Andrew Smith Interview (Part 2)

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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. My name is

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Mike Abendroth and I've got a couple announcements before we get back to our in -studio guest, Andrew Smith.

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We have two services coming up at Bethlehem Bible Church. I'm really not a big two -service guy, but God is blessing our church with lots of people who want to hear expository preaching.

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They want to know about sin and how it can be forgiven. They want to learn about Christ and his all -sufficient death on Calvary and his literal resurrection.

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And so we've got two services coming up. March 18th is when we go to two services. 8 .30 is the first service and it's traditional.

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And then the 11 .15 service, it's acid rock. No, we're just kidding. No compromise style.

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We're gonna try to have the services similar. 8 .30 is the first service. And then we have a

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Sunday school in between, 10 o 'clock. And then at 11 .15, we have another service. And so if you've been, but there's been no room for you at the end, we'll see you

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March 18th. Two services, Bethlehem Bible Church. And you might want to pray for us because I don't really want to do this and I'm dragging my feet, but what am

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I gonna do? Say no to people who want to come? I think two Sundays ago, Andrew, it was almost standing room only.

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And I think I was trying to talk about hell and stuff too, trying to drive people out, but this is counter -intuitive.

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The other comment I have, I would like to announce is we have an IBS class coming up soon. And the

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IBS class is Institute for Biblical Studies. We have a class on the life of Christ and a class on what a

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Christian home should be like. And Andrew, I'm not sure about you, although I think I know. For me,

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I'm the first generation of having a mother -father raised in a good church environment.

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And I'm trying to have my family function as a Christian family, a Christian father,

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Christian mother, Christian. Maybe they're not Christian children yet, but my desire is that they would be

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Christian. So what does a family look like? What does a family do for dinner? What do they do when it comes to free time, playing video games?

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What do we do for ministry, sports? And so there's gonna be a class for seven weeks that I'll teach here at Bethlehem Bible Church, the

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Christian home. You can go to our website, bbcchurch .org, and pull up that information.

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We'd love to have you register. And you can attend even if you're an Episcopalian. Charismatics can show up.

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Will we let Roman Catholics show up, Andrew? If they say proper penance. Okay, proper penance. Well, maybe they figured out the new mass by then.

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And peace be with you. Perhaps, if we're feeling forgiving. That's right.

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So Andrew Smith, we're gonna do part two today about video games, thinking properly about free time.

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Andrew, welcome to the show. It's great to be here again. Boy, time flies. It just seems like 10 minutes ago when you were here last week.

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Perhaps not even 10 minutes ago. So Andrew, when it comes to free time, leisure time, let's think big picture.

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In the old days, people had no free time. Bible days, there wasn't much free time because from the minute you woke up to the minute the sun went down, you worked.

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Free time is actually a fairly new concept since we moved to a more industrialized age from an agragarian age.

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Agrarian. Agrarian, agragarian, you're exactly right. The aggregate agrarian society.

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Thanks for being here, by the way. Where are you when I need you? Well, that's why you have the Tuesday guy. Okay, that's right. Hi, Steve, how are you?

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So thoughts about just amusement and leisure time and rest time in general. How should a

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Christian see times of rest? Well, I think the first thing that we are able to do with our time of rest is take that opportunity to perhaps further our studies with the scriptures.

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Obviously, we should have our regular devotionals and things like that. And those are things that should be put aside before we plan our days, similar to tithing or these kinds of things.

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That's a first fruit kind of issue, devotions and making sure that you spend your time in the Word and your time in prayer. But beyond that, perhaps a

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John MacArthur book or any of these Christian authors that you could read and things like that, that would help you with whatever you're struggling with.

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You could certainly find a topical book or maybe if you study something like a certain book, have a commentary, those kinds of things.

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I think that would probably be an excellent use of someone's free time. But beyond that, I mean, we do have, especially in our culture, this sort of need to engage in,

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I guess you'd call it amusement. So things that are maybe less thought filling.

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It could be something athletic. I mean, when you're out there playing baseball or playing soccer or one of these things, usually they say, don't overthink it, right?

