Is your church liberal?

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.

We're here to take your calls as well. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Why Liberalism Creeps Into Churches

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about spotting liberalism in a local church. Is your church liberal? Is your church drifting towards liberalism?

If you do nothing as a church in terms of church leadership, you will drift into liberalism. It's just the current that takes you away. You have to stand up proactively against the tides, the ebbs and flows of liberal theology that sneak into churches, and it's happened to great churches throughout time.

Matter of fact, it's happened to great universities, Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University. They start as teaching institutions for training men for gospel evangelical ministry, for the ministry that says Jesus alone saves sinners.

Jesus's death alone is a substitutionary payment to absorb the wrath of God. Jesus's resurrection alone confirms that God was satisfied with this transaction. And if you do nothing, you will drift into liberalism.

And if you're a person listening today, A, if you're saved, you ought to be a member of a local church. There's nothing in the Bible that assumes differently. There may not be a verse that says, thou must be a member of a local church.

But if you're not a member of a church and you're a Christian, the burden of proof is on you. You figure out from the text. You prove to me that you don't have to be a member, accountable to the leadership, using your spiritual gifts, tied into a local church that way.

Anyone that says, no, you've got to prove that I have to be a member, no, you prove to me that you don't have to be a member. Well, membership aside, if you are an attender and a member, and you say, well, there's some things slipping into the church since we've got that new leadership.

Leadership seems to just allow X, Y, and Z to go on. Is my church turning liberal? Matter of fact, that's not a good thing. Let's state it very clearly. Liberalism in a local church isn't good. And by the way, I'm not talking about politics.

I'm not talking about something that mundane. I don't really care if you're a Democrat or you're a Republican or a liberal conservative, Tory or a Whig, it doesn't really matter to me what you are or who you are in that regard.

That's a different topic for a different show. But I'm talking about theological liberalism. It's not a good thing. You don't want it to happen to your church. You don't want it to drift in. I'll never forget the day I did the swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco.

And they said, when you jump off the boat near Alcatraz Rock and you do nothing, you will end up floating down to the Golden Gate Bridge and never to be seen again. When you get in that water, you begin to swim towards San Francisco.

And you had to angle it a certain way so you would swim the right way. And if you do nothing, you will drift. It's the same with the local church. If the leaders do not stand up for the truth, if they do not stand up against error, if they don't, according to Titus 1, 6 and following, verse 10 in particular, they must teach sound doctrine and they must refute those who contradict.

Liberalism will creep in. Every congregational church on the corner of most towns here in New England, especially the UCC Congregational Church, they started off teaching the gospel. And they have drifted towards liberalism.

You don't want your church to drift towards liberalism. You want it to be conservative. You want it to be Bible-believing. So how could I spot liberalism in a church? Let me give you several suggestions on what to look for.

These are kind of sometimes code words, if you will, how to spot liberalism. I think I have 18 or 19. I'm not gonna get done with all those today, but we can begin to talk because I want a healthy church, a hygienic church, a sound church.

I want a pure bride for Christ. Don't you want that? And one thing about compromise, it leads to more compromise. Someone just needs to stand up and draw the proverbial line. There has to be some kind of Maginot line out there where you say, thus far and no farther.

And if your church begins to do this, then you have to ask yourself the question, if I'm not in leadership, it's probably time to bail. There's an interesting article by Robert Godfrey called The Myth of Influence.

Most people stick around liberal churches because they think they can influence the church back to conservative theology. While I think that's a wonderful thing to do in your mind for motives, it doesn't work.

And so if you're in leadership, you can do something about it. If you're not, it's time to not bail any longer because the ship has sunk. It's time to move on to a conservative place. Well, here's what we wanna do today.

We're gonna be talking here at WVNE 760, No Compromise Radio Ministry with your host, Mike Abendroth, how to spot liberalism in a local church. Number one, when you hear from the pulpit, if they still have a pulpit, number one, when you start hearing this phrase, the Bible contains the Word of God, the Bible contains the Word of God, what's the implication there?

This is a weasel word. This is when the leader, male or female leader, says that. They're not saying that the Bible is the Word of God in its entirety. They're not saying that all scripture is God-breathed and profitable.

They're saying that some scripture is and some scripture isn't. If the Bible contains the Word of God, that means it's in there someplace, but it's not all God's Word. That is a weasel word for liberalism.

You have to be very, very careful. The Bible teaches clearly that all of scripture is God-breathed. It is all profitable, and you can teach from it, you can reprove from it, you can correct from it, and you can train people in comprehensive righteousness.

