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Henno.
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, my name is Mike Abendroth. Wow, I am tired today. It has been about 120 days, 113 days since I�ve had the brachytherapy. And I don�t take three naps a day anymore, I did early on, but sometimes I just put my feet up on the desk and take a nap, and I would be kind of afraid if somebody looked in the window at the church and I put my feet up on the desk and I was taking a nap.
It probably wouldn�t be a good thing to show the congregation, even though I work a lot of hours. But now I have an excuse. So what can they say? All right, we have not had a message moment in quite some time at No Compromise Radio.
And we are sadly no more No Compromise TV shows. Those are all recorded and it has come to an end. I don�t fly to Memphis anymore to do any more shows. And so the Kooks and Barney segment for the TV show and the message moment for the TV show, they�re all gone.
As a matter of fact, No Compromise Radio is no longer on. It will be weekend. It�s a lineup. The shows will be in the Situation Room for the foreknown, you know, between now and whatever the months, years, decades.
They�ll stay in there, but no new shows and no association with No Compromise Radio on the weekend. But that doesn�t mean I can�t still have message moments and all that stuff. After all, that�s my own copyright.
Let�s see what Hebrews 3 says. I�ve been preaching Hebrews 3. And I wonder what the message says. I don�t know. I�m hoping this is going to make good radio. But if it doesn�t, it doesn�t. The message isn�t a Bible.
It�s a paraphrase. It�s one man who did it and maybe his motives were good to start, but the way it�s taken off now, it�s really bad. I don�t recommend it unless you�re going to do your own message moments.
That doesn�t mean it never gets anything right. It gets the sense of things right. Actually, quite often that�s its problem. Eugene Peterson does know what he�s doing. That�s, to me, a big problem when he does things that he shouldn�t.
And recently he�s been in the news because he was asked about homosexuality or gender neutral stuff or gender, not gender neutral, but gender benders and all these things. And then he made a statement, then got pushed back, and then changed his mind back to the biblical view.
How does that work? Well, here�s what it says in Hebrews chapter 3. So, my dear Christian friends, even there I want to stop because I know it says holy brothers. Jesus is the one that makes you holy, chapter 1 and 2.
Jesus is not afraid to call you a brother, chapter 2, verse, where is it, 11. So, how can I even make the connection here, my dear Christian friends? Companions, in following this call to the heights, to crown heights, madashahu, I forget you.
Take a good, hard look at Jesus. Okay, that part�s right, interpretable. He�s the centerpiece of everything we believe, faithful in everything God gave him to do. Now, by the way, where is it to say that he�s the apostle and high priest?
Here, it says it nowhere. Henno. Hennovision. Hennerific. I have a cup, a coffee mug, it says Henno on it. Henno. God gave him to do. Moses was also faithful, but Jesus gets more honor. A builder is more valuable than a building any day.
Every house has a builder, but the builder behind them all is God. Moses did a good job in God�s house, but it was all servant work, getting things ready for what was to come. Christ as son is in charge of the house.
Now, if we can only keep a firm grip on this bold confidence, we�re the house, if you want to bet the house on that. That�s why the Holy Spirit says, today, please listen, don�t turn a deaf ear, as in the bitter uprising, the time of wilderness testing, even though they watched me work for 40 years, your ancestors refused to let me do it my way.
Over and over, they tried my patience, and I was provoked, oh, so provoked. I said, they�ll never keep their minds on God. They refused to walk down my road. Exasperated, I bowed. They�ll never get where they�re going, never be able to sit down.
So, watch your step, friends. You might trip in the desert. You might trip in the desert. Yes, I�m here by myself, in this room, sequestered in no-co-land, but I think that�s funny. That�s about as funny as it gets.
You might trip up in the desert. You might trip on a rattler. I watched that thing the other day that showed a snake handler. You get those little videos on Twitter, wherever they are. And the snake handler was holding the snake properly, you know, behind its head on the neck area, and then he had his other hand on the body.
It was a pretty big snake, but he was holding it properly. And he was holding it straight ahead, and the lady, I think she might have been a tourist or a bystander or an investigative journalist, decided from the side to kiss the snake.
