Pastor Ron Poarch Interview

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.

Free Christmas Joy Tickets and a Burning Pictures Giveaway

It's No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and I'm your host today. Before we get to our live guest, I wanna talk a little bit about what's going on here at the church. We have free tickets for the Evening of Christmas Joy concert, Friday, December 4th, 7 p .m.

If you'd like tickets to that, you'll need tickets to get in. They are free. You can email us at info at nocompromiseradio .com or call the church, 508 -835 -3400, and ask for the tickets. There'll be wonderful music, world-class music.

As a matter of fact, I'll preach the gospel. It'd be a great opportunity for you to come and be encouraged and bring some unbelieving friends. Friday, December 4th in West Boylston, we have tickets for you.

I also wanna say that if you'd like to send in your book, Burning Pictures, you've got about six weeks to finish those up. I wanna have a picture of you with a book that you think worthy of burning, and then a picture of you and the book, the crispy book afterwards that you send in as well.

And the winner of my favorite pictures will get a five-book cent from No Compromise Radio ministry. Well, enough of that. Today, I have my dear friend on the line, Ron Porch. Ron is a pastor in California, and I'll let him tell you about himself in just a moment.

Ron Poarch's Cancer Diagnosis and God's Providence

But first of all, Ron, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Thank you, Mike. Do you know, Ron, I just almost wanna sit and just talk like friends instead of ask you all these formal questions. I know what you mean.

I know. Well, listen, we go quite a ways back, and my purpose for having you on is I want to encourage those today who are listening either through podcast or through live on the radio at 760 WVNE here in Worcester.

I wanna encourage them by talking about the faithfulness of God and the goodness of God in spite of situations, in spite of circumstances, in spite of health issues. You are a pastor. I wanna know about the church in a little bit, but tell us the story about how you were diagnosed with cancer, what happened, and tell us about the faithfulness of God, whether you were cured from cancer or whether you weren't.

In other words, Ron, I just want you to preach to the people about what happened to you and then the faithfulness of God. Well, thank you, Mike. I love this opportunity.

I first wanna include you because before I got cancer in 2005, I'd had a conversation with you, Mike, at a conference down in Southern California that regarded your mother and her health regarding cancer, and that, for some reason in God's providence, God put that in my life and made me concerned for your mom and thinking in ways about cancer.

Prior to anything ever happening to me, I had had a very healthy 43 years up to that point, never had anything serious happen to me besides a few broken bones, and then in the spring of 05, I started having some pains and just thinking that somehow, some way, I've pulled something, and they kept gnawing, and finally, they culminated in the summer of just at night, especially, where I could not, when I would have a big meal, having some excruciating pain and knowing something was wrong, and I finally, after going to the doctor many times and they said I need to exercise more, do some other things, and I was already a runner, a swimmer, even exercised more every single day, and nothing was happening until we finally had a diameter in my abdominal area, and finally, I don't know how many, over maybe four more weeks, I need to come in, they think it's a cyst, they were gonna do another test to make sure, but told me that one of the people who saw the scan thought it might be cancer.

Ron, it's amazing to me, I never heard that part of the story, I've forgotten that people say, oh, just exercise more, stretch more, take more vitamins, I mean, if you're not your own health advocate these days, you know, who is?

And I'm thinking about that, number one, and I'm also thinking about how God has providentially worked through all this. So keep going, sorry to interrupt.

Yeah, well, ultimately, it comes the night, the next day, I'm gonna have to have this surgery, and a number of people had to donate blood because the cyst was wrapped around a major artery, and so I had a number of other Christians involved in this process, even some that I've never met to this day, but that night, a doctor came into my room and said, Ron, you know, we came in to have this cyst removed, but it is cancer time, my youngest was five years old, and my life was kind of flashing before me, I had a five-year-old, an 11-year-old, and a 15-year-old, and my first concern, my first thought was about my five-year-old son named Isaiah, and I knew, I had great confidence in what was gonna happen in the rest of my family, but I asked that doctor at that moment by the bed, there was nobody else in the room that night, I just said, worst case scenario, it's the first thing that came to my mind, if this is the worst case thing, how long would I have?