And the pastor, the man of God, the elder, can be adequate, equipped for every good work with this Bible, with this tool kit, this spiritual tool kit. God has not left his leadership without any kind of tools to do the job of shepherding, pastoring, teaching, leading.

If you hear the Bible contains the Word of God, you run from that kind of church. 2 Peter 1 .20 says, But know this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will.

The scriptures aren't made by strictly human will, it is God's will through the human will. But men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. When your pastor teaches from the Bible, he is teaching from God's Word.

When he is accurate in his interpretation, God is speaking through that pastor. And so when someone says the Bible only contains the Word of God, you need to run from that. If your church does not teach that Genesis through Revelation is inspired, is profitable, is inerrant, is infallible, is authoritative, is sufficient, that's not a good church.

It isn't a church anymore. Once you abandon the Word of God, you abandon everything. And it's, of course, a free country. People can do whatever they want. I just wish they wouldn't call themselves Christians because Christians biblically, Christians theologically, and Christians historically are people under the book.

If I had kids in the room, I would take the Bible and either put the Bible under the feet of the children and make them stand on it, or I'd put the Bible above their heads. Either you are over the Bible or you are under the Bible.

And if your philosophy is you're over the Bible and you can pick and choose which verses are inspired and which ones aren't, which ones are the Word of God and which ones aren't, then just close up shop.

Just change the title of your church to some nonprofit deal, and we would be better off. But when you say you're a church, the church is under the Word of God. The implication to the Bible contains the Word of God is you can just pick and choose whatever you want.

This is called neo-orthodoxy in other words. You can say to yourself, well, these are the verses that really work in my heart. God's really working in these verses, and therefore those are the Word of God, but the other ones aren't.

And you can imagine what people do. They'll say the verses that talk about God's wrath, God's angry with the wicked every day, Psalm 5 -5, Psalm 7 -11, all these kind of harsh, hard-hearted verses, they're not really God's Word.

They're in the Old Testament. That's that old mean God of the Old Testament. I like the New Testament God of love and kindness, and He's real sweet. He's more manageable. Matter of fact, I can tame that kind of God.

That's exactly what people do, but we have to accept all the scriptures. By the way, Jesus accepted Genesis through 2 Chronicles. That's the Hebrew canon. Our canon would be Genesis through Malachi. That's what Jesus did.

Jesus accepted it all, and He could have said, well, Jonah's made-up story, Noah, it wasn't really a universal flood, Lot's wife didn't get really turned into a pillar of salt, Sodom and Gomorrah, God was just kind of halfway kind of mad a little bit, but like a grandpa, He got over it.

No, Jesus affirmed all these wildly supernatural accounts in the Old Testament. So number one, how do you spot liberalism in local church? That's what we're doing today. By the way, you can reach us at info at nocompromisedradio .com, nocompromisedradio .com, and you can email us or you can call us.

You can do whatever you want. Number one, how do you spot liberalism in local church? The Bible contains the Word of God. That's false. Liberalism has already snuck in. Number two, how do you spot liberalism in a local church?

When you start hearing that man was a product of evolution, when you begin to hear things about day ages, when you begin to hear about Darwin evolving, how can we reconcile the science of evolution with the faith of creation?

Liberalism is snuck in there big time. This reminds me years ago of the Russian cosmonaut, Garrigan, who circled the earth and he came back and he said, you know, there's no God up there. We've seen space, we've seen the heavens, there's no God.

As one man said, too bad Mr. Garrigan didn't step out of his space capsule without a space suit and he would have found God immediately. How true. When your church begins talking about evolution and it deviates away from six day creation.

By the way, you can just read the Bible simply, clearly, plainly, and you'll walk away saying to yourself, if you bring to the text no presuppositions, no kind of I've got to have this science, you're going to say it's six days.

It's as clear as anything. You let a Martian read it, you let a sixth grader read it, you let a Hindu read it and they'll all say the same thing. Oh, six days. Listen to what Genesis chapter one says.

Then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

And God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them. Man is the crown of God's creation. And when you attribute man to evolution, you rob God of glory.

You rob God of the crown of all of his creation. The crown of his creation would not be some kind of jellyfish, would not be the Grand Canyon, would not be the rainbow. The crown is man. Now, when we talk about this, it would be better if we quoted a few more verses.

