Rick Phillips Interview

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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

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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.

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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. We're here to take your calls as well. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

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My name is Mike Abendroth and I'm your host. Every day of the week, we do something different. Mondays, you typically hear an expository sermon from Bethlehem Bible Church.

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Tuesdays, I talk with Pastor Steve, my associate pastor regarding issues in the local church.

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And on Wednesday, I like to talk about books that would encourage you to study the scriptures. I think it was

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Harry Truman who said, leaders must be readers. I believe John Wesley said that you had to read the word and study four hours a day and other books four hours a day or get out of the ministry.

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And so I wanna promote reading good evangelical literature. I review two kinds of books, excellent books that I want you to read and other books that I want you to avoid.

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So we have both page turners and burners as we call them. And so today we have a great guest online, the author of Jesus, the

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Evangelist, Richard Phillips. And I should say great guests. I mean, no one's great, no one's good, but God has moved in Rick's heart to write books and minister.

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And Rick, thank you for being on the program today. Well, I'm glad that I'm, I'm hoping I'm not gonna be a burner. Yeah. Well, no,

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I've burned some of the books like Spong's books, you know, the shack, that kind of thing.

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Oh, good. So I think you're gonna make it into the page turner category. Praise the Lord. I don't wanna do some kind of shock radio, but you know, you have to sell radio time.

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Ah, well. Rick, tell us a little bit about the book. As you know, I love to study

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Christ Jesus and I know you do as well. And we see him in the gospels and how he evangelizes.

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You must have been preaching through the gospel of John and then come up with the idea. Just give us an overview on why you think every

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Christian needs to read this book. Well, yeah, I was actually, while I was preaching through the gospel of John, I was reflecting on the differences between John's gospel and the other three gospels, the synoptic gospels.

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And there's a lot of things you could say about the differences, but one of them is that John's gospel, that the unique material in John's gospel, what he has that nobody else has, is heavily weighted, it turns out, in describing

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Jesus personally ministering the gospel, Jesus' personal ministry of evangelism. And that struck me as a very interesting thing.

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And as I was just reflecting on it, I said, you know, wouldn't it be useful to use this material that John had wanted us to know about Jesus, so much of which focuses directly on the

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Lord's personal evangelism? Wouldn't that make a useful study? And I've often described it, you know how the disciples learn from Jesus by walking around with him.

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And so what we want to do is we want to walk around with Jesus in the gospel of John, to watch him ministering with individual people, doing his evangelistic ministry, and then draw reflections on what that means to us.

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Rick, I notice in the book you focused on part one, John the Baptist, part two, Jesus to Nicodemus, and then part three,

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Jesus as witness to the Samaritan woman. Let's talk a little bit about John 4 and how Jesus preached to the

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Samaritan woman. Some of the listeners maybe are just new to Christianity. Would you just give us an overview of our

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Lord's approach to giving the good news to this sinful woman? I have to say,

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Michael, I love all this material. The material in John 4 became very special to me. It's just a remarkable chapter, and it's a lovely depiction of our

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Lord Jesus. There's a lot that's very significant in this encounter. One of the things

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I noticed early on is that Jesus' ministry to specific individuals,

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I make the comment that if Jesus had come into the world merely to die and make it possible for whoever would be saved by believing on him,

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Jesus need never have gone into Samaria. John makes a point of saying Jesus had to go.

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It was necessary for him to go through Samaria. Now, the Samaritans were despised by the Jews. Jews always went around Samaria.

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In fact, it would just cause Jesus trouble to go through Samaria. And John says, no, he had to go.

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And so it just reminds us of the sovereignty of God in saving particular people.

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And Jesus makes this journey because this woman belonged to him, and she was precious to him, and he wearies himself.

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I think it's a wonderful, you know, we look at the issue of the dual nature of Jesus, his deity and his humanity.

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Again, this chapter is just very rich. Jesus shows up and he is weary, he's tired, he's thirsty.

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Why? Because he did what we need to do. He wearied himself in evangelism.