And his response was, surprised, he said, I'm never asked that question. He goes, but I'll answer for you, and I'm not saying you have the worst case scenario, but you know, four, five months, and he goes, but again, we will see what this is in the days and weeks ahead.

Ultimately, it was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and it was caught very early, and again, in God's mercy, treatments, and both in chemo and radiation, and now here it is, four and a half years later, I don't take any medicines, I sleep just like I did before, I'm running, I'm doing everything again, so God had plans for me to still be here, but I know we're gonna get into, I wanna talk about with you, Mike, just in the midst of that moment, in those weeks and months of not knowing certain things about how the Lord worked in that time.

Psalm 42, The Doctrine of God, and Learning to Suffer Well

Well, absolutely, it's amazing to me to think what God does and how He's faithful, even whether He heals someone like you, or my mother wasn't healed on earth, as she was ultimately healed and in glory and waiting for her new body.

Ron, when you, I mean, you're a pastor, and you've been faithfully preaching in ministry for a long time. Did you go through Psalm 42 moments where early on, you know, we all know Psalm 42 as the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for you, oh God, but sometimes we forget, when the psalmist asks himself the question, why are you in despair, oh my soul, and why have you become disturbed within me?

Then he answers, hope in God, for I will again praise Him. Did you think things like that? Were you, did you have to preach to yourself,.

Or what'd you go through? Well, a couple things. One, the doctrine of God is very practical. Maybe some people don't think that today, but if we are grounded in who God is, I do believe that God uses that at those moments by the Spirit, applying it to our lives, really have us embrace and feel the embrace of our Father.

And the Lord was gracious at that, yet my, you know, to your question, you know, those initial moments in that night when that doctor came, and you know, something, here I was alone, and then my parents and my wife came into the room, and they just had dinner, and it was like, hey, you know, everything's gonna be great tomorrow, and you'll be up and out of here, and I did not even know, I was still in shock.

I was gonna tell them, and I asked my parents to go. I said I wanted to be with my wife for a moment, and when I told her what was going on, she left the room, and I was very clingy at that moment. I just wanted her to be close to me.

I didn't want her to go away, and I didn't know where she was, and she was probably gone for 20, 25 minutes, and it seemed like she was gone for hours, because I didn't tell my parents what was going on.

I was just listening to them and talking and feeling like time was getting away from me, but my wife came back, and I was angry, and I wanted to chastise her, and behind her, immediately, were about 15 men.

She had gone down to the bottom of the hospital and called, and these guys just came, and they continued to come, and there ended up being about 27 to, I think it was 27, 28 men who were there within an hour.

They filled the room. They prayed with me and my family. We cried, and an amazing time of the grace of God in the midst of dealing with fear and unknown, and he said, wait a minute, Ron. You just said that you believed in the practicality of the doctrine of God.

Well, I have to say that God doesn't always, just in a flash, bring those things home to us. We have to dwell on them, and it did take some time, some hours, and some days for me to work through in the struggle of really trusting God and entrusting my family to his good hands.

Well, it was interesting for me, although I was a long way away, to watch God's faithfulness and to watch how you responded to that, and isn't it interesting to think that we preach this high view of God.

We have been taught the Reformed doctrine of who God is. We don't have a small kind of Arminian God who is at the beck and call of people. I mean, he is a God who reigns and who rules and who's also a great father, yet we still are frail, and we're still fragile people, and it's, you know, how do we respond?

And we need our brothers and sisters. Those men that came, they were from Grace Reformation Church?

Those were friends of church? Yes, and even from some other churches in our town and from some neighboring towns who came very on the heels of the other guys.

Disneyland, Cancer Treatment, and the Work of the Church

Tell the listeners the story about going to Disneyland and how you planned to go to Disneyland in the middle of all that. I thought that was just a very sweet, touching story.

Yeah, we had had a plan. My youngest, again, had never been on a plane, and there had been a deal during the summer. We had had some passes, and where we live is about a nine, no, about a seven-and-a-half-hour drive, and just about an hour, a little over an hour-long flight, and so we had planned in December to go to Disneyland, and I'm in the midst of my treatments.

