Pastor Justin Bates Interview

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, Duplex Gratia Radio. Who knows if we'll ever change the name. Don't forget, just released actually today in real time, Jesus and Cancer, small little pamphlet, booklet, 50 pages, condensed of the other book, Cancer's Not My Shepherd, just so people could hand them out liberally.

Anyway, you can write me, mike at nocompromiseradio .com. And today I have a special guest. I usually like guests that live in, you know, small little towns and stuff like that. But today, metropolis, urban, city, Tim Keller kind of thing.

Justin Bates, welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry.

Oh, thanks brother. Good to be here.

See, based on your accent, I can already tell you probably live in London, New York City, or maybe Dubai.

Close, Cambridge, that's close.

All right, Cambridge, Kansas, is that correct?

Yeah, that's where the church is, yes.

All right, well, Justin, tell our listeners, how do we know each other? Basically remind me, how do I know you?

So way back, many, many years ago, I took my students to a teenager conference or conference for teenagers. And you were one of the featured speakers there. And man, I had a student with a question, and I don't even remember what the question was now, but I said, well, you know what, let's go ask him and see if he'll talk to us.

And went back there, you were kind of sitting behind a book table and went back there and you said, here, just pull up a chair. And that just left a mark on me and certainly left a mark on that student that you were willing to visit with them.

And anyway, that's how we've met. And then, whether you know it or not, you've ultimately served as my pastor from a distance for a long time. And I've emailed you multiple times with most of the time silly questions, especially way back there.

And you're always gracious to respond. And man, I just appreciate having a mentor in the faith that's willing to visit with me.

Justin, I had forgotten about that conversation.

Was that it?

Where was that? Was that in Branson? Where was it?

I think it was Branson, yes.

All right.

Well, I haven't been to Branson for quite some time. I remember the Oak Ridge Boys Theater and I think the conference was on a Friday or whatever. And I looked and who was speaking, who's gonna be playing Thursday, the day before, it was the Oak Ridge Boys.

So I got free tickets and went and saw them.

There you go.

I just wanted to hear them sing Elvira. That's all I wanted.

Wasn't as good as you thought?

Yeah, that guy, whoever that guy is with the deep voice, man, he was really good. George Jones used to play at that theater and I would have liked to have seen George Jones.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. So Justin, I'm thankful to be able to talk to you today. My purpose and goal is pretty simple. I just want people to be encouraged that the Lord has his Christians, of course, all around the world, but he also has pastors in a variety of different places and settings.

And with all the talk about attendance, buildings and cash and nickels and noses, and we've got to have a lot of people. Tell us a little bit about the church in terms of the ministry there. And I know the town's not big, so the church must not be that big, but it doesn't matter because God's big and you're wanting just to preach to the people, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So we are what we would call rural, not secluded or way out there, but we are rural. We're kind of on the edge of the Flint Hills in Kansas. The county that the church is located in has a population of like 35 ,000, I believe.

And the county that I live in, which is just 20 miles from the church, has a population of about 3 ,000. And so pretty sparse as far as people goes in my neck of the woods, and lots of cows, lots of grass, lots of rocks.

And

Lots of rocks.

By the way, that reminds me of a story. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's my show after all. And I'm your pastor, so I can do that too.

Right, yeah, knock yourself out.

You know, there's so many rocks in Israel. The story goes that God, when he was making the world, he gave a bunch of rocks to the angels and said, distribute them equally across the world. And they tripped somehow in the sky and dropped them all in Israel, and I guess in Kansas.

Yes, right here where we live, yeah. I'll steal that one, that's a great one.

Sorry to interrupt, please continue.

No, that's okay. So we, Cambridge is actually a small town. I teased when we were at the Pactum Conference in Omaha, that, you know, I had seen more people in the first two hours that I was in town than I had for the three months before that.