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We ask the question, you know, have I been inconvenienced for the eternal well -being of someone

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I know? Well, Jesus was. And at the same time, of course, during the conversation, he reveals his deity to her.

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The actual interaction our Lord has with her, I think, is very significant. I'm a big believer, because the

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Bible teaches it, that we must be bad news, good news people. You know, if we don't talk about the law of God and the wrath of God on sin, well, then the good news of gospel forgiveness doesn't mean anything.

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And I think one of the reasons why so many evangelistic appeals don't accomplish much is because they're too timid or ashamed to speak about the wrath of God, the judgment of God.

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And so why do I need the remedy when I'm not sick? Now, that being said, and I strongly believe that, it's interesting that methodologically,

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Jesus does not start with this woman by talking about her sins. And I think she's like a lot of people in our society today.

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She is in despair. She is beyond hope. She's outcast from the society because of her immorality.

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And she has lost her sense of dignity. And so Jesus first deals with her as a neighbor, as a person.

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He treats her in a way that other people didn't treat her. He puts her down by the well, and he asked her if he would pour her a drink.

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And she says, you know, men don't ask women to do this, much less Jews allow Samaritan women to serve her.

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And Jesus gives her dignity, and he treats her that way. I've often wondered, what do our unbelieving neighbors pick up from our interactions with them?

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Do we look upon them with contempt? I have to say, Mike, I fear that in the culture war, and there is a culture war going on, and we are involved in it.

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But I think a mistake we've made is we look upon our unbelieving neighbors as enemies, because maybe they vote differently or have different moral values.

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Well, of course they do. And my next door neighbor, who's an unbeliever, and they have very different values than I do, is not my enemy.

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It is my neighbor. And I am to love that person. I am to treat that person as a person of dignity and worth.

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And Jesus does that with her. And he establishes a personal connection with her. And I thought that this was a wonderful portion of that chapter of John 4, that the way he treats her, he cares for the way he deals with her personally.

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And then through that relationship, then he begins by encouraging her that there's hope, because if you knew who was speaking to you and what he offered, you would ask him, and he would give you living water.

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Well, we're talking to Rick Phillips now, and we're talking to him about his new book, Jesus, the Evangelist, Learning to Share the

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Gospel from the Book of John. And Rick Phillips is published by Reformation Trust.

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I really like the way the book is laid out and an excellent publishing company. Tell me your relationship,

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Rick, with Reformation Trust. Oh, you know, like a lot of people, I've had a long relationship with Ligonier, and I've done events with them, and so those are all friends of mine.

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And I trust them, of course. And that's probably the biggest thing. And so when

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Ligonier formed their own publishing company, some of the guys who were involved asked me if I'd be willing to write, and I'm glad that he's done a great job.

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Well, you have 21 books published now, is that true? I think it's more than that now. All right. Well, we were talking about John 4 and Christ's approach to the woman at the well.

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He didn't start off with sin, as you said, but in your book on page 132, an excellent chapter,

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Dealing with Sin, you quote James Boyce, where he's dealing with the issue of sin and do

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Christians talk about sin and the quote is in your book, it is simple because Christians are realists.

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They recognize that sin is an everyday experience and the number one problem of mankind.

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Rick, tell me a little bit about a Christian's approach regarding preaching about sin when they meet a friend or neighbor or relative.

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Well, when I say that, I'm just reflecting on what Jesus is doing, and I say he didn't start with sin.

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My only point is not that it's injurious in any way, but he just dealt with it very naturally, and while I think it's good to have trained summaries and those kinds of things, we do need to deal with people just naturally, and that's what our

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Lord does with her. He sees what's going on with her. He sees her despair, and so he begins, in fact, not with confronting her over her sin, but by encouraging her with the eternal life that he has to give, but then, you know, she, the funny thing is, she's always trying to change the subject, and so he hones in on it and says, you know, the truth is that this is your need because of your guilt of your sin, and, you know, it's remarkable to me.

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People say, well, you know, we really can't talk about sin. Really? I mean, don't we live in a world in which people's problems are caused by their own sins and the sins of others, and isn't it loving and just effective communication to candidly discuss the reality of these things?