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So you have these things where you're maybe engaging your physical body or just engaging different parts of your brain to enjoy yourself.

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And a lot of people do that with TV. Over the years, as this free time thing has sort of become something that is in everyone's life, we had radio and then we had

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TV and then computers. And now video games are really becoming one of the mainstream ways that we can amuse ourselves.

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Andrew, it would be too easy just to say video games are bad inherently.

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So let's say no to them. And so with a fundamentalist, kind of King James only attitude,

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I enjoy a walk, I enjoy a swim. Those people that play video games, they're sinful and just say no to video games.

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It's much more complex, I think, in real life. I've got a 15 year old son in the house. If I were to just say no video games, he would say, okay, dad, but I'm trying to think through the issues on what

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I say no to because I don't think by nature sitting down, I don't think I'm sinning if I sit down and play a video game for an hour with my son.

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Do you? Absolutely not, I don't think that's a sinful thing. What if I played a video game for an hour with my son when my wife was really requesting help and I hadn't got all my yard work done and I just was gonna blow off the time and just sit down and play?

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Well, that would be a different situation. And the sinful part there - Are you calling me sinful? If you're doing those things, then yes

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I am, sir. Nobody's perfect, right? But the issue there is not that what you're doing, the video games are the sinful thing.

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If you're reading a book in your room and blowing off your responsibilities, that's still sinful.

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It's work first and play later. And whether that's sports, whether that,

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I mean, I could sit and read a book that I'm not supposed to be reading and have the wrong priority.

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We believe at Don't Compromise Radio that we have liberty in Christ and when God justifies us with the righteousness of Christ and Christ is counted with our sins, that we can't be more justified and you can't be less justified if you have some time to just relax and we think it's a heart issue.

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What defiles a person? It is what? From within, Jesus said in Mark 7, from within, out of the heart of man come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.

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Of these things come, of all these evil things, rather, come from within and they defile a person.

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And so when a person sins because of a video game and their laziness, the video game is just feeding what's in the man's heart, right?

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Absolutely. Is that the way we look at it? Was somebody just calling you? Was it an important phone call? It was not important. It was not important.

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Was that an iPhone 4S? It was, in fact. It was, but I thought you were a PC guy. I am a PC guy and I use iTunes on the

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PC. Oh, you do? Okay, all right. But you have an iPhone, but you like the Mac phones?

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I chose the phone with the best hardware. Oh, let's see. All right, well,

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Andrew is 30 years old. You've been saved for what, about 10 years? Probably seven. Okay, wow, that's...

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When did you get here? Seven, eight, something like that. I don't know. Okay. I have no idea. You know your testimony better than I do.

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I don't remember five years ago. Why would I remember seven? I know you love to teach and you're an excellent teacher. Before we talk more about video games, tell me the style of teaching you like.

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I .e. expository versus topical and all that. Let our listeners know a little bit more about you.

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I think this happens with a lot of teachers when they first start out the process. I think topical is a little bit easier.

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You can find the right references and things like that. But I find that expositional preaching is actually easier for me in the sense that I'm not worrying about...

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The context is right there in front of me. And so with a topical message, you have to jump around and say, okay, well, what is he actually talking about here?

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And does this actually apply to my topic? But with an expositional message, you're working through something.

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It means, number one, you can't avoid hard topics. And there's a lot of things in Christianity that are controversial.

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I think you'd totally agree with that. That's why we get such big arbitrary ratings. And teaching expositionally forces you to work through those issues.

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Excellent. Well, I think if I were a pastor, I'd like to have you as a member. Here I am.

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Wife and kids? Yes, I do have a beautiful wife, Anitra. And I have two beautiful children, Claire, who's three, and Asher, who will be one next month.

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Does Asher play video games? He probably will. Claire does. Okay. And Asher means what in Hebrew?

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Happy. Well, you know what? Wouldn't you like to be me as a pastor? If you were a pastor, wouldn't you like to have

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Bethlehem Bible Church members as a pastor? This is pretty amazing, isn't it? Well, we just follow the right leaders,

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I guess. I don't know. We're very blessed to have you and to have this church. Well, I guess I'll have you on for one more show.