And that's not far from wrong. There's, I think the population of Cambridge is like 80 people or thereabouts. And so that's the town where the church is located. We, I've actually been in that church since I was five and I'm 50 now.

So I've been in the church for a while. And that's, that makes for an interesting dynamic in a small community where, you know, you kind of know everyone and everyone knows you. And so that gives you an interesting flavor of ministry.

And then to pastor the church that I grew up in is that's a different flavor also. And my parents attend church there and my sister and her husband. And so, you know, it's different, I think, than being somewhere where, you know, you're in a big group or you're in a big city and, you know, everyone doesn't know everyone.

So in that sense, it's a different thing, I suppose, but man, it's a healthy church. It's alive. We have some young men in particular that just love the Lord and are asking great questions. And man, it is so much fun to watch them grow.

And so many of them are contemplating marriage in the next couple of years. And so, man, just, it's exciting. It's an exciting thing to be a part of and to see what the Lord's doing in young people's lives in this very rural community.

Justin, what's the name of the church?

Cambridge Baptist Church.

And do you have a website?

No, no website. There is a Facebook page, but mostly that's just used for announcements. And so we're a rather non-techie kind of church and only because there's not many tech whizzes that attend church there.

Now, we have, in recent years, the Lord has been kind and has sent a family to us with a husband and a dad that is elder qualified and willing. And so, man, I'm so excited to bring him on board and to begin to utilize his spiritual gifts.

And he is an IT guy. And so, you know, some of those things might change in the months ahead, but right now we're pretty not tech savvy.

Well, that doesn't matter at all. We here at Bethlehem Bible Church have a parking lot that's in pretty sad state. And it basically advertises to the community, we dare you to come.

So.

There you go.

So it's the same thing with you. I bet you have some pretty good potlucks, pot providences, where you have all kinds of grass fed beef and stuff like that. Good men's breakfasts when it comes to sausages and stuff like that.

Is that true or no?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Actually, our men actually love to cook. And so, yeah, we've got some folks in the church that can cook, which is handy because I really like to eat.

There you go.

When you were in Omaha for the Packham Conference, did you have a Runza?

I did, yeah.

Okay, all right, all right, excellent. So.

It was pretty good.

Yeah, not bad, not bad. I like them like at a football game and you're trying to warm your hands up or something like that. They serve us hand warmers and.

There you go.

High carb food.

Justin.

Yeah, edible ones.

Tell our listeners a little bit about how you got saved. I'm interested in that because if you've been at that church for 45 years, you're five years old, parents teaching the Bible, obviously, if you're five years old, what happened when you get saved?

How did it all come about?

Well, so it's kind of a winding story, but it certainly has the Lord's fingerprints all over it. So I did grow up in a Christian home, grew up in this church. My family moved to where we live now when I was five, like I said, and kind of landed in that church.

And it was a Southern Baptist church and a very Southern Baptist church, if you understand what I'm saying. And so that's the church I grew up in. For much of my life as a young person, my sister and I were the only two children in the church.

We would average between 11 and 15 people on a Sunday morning. And that's where I grew up. And it was interesting to look back now at how committed those folks were to bringing me up the best way they knew how, even though, man, I was the only kid in the classroom.

And if you've ever been in that situation, that's not easy for the teacher or the students.

That's right.

Man, but it just showed the faithfulness of those men. And in some cases, the women when I was younger. Anyway, long about fourth grade, my parents loved the Lord. And my dad at the time, especially, just had a lot of zeal for evangelism.

And he sat my sister and I down one day and shared the gospel with us. And I believe that my sister got saved that day. And I repeated some words that I thought would save me. And so I spent the rest of my grade school, high school years, and even into college, having faith in my words, that I had said the right words as I was instructed to.

And anyway, and by the time I got to be an adult and I graduated from college, just living like a lost person, I couldn't find a job by the providential hand of God. And so my dad has some cattle here and was farming some at the time.

