Current Issues in Evangelicalism (Part 4)

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

We've been on WVNE 760 AM here in Worcester, Mass for about three years, just over three years.

It's winding up, so if you'd like to still listen to the daily broadcast, we'll have broadcast six days a week, 25 -minute shows.

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Today, part four, Carl Truman at Bethlehem Bible Church. I had him speak to leaders, addressing the issues of leadership in a modern church and how crucial that is.

So today is part four, No Compromise Radio, and it is Carl Truman addressing leaders, talking from the pastoral epistles.

You can write me at info at nocompromiseradio .com, and you can actually write Carl at info at nocompromiseradio .com.

I'll forward it to him if I like it. If I stand up in my church when I go back home and I start preaching that God does not know the future, my people can take me down straight away.

I'll be out of that pulpit so fast because we have a confession which we say summarizes the teaching of Scripture and delimits the power of the minister.

I have no right to teach contrary to a confession that I have taken vows to as summarizing what

I understand to be the teaching of Scripture on the cardinal points of the faith. If you're in a church with a minimal doctrinal basis, then you have minimal power over what goes on in the pulpit.

You have minimal ability to stop your church degenerating into a personality cult or even less qualified, simply a cult.

Churches need confessions to delimit the power of office bearers.

And that's why I get the heebie -jeebies when I look at some of these very big megachurch organizations where you have very powerful single individuals at the top and very minimal doctrinal confessions to hold them to account by.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying here that Presbyterianism never goes wrong or good confessional congregationalism never goes wrong.

History demonstrates that it does because it's ultimately applied by people who go wrong. But I would hazard a guess and say it goes wrong less often than the alternatives.

And that's because it reflects more closely what Paul is laying out in the pastoral epistles.

Good men in charge, holding fast to a form of sound words.

Confession, a form of sound words. So confessions then, very, very important.

Thirdly, I think we need a clear grasp of the gospel over against creeping pragmatism.

What is it that really marks out liberalism? Most evangelicals, if you ask them, well, what is the hallmark of liberalism, would say anti -supernaturalism.

Liberalism is a denial of the supernatural accounts within the gospel and the

Bible. And certainly it can be that. I would say at a more fundamental level, though, liberalism is pragmatism.

Liberalism is not a denial of the supernatural, historical facts of the gospel. It is a denial of their significance.

That's what really marks out liberalism. For a man like Schleiermacher, the great father of liberalism in the late 18th, early 19th century,

Schleiermacher, the resurrection, he's a bit sort of ambiguous and non -committal on the resurrection.

For Schleiermacher, it's not that the resurrection didn't happen, it's that even if it did happen, it's of no earthly significance.

And this creeps in to conservative churches all the time, in a most extreme form.

I think you look at a guy like Joel Osteen, for example. Does Joel Osteen deny the

Trinity? Does he deny the incarnation? Does he deny the resurrection? I don't know.

Possibly not. I've heard him a few times on television and I've never heard anything that I would say, oh, he's really denying a cardinal historical truth of the faith there.

He simply denies its biblical significance. That's what it seems to me. The biblical significance of these things never comes through.

And it's alive and well in conservative circles as well. Just look at the book lists of many of the

Christian publishers today. One of my favourites is the

Eden Plan Diet. T .D. Jakes, by the way, has produced a diet book. T .D.

Jakes is not the greatest advert for his own diet, I would say. But the

Eden Plan Diet, it's published by a reputable evangelical publisher.

And if you read, I've not read it, fortunately. I'm not yet at the point where I need diet books, thankfully. But if you read the blurb on Amazon about it, it's all about the

Bible helping you to resist sinful urges at church pot lunches and this kind of thing.

What it's done is reduce the gospel to something that helps improve your way of life now.

Don't get me wrong, diet can be good things. Having a healthy diet's a good thing. Not sure that having a bad diet is a sin.

We don't discipline people in my church relative to their body mass index, for example. I was going to say, you know, it's like maybe bad dental care would be a sin, but then guys like me coming from Britain would find ourselves under permanent discipline,

I'm sure, in our churches. It's not that having a good diet isn't a good thing.

To me it's just, what has it got to do with the gospel? What has it got to do with the gospel? And yet these are reputable publishers that publish these things.