I had gone through four chemos still with two to go, and I asked the doctor, should I just cancel that? What should we do? I was making such progress that from the very beginning, he was very optimistic, this oncologist, and just said, no, Ron, I keep it, even though the nurses said, at that time of year, you know, there's a lot of sickness, your immune system's down, so we continued, and we went, and while there, I came across a man who came up to me in the hallway at the hotel and said, boy, you look like you're really going through it, and I thought I looked good.

I thought I had a hat on and wearing clothes, and there was kind of an ashen color to my skin, which I was really not aware of. You know, I'd spent months basically just being inside and as well as the medicines and things that were in me, and I thought, boy, I must not look good, and my son, my oldest son, I said, hey, how do I look?

He goes, oh, you look great, Dad, and we're in a restaurant. This is in Disneyland, a restaurant, and somebody comes up to my kids while I get up and say, boy, your dad looks like he's going through it, and my kids told me that when I came back to the table.

I said, what are they talking to you about? And I was so unaware of that kind of thing going on with me, but the Lord in the midst of that, I wanted to say, Mike, that the work that God did through our church, in our community here, and in my family, again, I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I saw an interview with, and they were talking about if she believed in a sovereign God, or she believed that God had purposes, why would she believe that if God didn't have them win this election? And this was actually O 'Reilly talking to some other woman, and what was interesting is that they thought it would only be a good thing to believe in a God if you would win the election.

They couldn't see believing in a God that would have you not win the election. I think of the same way as far as sickness and suffering. Do we only believe in a God who only and always heals us? And again, I say someone who's been cancer-free now for almost five years, I didn't know that, and we don't have anything guaranteed, do we?

Not at all.

You know what that reminded me of, Ron? Is that article written by John Piper, Don't Waste Your Cancer. And one of his points was, you will waste your cancer if you do not believe it is designed for you by God.

And for good. Absolutely. Yeah. How about this? Did you do this exhortation by Piper, or how'd you work through this when you had your cancer? He said this, you will waste your cancer if you spend too much time reading about cancer and not enough time reading about God.

Absolutely.

Well, two things, Mike. One, I couldn't really read early on. Some of the things and some of the medicines really affected my eyes, and for a time, I really struggled reading, and so I did a lot of time pondering and thinking and on a few occasions having some reading done to me, so that was actually a difficult thing.

And actually, John Piper and I were around the same time going through these things, and I actually got to talk to him in the midst of his time at one of the, you know, six at the Together for the Gospel, and just told him that what he had written was very encouraging to me, and I know I've sent it to others who've also found great encouragement from it, as well as something you sent to me, of all the emails, Mike, that I was sent from people, from missionaries, places all over the world, you sent me probably the shortest email, and it just said, dear brother, and you wrote, suffer well.

And that meant, and I've told you this many times, that meant more to me, because that's what I really wanted to do, by the grace of God, with all the fears that I was feeling and uncertainty about things, different times, I remembered that moniker, that I wanted to suffer well, I wanted to suffer for the glory of God.

Well, by the grace of God, you did. That was actually said to me when my mother was dying. Scott Farah, who was an elder at the church at the time, he said to me, you know, everyone's watching you, you're the pastor, and everyone's watching you suffer as your mother dies, so suffer well.

And so, you know me, I don't really have too many new thoughts in my life, I just take good ones and use them, and abendrothize them. So, by the glory of God and by His grace, you did suffer well, and when did you, when was the last time you were able to preach?

You preached for a while, then you had to stop preaching, right, and you just had to be ministered to. Is it difficult, as the pastor, as the leader, to not minister to people, and then in humility receive ministry?

How'd you work through that? Yeah, I mean, our church was essentially about two and a half years old when this happened, a young church plant, and it was really a question about, Lord, what are you going to do here, because when I told the church in late August of 05, I just, I was gonna have to take some time, something was wrong, I did not know what was gonna happen.

There were a number of pastors in the, from here in the Napa Valley, a good friend of ours came and preached once a month from over in Napa. Another pastor here in town also took the pulpit, and Mike, you came all the way across the country on the, I believe it was just before Christmas.

I thought you were gonna say on Horn Horseback. Yes. And I think that was my brother who came, he looks just a lot like me.