And he said, hey, if you can't find a job, you can always come home and work for me for a while until you find something that pays good enough that you can support yourself. And so I did that. And that's how the Lord brought me back to the church at Cambridge.

And man, just knowing that I was expected to be there week after week, even though it wasn't a genuine faith on my part, it was the expectation of my parents. And so I went ahead and went. And along the way in a little church, you take what you can get.

And man, there was two other young people in the church at the time who needed a Sunday school teacher. And they said, hey, why don't you teach him? We're tired of teaching him. They're not listening to us anyways.

And why don't you teach him? They'll listen to you. You're more their age. And man, that was a terrible idea. I mean, it was a terrible idea. And yet at the same time, man, the Lord used that in my life to just to show me the fact that, man, my faith was a vacuum.

And little churches tend to go through pastors very quickly. I think the pastor we had may have passed away or maybe retired and moved on. I don't remember. But we called another pastor. He had several children.

And this was the first man I had ever met in my life who was so committed to raising his family in a godly manner that he sat down with me before he would allow me to teach his children in Sunday school and wanted to hear my testimony, wanted to hear what I believed about Christ and what I was gonna be teaching them.

Man, you talk about holding feet to the fire. I've never been so uncomfortable, I think, as I was with that conversation. And so just revealing to me just the fact that I had nothing to stand upon whatsoever.

Anyway, long story short, at some point there, I can take you to a place on the road where it happened, but I just cried out to the Lord for salvation. He saved me as a grown man already teaching Sunday school and got married a few years after that.

And I was teaching youth at the time, so grade seven through 12. Man, I was really enjoying myself, but just, man, didn't know anything.

I really didn't.

Just whatever the Sunday school curriculum that the church was using, that's what I used and just taught straight from the book and met my father-in-law through that, through teaching teenagers, because he was doing the same thing in another town.

We did some ministry together and that's how I met my wife. I tell people all the time that I fell in love with my father-in-law before I fell in love with my wife.

That is classic.

Yeah, he and I, we think a lot alike. And so I just loved him from the get-go, met his daughter and said, man, she is marrying kind. And so I got ahold and wouldn't let go. So 25 years later, here we are.

So that's a little bit of the background.

No, I love that. Justin, so how many years have you been the pastor there?

15.

And is that probably the longest tenure that they've had in recent times?

Yes, yes.

Well, I just am encouraged by the providence of God. It reminds me of the story where there was a man in the Civil War and he got shot and he was on the mend and the nurses came to him and said, you know, we saw you have a Bible, which was just loaned to him.

He wasn't a believer, but it was given to him by his grandmother or something. And then they said to him, could you go talk to a young man who's dying? He's afraid to go to hell. And he goes to talk to the young man.

And then he said, you know, I tried to pray for him, but I got saved before I prayed. And, you know, just stories like that. The wonderful providence of God. I mean, our charismatic friends that are always looking for what God might do in the future and, you know, prophesying and predicting and stuff like that, where to me, it's sweeter to look at the providential hand of God in the past.

Amen, that's right.

So Justin, I'm encouraged by your testimony. Now let's kind of move toward, how did you get to where you are now theologically? I would imagine we're like-minded and kindred spirits in a lot of things with verse-by-verse teaching, Christ-centered preaching, law gospel, give the people assurance.

When I was in Omaha for the Pactum Conference, I was getting ready to speak at my main message on legalism and antinomianism. And Fesco looked at me, John Fesco said, Mike, give him heaven. And I said, amen.

Yeah.

How'd you get to where you are now? Because it wasn't probably from a typical Southern Baptist church.

Yeah, I know, I know. And let me hasten to say this, man, there have been so many faithful, godly men who've poured into my life over the years. And I don't wanna minimize that at all because all of that is Christ's good hand.

And I mean, in a church like ours, where you're talking about 15, 13, 20, 10, nine, eight people that requires a special kind of faithfulness. And so there's no people moving into the community. You don't have a pool to draw from.