I think the church needs to grasp the fact, or needs to reflect all the time on what difference does the fact that Jesus became a historical figure, really lived, really died, really rose from the dead, really ascended, and really intercedes for us in his

Father's right hand now, what difference does that make to the way we preach? If that doesn't make a difference to the way we preach, then we're preaching liberalism.

You can believe all of that stuff. One of the fascinating things about Luther and the Pope is they had the same confession.

They both believed the, you ask Luther, well, what's your confession? He'd say, well, look at my catechism. It's the

Apostles' Creed, that's what I believe. I'm sure if you'd said to Pope Leo, or Adrian VI, what do you believe?

He'd have said, the Apostles' Creed, that's my confession. The difference, of course, is it made no difference to the

Pope. He believed it, like he believed two plus two equals four. But it didn't impact the way he preached.

Or thought about the Gospel. For Luther, it made all the difference in the world. The Gospel could not be an

Aesop's fable and do the same thing. The Gospel could not just be a great description of a super life and do the same thing.

When people use the phrase here, the Gospel is not a doctrine, it is a way of life, they're doing exactly what

Newman was so suspicious of. They're taking a truth, and they're excluding all the other truths.

Yeah, sure, the Gospel is a way. I mean, I've been talking, first lecture, about the

Gospel, the men to guard the Gospel are to exhibit a certain way of life. But it's a way of life that flows from the

Gospel being a doctrine, or a teaching, a declaration. We live in pragmatic times.

The preoccupation, I think, with technique, even in conservative circles, points towards an underlying pragmatism.

Preoccupation with meeting needs comes in. As long as those needs are biblically defined,

I don't object to that. But even in some of the great growth in Christian counseling books over the last 10 years.

I remember being in a meeting where we were talking and somebody said, you know, my child this morning leant over the table and knocked the salt over.

What do you think a Christian response to that should be? And I want to say, a

Christian response to that, well, you just use your common sense. Tell the kid not to lean and knock the salt over.

I remember one of my sons being at a Bible talk where he was told by, and this is within the

OPC, the Sunday school teacher telling him that not, you know, that if he didn't clean his teeth, then his parents were to tell him that his teeth had been given to him to glorify

God and therefore he should clean them. And I said, that's kind of true, but I'm not going to check the dental hygiene of all the people in my church and discipline them if they aren't doing that.

Clean your teeth because your breath will stink and it'll be very antisocial if you don't. The problem is that you can have this pragmatism creeping in, even for the best of reasons.

We need to recover a clear grasp of the gospel as a declaration of what

God has done in Jesus Christ. Yes, that has implications for how we should then live, but the gospel is not in itself the embodiment of how we should live.

Fourthly, I think we need a renewed understanding of the ministry.

I think here the distinction between special and common grace is absolutely critical. One of the things

I think you can be sure of is that either your theology will drive your vision of ministry or your vision of ministry will end up driving your theology.

You may not realize that, but that will be the case. That is why I think when, again, this is one of those things that we're all supposed to agree to differ on.

When we're told that we can agree on the gospel, but disagree on methods, that can be problematic in some contexts because your understanding of the gospel should shape your understanding of the ministry.

Where you think God's grace, special grace, is to be found will determine what you think is the scope and the instruments of your ministry.

Martin Luther, a great example of this. Martin Luther thought that God could only be found as gracious in the flesh of the

Lord Jesus Christ, specifically in the crucified flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ. We'll talk about this a little bit more tomorrow.

And therefore, his task as minister was to point people to the crucified flesh of the

Lord Jesus Christ. The great, if you could suspend whatever views you may have on representations of Christ just for a moment.

There is the picture that most beautifully sums up Luther's vision of ministry is the painting that Lucas Cranach did of him preaching.

Luther standing in a pulpit with his hand extended pointing to a crucifix on which the broken body of the

Lord Jesus Christ hangs. It summarizes beautifully what Luther thought of as the task of the minister.

The task of the minister was to point the people towards God's grace. That raises the question, of course, of where is

God's grace to be found? That raises in an acute form the issue of special and common grace.

How you think common grace and special grace connect will shape how you think of the ministry.