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I was, I spoke in a penitentiary last Thursday night. I preached two sermons in a maximum security, it's our hardcore prison.

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Many of these guys have life sentences. You know, when I'm in a prison preaching the gospel, I don't beat around the bush, and I talked with them about, you know, obviously you have been in rebellion against God.

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Now, how are we gonna deal with that? And I just think that we, Christians are realists, and I think it's a little shocking to people sometimes, but if it's not done in a, you know, in a self -righteous way, if it's not done with mocking and with malice,

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I think that we often do much better with a candid, honest approach than we ever thought that we would, to be frank.

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Well, I think your book helps us in this area. We so much in evangelicalism, we want a formula, we want the

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ABCs of Christian evangelism. I think it's refreshing to go back to Christ and his life and his ministry to say to ourselves, how does

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Jesus preach the gospel? In what manner does he preach the gospel? Instead of running for some methodological

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ABC book, don't you think? Yes, and yet at the same time, we can see a pattern. Well, the thing I point out in John four is,

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Jesus first cared enough to weary himself. And the question is, do we care enough?

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I mean, isn't that, I lived across the street in South Florida for five years from a Jewish man, a

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Jewish family. And we knew them a bit. And I've been living there for two years. When I was out in the street and our kids were out there and he came up to me and he said to me, you're like an evangelical preacher, right?

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I go, yeah, yeah. You know, I pastored a big church up there. He said, were you ever gonna come to talk to me about Jesus? You know,

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I'm like, well, yeah, I just, you know, the frankness, I didn't care enough about the guy to do so.

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And he had been sitting at home, watching heretical TV, wondering about salvation when he lives across the street from an evangelical preacher who didn't love him enough and who didn't care enough about him to engage in the social risk and the weariness.

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And Jesus, he cared enough. He wearied himself to go to her. And then he crossed the boundaries, just huge numbers of boundaries between Jesus and a

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Samaritan woman. And he just crosses them. I do wanna say that there are many kinds of boundaries in our society today.

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There are the religious and the people who know they're not, particularly when we're talking about the morally depraved, they are not likely to come to church.

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We need to go to them and we've got to find ways in our evangelism to cross the boundaries and to go to them, even in small ways.

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I got a haircut yesterday and our church, which is a historically white church, we just are, we're in downtown

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Greenville and to our left is the yuppie thriving downtown. To our right are the poor black neighborhoods.

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And we don't have a lot of in -reach into the poor black neighborhoods, not because of racism or anything, because we live in a stratified society and it's not easy.

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And this is not a big deal, but I just make it my business to go to the black barbershop and to get to know the guys down there, to cross the boundaries and to go into their world.

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Now, how much more true is that of people who really might, maybe you're in a university setting, there's people who are not going to go to the church because they think we're not loving, they think they'll look odd.

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We know it's not true, but they don't know it's true. The Samaritan woman was never going to go to Jerusalem.

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Jesus just crosses the boundaries. She's blown away that he would do that. So he cared enough to weary himself.

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He crossed the boundaries. He connected with her on a personal basis, as I was saying. And then having done that, just treating her as a human being and even giving her the opportunity to serve him was a huge thing.

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And then out of that personal relationship, then he very clearly and biblically presented the good news.

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And we've got to do that. There's a lot of emphasis on pre -evangelism today. And so far as it goes,

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I'm fine with it, so long as it actually leads to evangelism. And I think there's even a certain amount of shame of the gospel among evangelicals today that our forebearers did not have.

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We need to clearly and communicate to people out of those, usually it's going to be effective when there's a personal relationship, but we need to know the biblical message.

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And one of the things I try and do in the book is very clearly show the biblical message that Jesus gives. Well, it's difficult for even pastors to preach the gospel because we realize when we go across the street to our neighbor, what is at stake and what the cross will do and the claims of Christ.

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And I think it's probably encouraging for people to know that we even have to struggle and set our mind toward doing these things as well.