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All right, on No Compromise Radio today, we're thinking out loud, and you are listening to us talk about video games.

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And so you can listen to all our old shows about liberty and legalism and asceticism and just saying no to things, but it's more complex than that.

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Although video games cause problems because of their addictive nature, because sometimes it's a bad video game with wrong themes, rape or all kinds of weird witch kind of stuff.

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Witchy Poo, where was Witchy Poo from? I don't know. That was the Banana Splits or something.

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There was Witchy Poo as a character. She was a pretty, she was a white witch, Andrew. You know, somebody on our website was just talking about the

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Banana Splits, believe it or not. We have some old people on there. Oh, you do? Okay, some really old people, that's right.

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Well, you're 30. I could be your father, by the way. And if you don't get in line, I'll have to get out the rod.

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I don't like that part. Tell me a little bit about parents. And so you're younger, you can think through things

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Christianly, you have small kids. Tell me what your advice would be when it comes to video games as from a parent's perspective, because our answer isn't no.

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What's the answer and how do you shepherd them and guide them and lead them? So the big thing about video games with kids is number one, kids just are not discerning.

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And if you are a Christian parent, it's your job to be discerning for your children, number one. Number two, video games also are not babysitters.

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So in much the same way that a lot of people would say, oh, it's not a good thing, you know, to park your child in front of the television for four hours or six hours or whatever on a

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Saturday so you can get yard work done. The same issue comes up with video games and perhaps even more so because they really do draw you in.

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Beyond that, I would say play games with your kids. I mean, if you set this expectation up where you plop the kid down and you leave them there in front of the television, you go off and do your own things, it causes two problems.

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Number one, you're not paying attention to what they're doing. And number two, you're fostering a relationship where you're not involved with your children.

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And that goes beyond video games. But I just said a few minutes ago that my daughter Claire plays video games.

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Well, we play together. And sometimes with Elmo's A to Z, A to Zoo, or whatever the name of the game is that she plays,

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I'm sitting on the couch and watching her and I'm not playing the game. But there's other games like the Microsoft Connect where you can have two players.

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You can have a parent and a daughter or a son or child and you can play together. And it's a lot of fun and it builds the relationship that you have together.

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You know, Danny Akin was here a while back and he talked about how he loved to sit there and watch college football with his sons every

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Saturday. It was a ritual, if you will, to do that. I think he called it a sacrament. A sacrament? Oh, excuse me.

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Just kidding. But you know, that's a perfect example of doing something with your kids.

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And it might even be something, watching college football all day long, that a lot of people would say, oh, that's laziness, dah, dah, dah, dah.

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But it's about the relationship between a father and a son or a father and a daughter, fostering that relationship so that you, and not their friends that they play with online or whatever, are the person that they look up to and trust and rely on.

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That's right. When I think of shalom, peace in the Hebrew, since you were quoting Hebrew words earlier, whole living, the wholeness of life.

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And so it's obvious that if you neglect your spiritual duties, your

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Bible reading, your duties as a husband to your wife and as a father to your children, and you're playing video games at work and stuff,

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I'm not saying that would be good in any way, shape or form. But I think you could incorporate video games.

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We don't play video games much now because the machine's so old. I think it was PlayStation 2. Are there any good games?

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You can actually still buy new PlayStation 2s. Oh, you can, okay. And so at our house, it was for a long time.

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You can play on Saturdays, the one day a week, Saturday afternoon, you can play the games as long as all your work is done on that Saturday.

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Does that sound fair? I think that sounds very reasonable. In one sense, I liked it because if there was the next level that needed to be gotten to and they knew they couldn't get to it till the next week, well, if you wake up in the morning saying, you know what,

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I gotta do that level again, but you think, well, I can't really do it till next week. By the time next week rolls around, you've forgotten about the level anyway.

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It depends. You rolled his eyes. Tell me about fathers, dads.

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We talked about it a little bit last time, but not very much. Give me some exhortations to lazy men who overdo video games and they spend too much money, too much time, and everything else has fallen apart.

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As a father or as a spouse? Either one's fine by me. Well, I mean, number one is that you need to put the controller down.