For Luther, here and now on the earth between the death and resurrection of Christ and the return of Christ, there are only two places where the

Lord Jesus Christ is found. In the declaration of the word and in the administration of the sacraments attached to the declaration of the word.

And so Luther's view of the ministry methodologically and in terms of its competence was completely restricted to those two things.

Declaration of the word, administration of the sacraments. Now declaration of the word for Luther wasn't always just preaching.

It could be one -on -one. It could be small group stuff. But that's what the minister's job was.

I hope I don't tread on any toes here. I don't want to cause more controversy. I think

I've got it three times now. Effortless, three times I've got it in effortlessly. First one was a bit contrived but the last two have been legit

I think. It's fascinating to me the growth of the number of titles for pastors that are in the conservative church today.

You've got pastors of everything these days. Or almost everything. Pastors of the arts, pastors of music, pastors of this, that and the other.

That will ultimately represent I think a confusion of where common grace ends and special grace begins.

If you think that God can be found just in hearing a piece of music, God can be savingly found in just hearing a piece of piano music played without any words, you can have a pastor of music.

It makes sense. But if God is only found to be gracious in the declaration of the gospel, then your minister will focus solely on the declaration of the gospel.

Publicly, and I'm not disparaging one -on -one pastoral ministry here because I think one -to -one declaration of the gospel is also a place where Christ is found.

But there is a certain amount of anarchy coming in with our understanding of ministry. Just look at the plethora of ministerial titles there are out there.

So a proper understanding of the scope of the ministry based on a proper understanding of grace.

A word -centered ministry, I think this is my fifth point, flows from that.

And again, we come back to my point earlier that I don't think Paul thinks that the problems that really beset the church are ultimately technical in nature.

If you think that the primary problem for the church is communication, then you will, of course, get rid of preaching.

Samuel Johnson, way back in the 18th century, says, people have got a strange opinion these days that they think they can get information better from a lecture than from a book.

He said, I always find it better to read than to listen to lectures. People have known for hundreds of years that having somebody stand up front and warble on for half an hour, 45 minutes, or an hour is not a great way of communicating information.

If you think that the problem of the church is communication, then you'll get rid of preaching fairly quickly.

Has it ever puzzled you, though, that passage in Scripture when Jesus is teaching in parables and his disciples ask him, why are you teaching in parables?

And Jesus gives an answer that, if I was dean, I hope I say this without any,

I hope it's, I say this with all reverence, but if somebody had given

Jesus' answer to me when I was dean of Westminster, I'd have had to have fired them or at least put them on a probationary warning because Jesus' answer when he's asked by the disciples, why do you teach in parables, is, well, it's so that people won't understand what

I'm saying. That's a fascinating answer, isn't it? So they'll be always listening and never actually hearing.

They won't actually know what I'm talking about. Well, that's madness. And it's a great text, actually, to get hold of when people say to you, well,

Jesus was a great moral teacher. You'll say, no, Jesus was a hopeless teacher because he deliberately taught in a way that nobody would understand what he was saying.

That's bad pedagogy. It's because, of course, Christ's preaching is not ultimately about communication.

Christ's preaching is ultimately about exposing the sinfulness of the human heart. And if you've not read the work of my dear

Westminster colleague, Greg Beale, on idolatry, I think the book is called

We Become What We Worship. He's picking up on the idea of Psalm 115 that you make these idols and then ultimately you become just like idols.

Greg reads those passages, rightly, I think, against the background of the commissioning of Isaiah.

Remember when Isaiah's commissioned, the Lord says to him, I'm going to send you to teach these people. But they're not going to understand a word you say.

And the point is, you're going to go and expose their idolatry. They're going to be as deaf and as blind as the idols.

And you're going to expose that. You're going to teach them. And they're not going to get what you're saying. And that's going to make their idolatry absolutely obvious.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not denigrating the fact that preachers should be good communicators. But preaching is not a great mode of communication.

The reason we preach, I think, is that God is primarily a speaking

God. And the Word of God is the mode of God's presence.

You look in the Old Testament. How is God present with his people? When he speaks. Amos threatens a famine, a famine of the

Word of God. God is going to be absent. Luther says, all of the previous blows are as nothing compared to this one.