And so you just have to be faithful to Christ. And so I don't wanna minimize that at all in those men and in those women who taught me in Sunday school all those years ago. But I was listening to the radio one day, not long after I had gotten saved and I heard a fellow come on the radio.

His name was Chuck Missler. Are you familiar with him?

Yeah, sure.

Okay. So heard him and he had a resource called Learn the Bible in 24 Hours. And I'd never heard such a thing and got that, listened to it back in those days. I don't even know if his ministry is still around, but he had like verse by verse teaching through books of the Bible that you could purchase that were audio.

And man, years back, obviously you had an MP3 player. You would download it with your dial up internet and then shoot it over to your MP3 player. And then I could listen to that throughout the day while I was working.

And man, he just lit me up as far as studying the Bible verse by verse. And so that's how I began to teach it. Then that's how I began to preach it. And I was preaching through the book of Genesis one day and just verse by verse through the book and was very confident in some of the things that I held to at the time.

Then I came to Jacob and Esau and man, for a guy who had been taught that Calvin was a quack and Calvinists were satanic, I just had to deal with some things in front of me. And man, after spending some time there in that text, just trying to prepare to preach it.

In fact, I think if I remember right, I think I spent six weeks preparing to preach that bit of text there. And man, I came out with a whole nother perspective on the doctrine of election and that whole concept.

And then I found out that as I began to believe what the Bible taught, then I fell under the label of Calvinist. And so that's how I came around to kind of a reform theology. And then once you're in the door, so to speak, then you begin to think about the souls of the reformation and you understand those things.

And I taught some church history on Sunday evenings for a while. And the more you grasp the importance of those doctrines, then you begin to think about how all of this is related. And then I had to struggle a bit with sola fide and sola gratia and sola Christus and what that meant then in regard to salvation and what that meant to the doctrine of justification.

And then once you get that and you understand the doctrine of justification rightly, then that has an effect on your eschatology as well. And man, the way that things are connected just never fails to amaze me.

And man, that's kind of how I wound up in the law gospel world. I'm just trying to sort that out and search for clarity as far as the solas go and that reformation doctrine. And so I don't know if that answers your question or not, but that's kind of how I landed where I'm at.

That is excellent. Today we're talking to Pastor Justin Bates, Cambridge, Kansas, Cambridge Baptist Church. And I thought a couple of things, Justin, while you're talking. Number one, how to know the Bible in 24 hours.

You said it took you six weeks to understand Jacob and Esau. I calculated that out. That's 1 ,032 hours.

Well, yeah, yeah.

For one passage. And then circling back to what you had said at the beginning of your answer, I just think about what the Lord does in the life of one Sunday school teacher, with one student and how pouring their lives on that Sunday morning and maybe beyond just is so beneficial.

And then now, maybe some of them are deceased, but if some of your old teachers sit and reflect a little bit, they'll think, oh, you know what, I taught that child, Justin, and now he's a pastor and he influences more people.

And to me, for those that are listening who teach Sunday school, and there's a fourth grader or six years old and they're snotty nose and don't seem to pay attention, it's all worth it, isn't it though?

Oh, listen, no doubt. So I've been teaching the Bible, albeit not altogether greatly, but I've been teaching the Bible for 30 years in the same community. And you can look around you, and I'm not sure at what point this happened, but you can begin to see the fruit of all of that if you stay long enough.

And I think that's the thing that a lot of pastors who are in and out of different churches, they miss the blessing. And man, when you see a student come along later, it's a young lady who you taught, and now she's a wife and a mother, and she's a godly young lady, and just blows you away.

And God is just so kind to let you catch glimpses of that. And yeah, I try to thank those who have poured into me, although most of them have passed on. But yeah, I can't undervalue their investment in me.

I mean, I think that would be terrible. Because they, like I said, if you've never been in a Sunday school room with just you and a teacher, or just the teacher and one student, man, that can be really awkward and uncomfortable and blah.