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I mean, it's sort of a common sense thing to say, but it's absolutely 100 % true. There's these online role -playing games, massively multiplayer online role -playing games.

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There's a lot of them that are out there. And these are games where you have an online community that you can very much lose yourself in.

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They call it, you think of things like Second Life, where you're creating a fake you. And you're creating, it sounds ridiculous, but you know what?

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That's exactly what it is. And you have a little avatar guy that walks around and you talk to people and you create an entire life in this video game world that somebody pushes the wrong button and they blow the server away, then you're gone.

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And investing this time and all this energy into these basically fake things is,

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I mean, it can be a fun pastime to do responsibly and as long as you exert self -control, but your children are only with you for,

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I don't know, 18 to 25 years. I guess you could say it sounds like a long period of time, but my children are three and almost one.

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And every single day, I'm reminded of the fact that my son is not quite one and my daughter is three and they're very different.

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And she's grown up a lot, obviously, over the last three years. And that time goes by very fast.

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Having a baby is fun, but you know what? If I'm playing Call of Duty instead, then I'm missing out on life.

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You know, I wanted to make sure, Andrew, I didn't come across as a legalist because legalism is as bad as antinomianism.

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Extra rules is as bad as no rules. So I don't think there's anything wrong with them, but I rarely meet people and you're probably an exception.

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I don't know if I have to start checking on you more, but I rarely meet people who have good self -discipline and self -control when it comes to video games.

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If I talk to people who like video games, how many hours do you think they really play a week versus read and work and everything else and investing time and doing other things?

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Right, well, listen to this. This was in 2007, Harris Interactive, which is a secular organization, did a poll of about 1 ,200 youths aged eight to 18.

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And let's see, 81 % said they played video games at least once a month. The average play time varied by age and sex from eight hours per week from teen girls to 14 hours per week by teen boys.

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That's a part -time job right there. Tweens, eight to 12, fell in the middle with boys averaging 13 and girls averaging 10.

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So that's a lot of time. And there's a lot of other things that can be done with that time. I joke about this with my wife a lot.

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I do a lot of different things, both at the church, at work. I actually have three jobs.

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And the thing that I consistently push to the back burner is actually playing video games, even though I run a video game website,

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I work for a prominent games retailer with one of my jobs.

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I'm very involved in the gaming community. I probably spend more time in the community and interacting with people than I do actually playing the games themselves.

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Well, theologically, community, I don't like, but when the video game thing, I think I can allow that. You have a dispensation today.

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All right, let me ask you this question, Andrew. Again, I'm not the legalist or anything like that, but why don't 50 -year -old men play as many video games as 25 -year -old men?

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In other words, is it because men who are 50 are older and they're busier?

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Or is it because they're older and more mature and then can push some of that stuff to the side easier?

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Or is there a third option? I think it's definitely much more the second option that you listed there, that as you take in this world and experience the world and become wise and become more mature, you realize just how fruitless it is.

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Ecclesiastes talks about this life as a vapor and it is here for just a little bit and then it's gone.

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And I touched on this earlier, just wasting your life in this digital world instead of actually experiencing what life is is exactly that, it can be a waste.

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Andrew, when I meet young people now, most young people that I meet, and part of it is the look and I get all that look stuff, but I meet them and they're slouched over and they don't look me in the eye.

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And it just drives me batty. And every day when we drive to church, I try to tell my kids to look people in the eye, shake their hand, ask them how their week went, engage them.

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You know, it's weird because in the alternate universes that you talk about, there are no manners needed, no social mores.

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You know, what's the worst thing you can do? Shoot somebody in the back and call a duty and the rest of the people kick you out? Probably, yeah, something like that, yeah.

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Or inactivity, you get kicked out for that too. I just want parents to parent. And if you wanna play video games and everything else is done in the house, there's nothing wrong with that as long as it's an appropriate video game.

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I wish I could play Call of Duty. I'd probably like it. I could pick up some cool well -rod gun and shoot a bad guy.

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I know more about guns from video games. You know, M1 Garand, I went and shot one the other day and I knew about that gun because I had -

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Call of Duty 3. I think Call of Duty 1, as far as I know of. So I just want parents to be engaged.