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I try to tell our folks here, Rick, that if you say to yourself, I wasn't led to preach the gospel or evangelize, you've forgotten the

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Great Commission where you don't need to be led to obey. God's already told you to obey. And when

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I tell my son, clean your room, and I ask him two days later, why haven't you cleaned it? And he says, well,

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I wasn't led to clean it. We have the Great Commission and here

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Christ Jesus promising us, and lo, I am with you always. In light of that,

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Rick, tell me a little bit about the appendix, the sovereignty of God and evangelism. Why is the sovereignty of God important for the people as they talk to their friends at work or their neighbors?

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Why is that such a solid doctrine for them, practical doctrine? Well, I firmly, belligerently insist that the doctrine of the sovereignty of God does not in any way minimize or mitigate against evangelism.

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We do not believe that since God predestines those who are going to heaven, it doesn't matter whether I evangelize or not.

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God has given me the duty of doing so. Having said that, I think that our own sin and that Satan often get us to act as if it does.

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And so whenever we find ourself thinking, well, you know, God's sovereign, so it doesn't matter whether I do my duty or not. We are not right.

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Our doctrine is badly flawed. And we should never let our knowledge of the sovereignty of God keep us from being as aggressive as we can be.

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In fact, if we understand the situation rightly, it is only the sovereignty of God that gives us any hope.

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And that will ground us in biblical methods. I think that one of the reasons why there's so much unbiblical evangelism in the last couple hundred years, and I particularly mean altar calls and other types of manipulations, is that people who don't believe in the biblical teaching of total depravity, they're desperate to save souls and it's not working, they don't think, and so they try to improve upon the methods.

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Well, that's always going to be a disaster. What we need to do is a biblical ministry of prayer and biblical witness, as Paul says in 2

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Corinthians 4, I set forth the word of God before the consciences of men, and then we allow

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God to sovereignly work. And so on the one hand, we are very aggressively active because this is a command that we have, and we know that God sovereignly works through means, and our witness is one of the means.

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On the other hand, we patiently wait upon the Lord. And it's exciting to me, you know, I get up in the pulpit sometimes saying to myself, you know, unless the

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Holy Spirit accompanies the preaching of the word, they're going to hate me. I mean,

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I'm going to preach an offensive message to them because I'm preaching the text, or they're going to think

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I'm nuts. Ah, but there is the Holy Spirit isn't there? And it gives us such freedom to expectantly and joyfully give an accurate biblical presentation of whatever text we're preaching and of the gospel itself, because we know that God will sovereignly enter into that, and he will save many.

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Well, speaking of the sovereignty of God, tell us a little bit about your relationship with James Montgomery Boyce.

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And I often think of those who have been placed in my path to train me. It could have been anyone, but God in his goodness placed the right kind of man at the right time in my life to give me the right doctrine, or who knows,

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I could be following Benny Hinn. Tell me about God's goodness in giving you a mentor like James Montgomery Boyce.

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Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I've been thinking about him a lot recently because it was 10 years ago in 2010 that he died.

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And when I was with him at Tenth, Tenth Church has a New Year's Eve watch night service.

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And we have one here. And I was thinking about Jim because the last one he did was 10 years ago this year, and I was with him.

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And it was an incredibly memorable one. But, you know,

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I was converted under his ministry. I was a graduate student at the Wharton School of Business, and I was living in downtown

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Philadelphia, five blocks from Tenth. And my mother kind of nagged me that I needed to go to church.

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And so, I mean, I've been raised in liberal Presbyterian churches, so I went to a nearby Presbyterian church.

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I walked in, I'll never forget seeing Boyce that night and just how blown away I was for this man to be articulately preaching the word of God with authority.

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And maybe I'd seen it before, but I don't think I had. It was just a remarkable thing.

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He was no man -be -pan being. There was no, I mean, he was just authoritatively proclaiming the message and pressing it upon his hearers.

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He was preaching that night, the third chapter of Hosea. And I was, after the sermon,

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I went home and got on my knees and surrendered my life to Jesus. Now, during those two, that was the first semester of my time in grad school.

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So those two years were revolutionary to my life. I was a single man. I've actually met my wife at Tenth.