And so she went to kiss the snake, and the snake didn�t like it and bit her face. It turned and yanked itself and got itself loose enough from the handler and bit her face. Wow. Snakey, snakey, bitey, bitey.
Deserty, deserty, trippy, trippy. All right, what do we have here? Here is something on my inbox. Dear Pastor Mike, this is, by the way, back in May 6th, but I have a reason that I have been catching up, and this is from Adam.
I don�t know what�s in here, except toward the end. I hope that you receive this in time for your birthday, and by God�s grace, that it is encouraging to you. I�ve been enjoying your NOCO Radio Ministry Via Podcast for several years and have greatly benefited from your labors.
I love your sense of humor on your show, especially the banter on the Tuesday. Since you�re the same age as my parents, listening to your pop culture references has always been enjoyable for me. You remind me of my dad.
But you have much better theology. This is the guy that sent the coffee. Wow. I know it�s not pizza, he said, but I hope it arrives you as fresh and delicious as we are blessed to enjoy every Lord�s Day.
Okay, what else does this say here? This is fun. I�ve also been edified in reading a couple of your books and look forward to reading more. Adam, if you email me, mikeatnocompromiseradio .com, and tell me which ones you have, I�ll send you another one that you don�t.
Free of charge. I�ve also been edified, let�s see, your advice, instruction, homiletics, and example of your preaching is particularly beneficial, and if the Lord leads me into preaching, such instruction will hopefully prove beneficial to the body of Christ.
Thank you. Sorry to hear about your diagnosis. I�ve been praying for you. Thank you to all your listeners who have. Please don�t stop. It has seemed to me, at least anecdotally in my own corner of the world anyway, that our sovereign has ordained a greater degree of defiant affliction to many of his people in our country at this time.
Could be. Seems to him, so that�s a logical statement. That�s a true statement. I can�t verify it. It�s anecdotal. Don�t you know that? I get it. I don�t think there�s one family in our congregation, small as it is, that is in the midst of some serious trial at the moment, nor indeed of many of my friends and family members in other congregations.
I�ve heard it said that the excellent minister of God�s word teaches his people to die well. For my part, I know that we must learn to suffer well, that we must not lose heart or grow weary of doing good.
It�s a hard lesson to learn and not particularly enjoyable, though it does yield the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Adam, all joking aside, excellent paragraph, excellent exhortation, and I not only want to tell people how to suffer well, I need to be told in light of Scripture by people like you, who could be my children, how to suffer well.
Very, very important. I am not some big type of removed clergy or different from anybody else. We are the same. Pastors are the same type of people, and any pastor that comes across as above and they don�t need the grace of God and the word of God, they will probably get something soon enough to make sure they realize they have clay feet.
And so that is wonderful. I appreciate the coffee. Thank you. Yum. And what�s better than the coffee is this particular paragraph. He says, �May our gracious and great high priest� see, that�s right up there in the Hebrew language, so he�s talking right up my alley, �sanctify your afflictions as he continues the work he has begun in transforming you into the likeness of Christ.
I hope that you have a blessed birthday surrounded with family and friends. May God bless you with many more years of fruitful ministry. Grace and peace. Adam. Adam, thank you. That was excellent. I really appreciate it.
I hope that you�re still listening, even though I haven�t been able to say, I think I probably wrote a thank you note. But if I didn�t, this is my thank you note. Thank you for the coffee. And I think in the past I have said to people that I don�t ask for money online, but I ask for coffee.
I�m just kidding. Every summer I�m in Santa Cruz and I go to Pete�s Coffee and I tell them I always promote their coffee on the radio, hoping they�ll give me a free cup of coffee or something, and all I get is soy in my latte.
That�s all I get. I didn�t even order it. Order it. Oh, man. There is a way to donate on No Compromise site if you�d like to do that. I have in front of me the Christianity Today July-August robots are coming for your job.
And it�s so funny because on the top of this July-August 2017 robots coming for your job as the main article, remember Christianity Today, it�s page 74. It says thou shalt waste time. So, it�s like, yeah, it�s a waste of time.
Robots are coming for my job. I would imagine that if somebody has been displaced from the workforce because of a robot, you won�t like that. But that�s going to be in my Christianity Today. If I was the general editor and I was the one in charge of Christianity Today, I would have articles that would be completely different.