And all these guys, I had a guy come down from Portland, Oregon, and again, we're talking about a church that was about 50 people, and those people have never forgotten how much these other preachers cared for them and for their well-being, and even when you came, Mike, you met with them the day before with some of the men of our church to encourage them, and those things have never been forgotten as gifts from God's hand.

Grace Reformation Church, Expository Preaching, and the Gospel of Grace

Well, tell us, Ron, since we're speaking.

About Grace Reformation Church, tell us a little bit about the church, tell us about some of the distinctives there, why you wanted to plant a church outside of Sacramento, it's called Woodland, California, I like to go to the Sonic down the street, but why Grace Reformation Church, and what are some of the distinctives,.

And give us the website, too. Yeah, well, a graduate of Westminster Seminary in Escondido, I, more and more in believing the Reformed distinctives theologically in our town, there was not a church in the history of this town from 1890 that ever confessionally held to Reformed doctrine, and I guess in the middle of 2002, contacted by a number of different families over a period of a few months, and these families asked what I was going to do next as I had resigned from an associate ministry in the same area, and with the permission of that other church, we went forward in planting a church here in Woodland.

And when it says Grace Reformation Church, when you talk about grace, tell the listeners, let's say, well, first I should say, this is Mike Ebendroth on WVNE, No Compromise Radio, interviewing Pastor Ron Porch from just outside of Sacramento, California.

Ron and I are good friends. God has providentially put us together. I think, Ron, by the way, the first time I met you was maybe in the front row at the Shepherds Conference, and Ron and his son would always make sure they were right up in the front, and they had the best seats and just singing out loud, and you had an extra spot for me.

You probably didn't really have one, but you made one, so I could sit in the front and worship Christ Jesus together with you, and I never forgot that. So Grace Reformation Church, you do expository preaching, high view of God, a high view of scriptures.

If there's a listener today, we've got about three minutes to go. If there's a listener today who doesn't understand what grace is, they're not a Christian, give us the one-minute gospel.

Yeah, every kind of religious system they have, every single system in this world is geared towards you do something in order to make it to whatever your heaven is or your nirvana, whatever it is, for after this life, everyone, you gotta work your way there in some way, shape, or form.

You're already good enough, and there's nothing to attain anyway. Only the Bible teaches us that God reached down and gave us something we didn't deserve by grace. He saves by people trusting in the work of his son who came and died on the cross, taking the punishment of his sheep for his people, and giving them eternal life, all who trust in him and for his atoning sacrifice on the cross.

And it is unique in comparison to any other kind of religion in the world. There's nothing like it, and God has given us simony in his word.

I'm saved by grace. Absolutely. Tell us a little bit about Tom Schreiner. We're actually taping this a week before, but it's gonna be played a week after. Tom Schreiner's coming to your church and having a conference.

Where would the folks who want to listen to that conference go and tell us why they should listen to the conference?

Yes, we're calling this Grounded in Truth Conference. It's gonna be four sessions, about five hours worth of listening. Tom is a professor at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, a New Testament professor, and it's essentially gonna be a time of Tom answering a number of questions on how we got to scriptures, the authority of scripture, the inerrancy of scripture.

He's gonna deal with issues concerning the church, modern trends, issues about gospel and law and legalism. And then we're gonna have the last session just be totally focused on calling it Tom Schreiner Unplugged, where he's gonna just deal with a number of questions.

You're so missional.

We will have it posted on iTunes under Grace Reformation Church. Good, I've got about a minute to go. What's your hardest question that you're gonna ask Schreiner?

Oh boy, maybe something to do, hardest meaning that for, I would say that asking some questions related to the charismatic movement and how people who are not charismatic and people who are charismatic, how they can strive for unity without being compromising.

It's a very difficult balance. Well, I was gonna take the question that you were gonna ask Schreiner and I was gonna ask it to you.

So we're out of time. I know. Ron, I love you. I love your ministry and your family. Thank you for spending some time with us at No Compromise Radio Ministry. And I love the fact that in the faithfulness of God and his goodness, you're still alive to preach another day.

And I know you'll preach grace alone through faith alone. Thanks, Ron. Can I have one final word, Mike?

Yeah, you got two seconds. Your ministry is reaching California. Thank you, brother.

God bless. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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