Because this is the point at which God actually withdraws completely from his people. There is no Word of God.

Think of the Shunammite, this lovely lady who's built this annex to her house so that Elisha can always have a place to stay when he comes through town.

She has this miraculous child as a result of that. And at some point in his, well, the text is a little bit difficult to understand.

But at some point when he's old enough to be out with his father, but still small enough to sit on his parent's lap, at some point the child dies.

And the woman goes to Elisha. She goes to the prophet. And she says to the prophet, I didn't ask for a child.

I told you I was perfectly satisfied, but you gave me the child, and now the child's been taken away. And Elisha, if you remember, he gives his staff to his servant, and he says, run.

As fast as the winds can carry you, run and lay my staff on the child's face, and all be well.

And the servant heads off, and the woman won't leave the prophet. And she says, no. No, you've got to come with me.

We have a saying in Britain, I want to talk to the organ grinder. I don't want to bother with the monkey.

The organ grinders used to have those things, and the monkey would dance, and the organ grinder would grind. The idea was, I want to talk to the guy in charge.

I don't want to talk to the hired help. She wants the organ grinder to deal with this.

She doesn't want the monkey. Why? Because Elisha's the man through whom the word of God comes, through whom

God is therefore present in a special, powerful, saving way.

One of the great things the Reformers do is they make the connection between Old Testament prophets,

New Testament apostles, and post -biblical preachers.

When preachers preach, Second Helvetic Confession, we believe that when a man who is properly appointed preaches, it is the very word of God.

The Latin is very strong. Not that they thought the preacher's word was the same as the Bible, but God was speaking through the preacher.

And so the point about preaching is not that it's the best means of communication. The point is, it is the

God -appointed means of God being present and confronting his people. When God speaks, he's present.

And of course, Mark chapter 1, you have that moment where the heavens are torn asunder, the

Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove, and God the Father speaks. And Mark is clearly seeing that as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.

And some of the intertestamental Jewish glosses on the Old Testament prophecy said that God would be absent from his people until the heavens were torn open.

So when Mark chooses the word tore, schizo, I tear, tore open at that point, he's saying the prophecy is being fulfilled.

God's present with his people. How do we know that? His voice. He speaks. He's back.

So we need, I think, an understanding of a word centered ministry.

That has implications for training for the ministry. One of the things I think that seminaries generally don't do well is train men to preach.

Part of the problem is the hours in the class that have to be properly spent on biblical languages and other things take away from pulpit experience, partly because, of course, preaching in a classroom is not like preaching in a church.

And partly, of course, you've got to be careful that churches don't just get experimented on by incompetent student preachers.

What is the right context for somebody to learn to preach? It's a tough one, isn't it? Because you don't want congregations to suffer through bad or accidentally heretical preaching from a student.

But you want students to become experienced pulpit people before they take their first call.

So I throw that. That is a tough problem. If any of you have got a solution, tell me about it. Don't tell anybody else.

Then I can claim it as my own and revolutionise seminary training. So word -centred ministry,

I think, is vitally important. And that should also shape, I think, and make us very sceptical of those whose role models for preaching are ultimately technical role models.

Stand -up comedians, they're not the best role models for preaching. Old Testament prophets are. Stand -up comedy has, and this is not a judgement on humour in the pulpit.

I think humour is a good pedagogical tool. It needs, in sermons in particular, it needs to be used very carefully in a very limited way.

It's not a judgement against humour, but it is a judgement against cocksure conversationalism. That's not an appropriate means of preaching the truth.

Prophetic word, that's what preaching is. The Old Testament prophets, they're the best model for preaching.

And finally, my last, I think it's my sixth point. We need to recover an understanding of what it means to be the church.

We live in an anti -institutional, anti - hierarchical age, and I think this is probably tougher for Americans than it is for people elsewhere in the world for the reasons

I outlined at the start of my first lecture. And this is not a criticism, it's merely an observation. Americans are strong individualists.

They rightly, for many reasons, suspect hierarchies. They are rightly suspicious of people in authority, throwing their weight around and crushing the little guy.

Those are many of the things that have made America great and have served the civic sphere very well.

Unfortunately, they don't work so well in the church sphere. 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 6. 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.