That�s what I would have. There would not be one robot article. I have this open to the Pulitzer Prize winner Francis Fitzgerald Scott Key. Just kidding. Interview. I don�t know why that�s open there.
Not quite sure. And I have the little InterVarsity Press. There�s a little book there called From Cairo to Christ, How One Muslim�s Faith Journey Shows the Way for Others. Abu Attala with Kent A. Vantill is the co-author.
Now, I don�t know anything about this and this is just not really my wheelhouse. IVP books and such. The guy came to Christ. Praise the Lord. But I�m interested in who that Vantill is. Any relation? Any relation of Vantill presuppositional apologetics?
Okay, and the next thing we�ve got, justice and spirituality. I wasted my time with this. So should you. Dog Days of Summer. Nicholas Miller�s book, 500 Years of Protest and Liberty from Martin Luther to Modern Civil Rights.
Devotions for Women by Women. Let�s see. I think it�s a short book because where are the devotions in the Bible written by women? I know that�s really dumb. Faith and Leadership Things. Global Missions.
Salvation by Allegiance Alone. Rethinking Faith Works in the Gospel of Jesus the King. From the title of it, what an awful book. Run. Run. I�d rather have you get any of these other Baker academics. That sounds bad.
Salvation by Faith Alone instead of Allegiance. Allegiance and Faith. Boy, that is really bad. Giving Gifted Women a Chance in the Church. What does that mean? Give Peace a Chance? There�s all kinds of places for both men and women to serve in the local church.
Do we need a new word for faith? That�s talking about that book. It�s supposed to be Allegiance. Let�s read this because I think this is interesting. I haven�t done this before. Obviously, you can tell the show is so tight.
Kelly Kapik, who�s written some good things, is going to write a book review for Salvation by Allegiance Alone. Rethinking Faith Works in the Gospel of Jesus the King. UW Bates. In his provocative book, Matthew Bates expresses, by the way, Kapik gave it four stars out of five, deep concern that Christians, particularly North American conservative evangelicals, misunderstand what the Bible means when it calls people to faith.
Okay. I would understand. Too often, he argues, they reduce faith to cognitive offense. I�m so tired. To cognitive assent, as if believing in Christ simply means agreeing with certain propositions. Okay.
Just to get off line here, we�ve got reform position. What is saving faith? Well, there�s a face that doesn�t save and there�s a face that does. Salvation by saving face. Have you ever tried to save face?
Saving faith. Knowledge, assent, and trust. Notitia, assensus, fiducia. Those are the Latin words. To have saving faith, you need to have all three. Sola fide. In that particular faith, there�s a faith, which is assent and trust.
Okay. Back to the article. Too often, he argues, they reduce faith to cognitive assent, as if believing in Christ simply means agreeing with certain propositions. Further, they often reduce conversion to saying a one-time prayer, thus presenting faith as a kind of fire insurance, a way to avoid God�s judgment, no matter how one decides to live.
Well, I see the problem, too, but moving it from sola fide to sola allegiancee, or whatever it�s called in Latin, isn�t going to be helpful. It�s not helpful. The effect is to disdain God�s or good works and God�s law as self-righteousness, creating a false opposition between faith and obedience.
Is there a false opposition between faith and obedience? Is law gospel? Glaw lawspel? If you mean once you�re saved, you want to obey, and you will obey, if the evidence of your salvation and the fruit of your salvation are obedience and love, but not the ground.
The ground of salvation always has to be love, and neglecting the Bible�s call to love God by keeping the commandments of John 15. If we could just go back to the Belgic Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, we would be helped categories of glaw and lawspel.
That would be very, very helpful to really have law gospel categories. Bates has two concerns. First, the gospel is too often equated with justification by faith alone, but this equation is not faithful to the New Testament.
The gospel is something Jesus announces and embodies. It is the story of the eternal Son becoming one with us in His incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and enthronement as King and Judge. Can you hear all that language there?
He embodies. Now, if you want to say Jesus is the gospel, I understand that, because how can we disassociate His person and His work? Sinclair Ferguson, in that free book this month, this October, Whole Christ, Totus Christus, has a good section there about how Jesus, you could think about Him as the gospel, and His work of redemption and His person united.
