. A while ago,

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God moves in a mysterious way, has wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.

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Deep in unfathomable minds of never failing skill, he treasures up his bright designs and works his sovereign will.

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Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take. The clouds ye so much dread are big with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head.

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Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace. Behind a frowning providence, he hides a smiling face.

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His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour. The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower.

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Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan his work in vain. God is his own interpreter and he will make it plain.

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I think it was John Flavel who said something to the effect, remember with Hebrew language, you read from right to left, not left to right.

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And that the workings of God's providence would be similar to the

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Hebrew language. And sometimes you have to read it from right to left. By the way, when it comes to sovereign working of God and providence, sometimes those who believe in providence feel kind of gypped maybe.

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They kind of feel they're losing something to the charismatics and the charismatics will have all kinds of signs and speaking in tongues and God's giving them impressions and feelings and sensing their presence and contemplative prayer.

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God talking to them while they're praying. And their feelings are changed to gold dust.

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All kinds of things that happen allegedly, as you Romans say, allegedly. But I don't think they have anything on the cessationist view of the providence of God.

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When you look forward to try to see a sign and you're thinking, how do I make a decision in the future or now?

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I need some kind of sign God. Well, God has given you his word, wisdom from him through prayer, wisdom from others through receiving counsel.

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And then you do what you wish. And so word, wisdom, wish are scripture, wisdom, desire, as we've taught on the show before.

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But once you look backwards in time, if you're married, think about how you met your wife and all the decisions and all the things that had to happen before you would meet your wife to meet your husband.

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All the things that would have to happen to get you in the right spot, to move the right place. I lived in Nebraska.

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My wife lived in Santa Cruz. And to try to get us both to Los Angeles through all the different circumstances, it is an amazing thing.

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And when I would look at apartments in Brentwood, which one would I pick? I finally picked this one. When she looked in apartments for Brentwood and she picked and she picked the one right across my street, she didn't have a vacuum.

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I had a vacuum. I never used my vacuum, but she came over to borrow it because her friend said, oh,

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I know that guy, Mike. He's got a vacuum, ask him. All the different ways. It's amazing to think of the providence of God.

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And sometimes it's a frowning providence, but we know the promises of God. And God has told us that he's going to work everything together for our good, for his glory, for our good.

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And so today on No Compromise Radio, we are just cleaning off the desk. What else do I have here?

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I do have Christian Living in the Home by Jay Adams in front of me, a book. And I really think this book is helpful.

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One of the reasons why it's helpful, it's biblical, Christian Living in the Home. And another reason it's helpful is because it's simple.

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Here he says on page 10, Christian Living in the Home, Jay Adams. I have couples read this before they get married.

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I have them also read Dave Harvey's When Sinners Say I Do. The first and most important fact to remember about a truly

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Christian home is. So if I were to ask you, what's the first and most important fact to remember about a truly

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Christian home? After all, the book's called Christian Living in the Home. What's the most important fact?

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Know your roles, base everything on the

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Bible, how to lead, how to submit.

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The first and most important fact to remember about a truly Christian home is that sinners live there.

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Sinners live there. See the realistic picture of a truly Christian home and how our homes are filled with sinners.

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So what do we do? And Adams goes on to talk about sanctification and admitting sins, knowing what to do about their sins, progressing out of sins because of who

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Jesus is. Today on No Compromise Radio, the veritable potpourri miscellaneous. You can write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com.

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No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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