But they just, so many years were faithful, and I appreciate them.

Well, it's probably a thing of the past now, Justin, because with Corey laws, and Corey checks and laws, and everything else, you don't wanna have one teacher with one student.

Right.

Right.

It's just a sad state of the world. Justin, help some of our listeners today. Lots of them probably are at small churches. Maybe their Bible study is small. Maybe their Sunday school is small. We have lots of pastors who listen, and they don't have mega churches.

How do you encourage people with smaller ministries, just in general? Because that's been you for 30 years, and maybe you've got some temptations here or there. You don't think about it perfectly, but you'd be a perfect person to encourage folks that if there's not many people, it's still worth it all.

What would you say to them?

Well, I mean, number one, I don't know anything else. So I don't really have a picture to compare ministry to that I think is better, grandiose, whatever, because this is all I know. But at the same time, I mean, I'm also bi-vocational, as probably a lot of small church pastors are.

I'm actually tri-vocational. So I have two jobs on the side, and then I pastor the church. And so time management is a major issue. Exhaustion is a major issue. And yet at the same time, man, I mean, I just remember those teachers setting me down, and in fact, a few pastors along the way, who just sat down, just me and them, and said, hey, Justin, here's some things you need to be aware of.

Here's some things you need to be thinking about. Here's a way to look at this passage or that passage, and just pouring into my life. And then looking back, I would say, how could I not do the same? I'm just full of gratitude.

And, you know, I mean, if you had a child, and you only had one child, wouldn't you invest in that child? Surely you wouldn't say, well, if I had seven children, I would be a better parent. And so in that sense, you know, I'm perfectly content to minister where I'm at.

I find joy in that. Sure, there's struggles, but, you know, there's struggles for, you know, I mean, there's struggles for pastors who have huge churches and have huge groups. So I don't know if that's encouraging or not, but I mean, it's just a reality.

Well, that is very encouraging. And I know when our folks listen to this show, and even for me, as I listen, I'm encouraged, good attitude, wanna preach Christ Jesus, don't care about how many people are there because it's an audience of one.

And, you know, maybe you could be my pastor. If you think I'm your pastor, with your attitude and demeanor, Justin, maybe you could be my pastor.

Well, believe me, it's not always, it's not positivity that I always struggle with.

Okay.

Well, you know, sometimes people go home at lunch after church and they have roast pastor. So you don't necessarily always wanna be the pastor.

Righto, righto, yeah.

Well, we are almost ready to wrap up the show. So let me ask you this, what book you're preaching through these days of the Bible?

So I'm preaching through the book of Revelation, actually.

Oh, and what are your favorite commentaries so far?

I thought you were probably asked that. You know, Beal has probably been the most interesting. So Greg Beal, it is a huge, it is a huge work. But that has probably been the most interesting, just to spend the time and look at all of those references that are in there.

As far as usability goes, maybe not. But I mean, it's definitely, it is a piece of work. Eldon Ladd and Osburn, both of those guys, pretty usable stuff. Not necessarily that they're all on the same page, eschatologically, but those have been pretty interesting commentaries.

Sounds good.

When my dad from Nebraska would call something a piece of work, it wasn't positive.

Well, I meant that in a positive way.

I know, I know. All right, Justin, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you. And too bad we didn't have more time to talk in Omaha, but you know how celebrity Christianity is, right?

You just have to.

Oh, absolutely, yes, yes.

No, but it was really good to see you. If there's any way we as a radio show or I personally can help you or encourage you,.

I'd love to do that.

And today you've heard on No Compromise Radio, dear listeners, Pastor Justin Bates, Cambridge, Kansas. And I normally say if you're ever in Cambridge, Kansas, you know where to go, but. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, you never know where people are gonna be. So Justin, thanks for being on the show today. I appreciate it and I appreciate you.

Absolutely.

Yes, sir, brother, appreciate it.