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But that was my life changed fundamentally. I had two solid years. It's amazing what God can do.

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In two years of devoted Bible study and really repenting of your sins and living in Christian fellowship, we had a wonderful group of single young adults, my peers, who really taught me how to be a

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Christian. And the boys just preaching. Well, I went away to, actually, I was a military officer.

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I was on the faculty at West Point. And I got involved in Bible studies up there. Over that three -year period, the Lord called me into the ministry.

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It's kind of its own story. And when I came back to Tenth, actually,

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I led the singles group that I had been in a few years earlier. But I got to know

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Boyce pretty well. And then when I came on staff, I joined his work with the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. So he and I traveled together for about three years.

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And you do get to know someone very well. He and I were very close. And really, he was my spiritual father.

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And the great thing about Boyce was the authenticity and the integrity of his

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Christian life and his personal embrace of the things he taught.

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You know, so much of the things that I say and do now arise out of dinner conversations

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I had with Boyce. I was talking to one of my interns just this morning, and I was saying to him, you know, let's be servants of the

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Lord Jesus, right? Let's not, you know, we have X number of years to be ministers. Let's not be playing games.

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Let's serve our Lord. This is all flowing out of the dinner conversations I had with Boyce over a three -year period.

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And it was wonderful talking about preaching. And of course, I was under his ministry. I was then a colleague of his.

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And Phil Ryken, who's the senior minister there, he and I ministered alongside

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Boyce the last couple of years of his ministry. You know, one of the big themes was an utter conviction and being convinced about the power of the

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Word of God. I mean, I have committed my whole life to the conviction that God will do mighty things through a faithful ministry of his

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Word. I get that from Boyce. And now you have Dr. Barnhouse as a spiritual grandfather, I guess.

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Well, it's true. You know, right after Boyce died, in fact, the night that Phil Ryken and I had, we had plotted out what we would do the

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Sunday after Jim died, Jim Boyce died. And Phil preached the morning service on it, which was more of a comfort message for the congregation.

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And I gave more of a eulogy sermon in the evening. And I preached on the death of Elijah and the fall of the mantle.

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And one of my points was that really, Boyce's mantle has fallen on us all because we can all pick it up.

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We can all do what he did, lead authentic Christian lives of prayer and minister the Word of God.

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Well, anyway, after I preached the sermon, this little old lady comes up to me and said, I want you to know how much Donald Gray would have liked that sermon.

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Oh, wonderful. I said, ma 'am, did you know Dr. Barnhouse? She said, why, I was his secretary for 20 years.

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And of course, Boyce looked to Barnhouse the same way we looked to Boyce. And so we were constantly hearing about Barnhouse from Boyce.

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And I do feel, I mean, I think I have the right to claim I'm one of Barnhouse's grandchildren and one of the sons of Boyce.

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Amen. Well, we've been talking to Rick Phillips and he's the author of many books, but the one I wanted to talk about today was

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Jesus the Evangelist, Learning to Share the Gospel from the Book of John. You can go to our website, nocompromiseradio .com

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and there'll be a link on how to order this Reformation Trust book. And I think it'll encourage you to preach the gospel, to evangelize and study our

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Lord Jesus Christ. We've only got about 15 seconds left, Rick, but so many times we hear WWJD and it's not really symmetrical.

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People can't do what Jesus did, but they can learn from his evangelistic style and motives, can't they?

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Well, I want to say this, that when Jesus, after he witnesses the Samaritan woman and she believes, she goes back to Sychar, her town, and she witnesses the gospel.

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While that's happening, the disciples come back and they hand Jesus a sandwich. And Jesus refuses the food and he says, my meat and my drink is to preach the gospel.

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And I just want to say this, the thing Jesus was so preoccupied with that he couldn't even stop to eat was the woman taking the gospel back to her village.

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And the thing right at this moment that has the rapt attention of our exalted

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Lord Jesus, his whole enthusiastic attention and his mighty prayer is when you and I witness the gospel.

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Amen. Jesus, the evangelist, Rick Phillips. Thank you, Rick, for being on the show. God bless you. God bless you,

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