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And that goes for sports too. Some parents are just freaking out when it comes to sports and that's all they do, running around with sports.

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So I don't think there's anything wrong with video games if parents parent and 10 -year -old boys and 15 -year -old boys can't control themselves.

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Absolutely. You mentioned before, drives you crazy when kids don't look you in the eye. Entering school, when kids are first entering kindergarten or first grade, things like that, their intellect isn't the issue.

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Their social development is the problem. And I deal with this with my own daughter. She doesn't like to look people in the face and we have to continually remind her, you need to look at people when you talk to them.

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You need to look at me when I'm talking to you, et cetera, et cetera. And if you park a child in front of a

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TV, whether it's watching TV or playing video games, they're not learning social interaction. And you're not parenting when that happens.

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I mean, these are the responsibilities of a parent to make sure that your children are developing properly and parking them in front of something and going off and doing your own thing isn't how you do that.

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You know, if there was a video game and there could be a six -player game or a four -player and everybody, you know, take turns every 15 minutes, somebody else jumps in and plays and those kinds of things

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I have no problem with. Actually, the other day, Andrew, I said to my kids, we're gonna go watch the

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Patriots game. It was Patriots playing the Broncos, you know, the whole Tebow deal. And my girl said, you know, we don't really like football.

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And here's what I said to them. I said, well, one of the reasons you don't like it is because you don't understand what's going on.

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We don't have a TV at the house so they don't ever get to watch football, even though I'd like to watch football. And so I said, but we are gonna go because Christians get together for social parties.

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People get together for social parties and you need to know what's going on so you could watch a game with other people a couple times a year at a

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Super Bowl and just know how to function with a touch football game or watching a game with other

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Christians. Because I just think it's good for your social development. We learn to play volleyball. Why? Because you're gonna need to play volleyball to church function sometime.

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You need to learn to watch football games because sometimes Christians get together and do that. So I could use the same philosophy with video games.

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It'd be nice to know how to play a few games because Christians sometimes get together for game nights. I think there's actually a

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BBC game night. Do they do video games at night? You know, I don't think they do. I think we try not, I think -

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Dungeons and Dragons isn't video, right? No. Hero escape.

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Hey, all right, I've got you. I've got two more minutes. Andrew, talk to me about Harry Potter, Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the

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Rings. Lord of the Rings Christians like because it's written by a Catholic and there's, you know, good witches, but Harry Potter's written by a pagan and there's bad witches.

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What do we do with witches in games? Well, I mean, you know, burn them. That game will be out someday,

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I'm sure. But no, the issue there is what goes into your mind. You know, what you wanna put into your mind are the best things.

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You have a good, better, best philosophy. I know you've talked about that on the show. And, you know, if you have the ability to put better things in your mind, certainly do that.

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I don't think that those things inherently are sinful. I don't think there's anything, I mean, obviously, if you were to engage in those things, you know, that's a little bit more questionable.

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But I don't know, playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons or playing a Harry Potter game or reading a Harry Potter book, you know, proper parenting breeds discernment and the ability of someone, whether it's a child or an adult or whatever, to say, this is a fantastical thing, this is not reality, this is a secular thing.

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I mean, there's a separation there. You know, just like video games are not inherently sinful, I don't think that those kinds of things are.

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Now, obviously, if it's something that you're uncomfortable with, don't engage in it. We talked First Corinthians 8, now you've been teaching on that.

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You know, and if you're in a situation where somebody's convicted by those things, then don't do them. It's just...

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Right, or somebody's using the Lord's name in vain or casting spells with Jesus' name or this, that, or the other, I think it's not good.

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But I did think, Andrew, we're gonna have a Bible Reformation Day theme during Halloween's festivities next year, and I'm gonna have maybe my daughter dress up as a witch of Endor.

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Of Endor, really, that'll be interesting. Andrew Smith is a member here at Bethlehem Bible Church, serves in the media ministry, teaches the

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Bible. Andrew, I love your enthusiasm and desire to serve the Lord. Thank you for being on No Compromise Radio.

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It's my pleasure. 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.