Genesis 2 .7. Then the Lord God formed man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being. Nothing about evolution, nothing about millions of years, nothing about somehow, you know, you used to be a frog, then a toad, then a dog, then a man, then an ape.

Matthew 19. Jesus said, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female? Jesus affirms that. If you call yourself a Christian, you believe that God created man, not the other way around.

When you begin to hear in your church talk of evolution, talk of making a hybrid between science and faith, like somehow they're on different poles, you're in big trouble. You need to leave that church.

God obviously, clearly, plainly stated in Genesis 1 how many days he made it. And for me, it's not that big a deal. I think Adam was probably 20 or 30 years old in the way he looks on the first day that he was made.

So if God wants to make an earth that looks a little older, if God has the flood ravage the earth and it makes it from a scientific perspective look older, that's fine by me. I was talking to a gentleman the other day and he said he was a, this is Ken in our church, and he said he was over in Iraq in the middle of nowhere working for the government regarding military issues.

And he looked down and there's all kinds of seashells. What are these seashells doing in the middle of the desert? The earth can look certain ways, yet we realize there are the remnants of the flood. Well, I'm digressing.

Human Sin, Victimhood, and Personal Responsibility

How do you spot liberalism in a local church? One, when people say the Bible contains the word of God. Two, when people start talking about evolution in any way, shape, or form. Three, when people start saying man is a victim.

Man is a victim. The Bible says man is a sinner. Man is a sinner, not a victim. Do you remember the story of the 14-year-old Rod Matthews? I think he is a good beacon, a good warning beacon for us analyzing the culture today.

This young man did not find interest in sports or books. He was bored and he loved watching faces of death. Do you know that video of all the people who have died and it's just a video showing the gruesome deaths of people?

And so he loved to think about death and he wanted to see death personally, not just on some video or DVD or TV. And so one winter he lured a friend out into the woods and pummeled him to death with a baseball bat.

He was tried for murder and then they had the child psychologist come in. And do you think they began to say that he was a sinner and he deserved death? Or what do you think that child psychologist said?

Here's the clinical evaluation of Rod's condition. And here's what they said, that he didn't know right from wrong, quote, he was morally handicapped, end quote. Morally handicapped. When you start hearing that kind of language from the world, well, that's how the world talks.

But when you hear that kind of language in the church, your church is liberal. Man is not a victim. Man is the sinner. We talk about addicts. We don't talk about sinners these days. We talk about people dysfunctional.

We talk about diseases and syndromes. And God says, we made ourselves do it. James 1 .14, each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lusts. As my old seminary professor, Dr. Zemeck used to say, you made you do it.

And so how do you see liberalism in a local church when they start talking about men and women as victims? It's somehow our environment. It is somehow our hereditary. It is somehow PMS. It is somehow some kind of twinkie defense.

It's like Aaron in Exodus 32. Well, you know, I don't want you to be angry with me, Aaron said to Moses. You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, make us gods who go before us as for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.

So I told them, whoever's any gold jewelry, take it off. Then they gave it to me. I threw it in the fire and out came this calf. Blaming other people for sin. Matter of fact, Hallmark has bought into this.

Actually, they're smart. They know how to make money. Since over 15 million Americans somehow in some way attend support group for quote unquote addictions, well, Hallmark thought, you know, that would be nice to have some kind of good cards for that in this recovery boom.

Years ago, Hallmark had, there was an article entitled making room for the recovery boom. And it was in the library journal, 140 different kinds of support groups, 45 million members. And so they had all kinds of Hallmark cards.

And by the way, today you can find an anonymous group for about anything. We live in a sinful society, not an addicted society. We live in a fallen society, not in some kind of disease dysfunctional society.

Listen to some of these anonymous groups that you could attend, all feeding the flame of man isn't a sinner, man is dysfunctional. Man needs psychological help. It's not really a spiritual issue. If this is the way your church talks, you're in a liberal church.

How about this? Overeaters anonymous, sex addicts anonymous, gamblers anonymous, spenders anonymous. You've probably met a few of those people before. Debtors anonymous, fundamentalist anonymous. I think I could probably join that one.

Parents, that makes me cough, parents anonymous, child abusers anonymous, workaholics anonymous, shoplifters anonymous, pills anonymous, emotions anonymous. This is a funny one, Messy's anonymous. You've got a dirty room, you're a Messy's anonymous.

Kleptomaniacs anonymous. These are all things that make these sinful things, the ones that are sinful, a disease. How about compulsive shoppers anonymous? Basically consumerism is a disease. And so the article goes on to say, apparently we live in a very sick society.