You just can't separate in some abstract way one from the other. But here, He's embodying, becoming one with us in His incarnation, yes. God's people are justified by faith alone only as they are united to the risen King by the Holy Spirit.
Our faith, then, is rooted in the story of Jesus. We celebrate His victory over sin and death while also submitting to His everlasting. Submitting, though, is submitting part of sanctification? Have you submitted all the way?
Is there anything in your life that you haven't submitted to? Is that a condition for salvation or an evidence of? See where I'm going with that? This takes us to Bate's second concern. He argues that the term pistis, most often translated as faith, should instead be translated as allegiance.
Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Because this concept, more faithfully, more allegiance-ly, conveys the New Testament. This allegiance has three dimensions. Mental affirmation that the gospel is true.
Professed fealty, sworn loyalty to Jesus alone as cosmic Lord. All this cosmic Lord stuff and this embodies and becoming one. This is all language of run. Avoid, N-O, and enacted loyalty through obedience to Jesus.
Bates prefers this formulation to the classic Reformation construct of notitia, assensus, and fiducia for several reasons. The Protestant framework, he argues, often reduces faith to a sense of forgiveness rather than a connection to Jesus' kingship.
So I'm going to just take what Matthew Bates says. And I'll ditch the rest. You know, Calvin, Bates, they're all these. We'll just go allegiance. You know, we're forgetting Jesus as king. The Reformers forgot that he was kingship.
He was involved with the kingship. It stresses the believer's inner psychology in a way that overshadows the Bible's emphasis on obedience. And since the classic formula doesn't place embodied fidelity at the beginning, it could be construed as making obedience optional rather than indispensable.
I'm telling you what. Everywhere you go, this razor's edge of justification by faith alone. They're either the gnomist on the one side, gnome law, legalist, or you have the anti-gnomians on the other side.
And they're so afraid, people are, that people are going to run around like crazy hellions, morally lax, that you've got to prop up these other things and change definitions, change what saving faith says and is.
The church's main discipleship problem, according to Bates, is not that people are so busy trying to obey God, they fall into the habit of thinking they are saved by their works. The problem instead is that too many people have said a prayer, received assurance, and proceeded to live as if Jesus' reign were irrelevant.
This is all morphing together. If you say you believe in Jesus and you're not believing now, well, then there's a problem. That's called Hebrews 3. It's unbelief. Perhaps, he argues, allegiance could better convey that it means to submit to King Jesus and dwell in his kingdom.
So you're saved by allegiance and submission. So instead of faith, which trusts alone only in what Jesus does and is found outside of you in the perfect righteousness of Christ Jesus, you're now saved by allegiance, your own submission.
So I ask you, Christian friend, how are you doing? Have you submitted enough? Have you had enough allegiance, enough loyalty, enough submission? That's not sola fide. So he's just basically hedged toward Rome.
When it's new perspectives, when it is federal vision, Auburn theology, this is all hedging towards Rome. The second you go from you leaving Jesus going to you, leave Jesus' righteousness and go to yours, you have a major problem.
Perhaps, I argue, allegiance wouldn't convey it at all. However, Copic says, I'm not fully convinced that translating pistis as allegiance correctly addresses this problem since it raises potential misunderstandings.
While theologians have traditionally distinguished between faith and what is entailed by faith, Bates appears to define faith by its entailments. The book of James makes clear a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.
But these works, like Abraham's willingness to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, flow out of preexistent faith. While James highlights the indispensability of works, he clearly presupposes Abraham's deep trust in God and his promises.
Faith is not a one-time event. That is why early Protestants spoke of continued conversion, conversio continuata, not because they thought people would lose and then regain their salvation, but because repentance and faith are not simply what gets one into the kingdom, they're a manner of life within it.
Finally, I worry that Bates is asking one biblical concept, kingship, to do all the work of describing salvation. I think you should avoid that book. We don't need more papal views or papal bowls of sola fide because it's not sola fide alone, it's something else.
Sola allegiance. One more false attempt to redefine sola fide so that people aren't morally lax. You can see how dangerous people think sola fide is. And here's one more illustration.
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.