Well, from the world's perspective, that's true. But apparently we live in a very sinful society. And if you don't recognize your sin, then you can't recognize the Savior who forgives sins. Jesus didn't die on the cross for dysfunctions, for diseases, for addictions.

He died for sinners. And so the thing that people have to come to is they need to see God's requirements, God's standards, God's glory, God's holiness, and realize that they don't measure up, that they are sinful.

The law has left them speechless and they have nowhere to turn. And they say, based on the law of God, I deserve damnation. I will shut my mouth, according to Romans 3, verse 19. I can't give you excuses.

I can't give you what my parents did, didn't do. I am undone. And then you present to them the glories of Christ Jesus. After all, if you're not really a sinner, then you don't need the Savior of sinners.

Jesus came to seek and save those who are lost. They knew they were lost spiritually. Jesus came to die for sinners. And so we want to make sure that we realize each one is tempted when he's carried away and enticed by his own lust, by his own desires, by his own passions.

After all, didn't Jesus say in Mark 7, all these evils come from inside and make a man unclean. The evils of sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly.

They all come from man's hearts. We are supposed to take personal responsibility. I made me do this. And society doesn't want that. They don't want to do that at all. And so we have a society that is given over to their own lusts.

That's exactly what the Bible says in Romans 1. They are given over to their own lusts, to their own degrading passions. Friends, take personal ownership in your own life and then make sure your church does as well.

Proverbs 19 .3, a man's own folly ruins his life. It's his own folly. This is NoCompromiseRadio .com on WVNE 760 here in Worcester, Massachusetts. We're talking today about liberalism in a local church.

Is your church liberal? Has liberalism snuck in with code weasel words like the Bible just contains the word of God, that there's some kind of evolutionary long day, long age gap theory. And also men and women, they're not really sinners.

They're just poor victims. That might be good for Oprah theology. That might be good for some kind of TV theology, but the Bible says we're sinners. So we know it deep in our hearts anyway. One man said, I talk about sin and people being sinners because I'm a realist.

We know that. We have consciences and our consciences have guilt. What kind of conscience would have guilt if we're just the product of evolution? So we wanna talk about what tends to pop out in local churches that are liberal.

You don't wanna be in a liberal church. You wanna be in a conservative church. You wanna be in a church that has the same view of the Bible that Jesus did, that Paul did, that Peter did. That's what you want.

Those people in church history that had conservative churches are the ones you should be looking up to and respecting. John Knox, John Calvin, Martin Luther, the list goes on. Even in our day, when you have men like R .C. Sproul and John MacArthur standing up for the word of God.

You don't hear about the liberals very much. Oh, once in a while, you'll hear about Fosdick. Oh, once in a while, you'll hear about one of these liberals that does something for someone. I'm glad liberals do good works for people, but that doesn't earn them anything.

Good works don't get you to heaven. By the way, that's my fourth on the list of how to spot liberalism in a local church. When you start hearing man is made right with God by works, you need to get out of there.

It's no longer a church. Man is made right with God by Christ-finished work on the cross, the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, and it is appropriated through the non-saving instrument of what?

Faith. Faith doesn't save. Faith in Christ saves. Faith isn't meritorious. Faith isn't even a work. Faith isn't a wage. Faith in what God has said, turning away from self and turning unto God and His works.

And yes, you are saved by works, Christ works, because you couldn't be saved by something that's less than holy, and only Christ is holy, therefore only His works are holy. We believe you're saved by works, by the works of Christ, but you're never saved by your own works.

Because Romans 3 .20 says, by the works of the law, no flesh will be justified in His sight. Because through the knowledge of the law comes the knowledge of sin. Through the law comes the knowledge of sin.

So we want to be careful. You don't want to be in a liberal church. You don't want to say, oh, the youth program's really good, and my kids like this church, and my wife likes this church, and I kind of like this church, but I know better.

Well then, friends, it's time to run. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, run from that church. It's not a Christ-honoring church. Christ-honoring churches say men are sinful, and only God can save.

Christ-honoring churches look at the Word of God the way Jesus does. Christ-honoring churches say God gets the glory for creation and He makes out of nothing, and He makes instantaneously, and He makes wonderfully.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made. This is No Compromise Radio. Don't attend a liberal church this Sunday. Don't attend it at all. Mike Abendroth, information, info at nocompromiseradio .com, God bless.

Ministry Sign-Off and Church Information

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.

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