My Favorite Sermons Are About Jesus

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, a ministry. Michael Abendroth here. That�s spelled M-I-C-H-E-L. There�s no way. What happened? I think my mother was watching a film on television. She liked it, and it rolled up the credits, and it said, �Director Michelle somebody Abernathy, Afro-Orf.

And there we had it. Mom and dad were married, then divorced. She was in a car accident. My dad, who wasn�t my dad at the time, but Lee Abendroth visited her in the hospital. That kind of made amends.

They saw each other several months later at a party. I was conceived that night. They got remarried and stayed married until 1989, January, when he died of lung cancer, non-smoking lung cancer. My mother died about 11 years ago of non-smoking lung cancer.

I have prostate cancer. Hopefully, it�s gone, but we will find out soon. I gave some blood today for the PSA test. As I�ve said before, if you are a man and you�re 50 without cancer in the family, or 40 and above with cancer in the family, you should have a PSA test.

It is a blood test, and it measures things, activity in the prostate. It doesn�t always mean you have cancer, but it is, I would say, life-saving if you walk through it properly. You can get it retested, and you can get the percentage test, the PSA free test as well, and MRI and all that stuff before you get a biopsy.

But if you want to talk to somebody, it was nice to talk to people who are in the know. I have a medical background, and now I�m pretty much an expert in prostate cancer from the patient�s perspective.

I read today the procedure report, medical report by the doctor. He said things in there that I knew and didn�t know. Anyway, if you place an iron counter close to me, it looks like a Geiger counter, it�ll probably beep, but only like 1 with the half-life of the palladium.

I�m okay to hold your child, to let my dog sit on my lap. I don�t really let the dog sit. The dog�s not a lap dog, no-co mascot. She doesn�t really like to sit up on somebody�s lap. She would like to be on her little bed.

She wants her ears rubbed a certain way. That�s that. Always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. That�s our tagline. I�m working on a new intro-outro. Israel, if you�d like to go, it�s getting closer.

You need to send in a deposit to Pilgrim Tours. You can find Pilgrim Tours online. Go to our website or email me info at nocompromiseradio .com and reserve the spots. I have 23 slots. I don�t know how many are filled up.

First come, first serve. I know Pat has filled up his half of the bus, his side of the bus, so I�m waiting now for my side to fill up. All right. I�m going to talk today about sermons. What�s the best sermon you�ve ever heard?

What Makes a Favorite Sermon

Now if you�re like me, you have sat and listened to a lot of sermons and now with digital capabilities via the internet, you can listen to a lot of sermons, sermon, sermon, sermon. There�s sermon audio.

There�s OnePlace. There is bbcchurch .org. Lots of opportunity. I might ask you this question, which is a little different. What is your favorite sermon? Now the first one means you�ve heard sermons. You�ve been there.

By the way, I could probably ask another question. What�s the best sermon you�ve ever heard personally, in the room, compared to online? There�s something about having the person right there as they preach away.

But we�ll talk about that in a minute. Your favorite sermon, now it could be a Spurgeon sermon, a Whitefield sermon, a Luther sermon. It could be an Adoniram Judson sermon. It could be Ezekiel sermon.

Let�s see where this is going. Paul�s sermon. Peter�s sermon, Acts chapter 2. When I read Jesus�s Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7, I was so captivated by it that eventually I ended up preaching Matthew 5, 6, and 7.

Now typically I would just pick a book, Matthew 1, and start there, verse 1, but I just jumped right into Matthew chapter 5, 6, and 7. I think I was working on my doctorate at the time on preaching, so I was attuned to preachers and preaching and princes of preachers, preachers of preachers, and certainly Jesus was the preeminent preacher.

Now maybe sometimes you might say he just talked or he was speaking, it wasn�t a formal sermon. I understand that, but I think the Latin word for sermon is just word, right? Preach the sermon, preach the word, sermo, that�s what I�m thinking.

It means something close to that, if not that. I have my little Richard Mueller dictionary of Latin and Greek theological terms. I�m going to look it up right now because I do not like to be wrong, and I don�t want to be wrong.

Those are both actually true. Quadriga, four-fold pattern of medieval exegesis, we don�t want that. Res, we don�t want that. Getting closer. Sacerdotium, sacramentum, what am I looking for again? Sacrificium intellectuus, sacrifice of the intellect, that�s no Compromise Radio�s new tagline.

Sacrificium intellectuus, put a little star right there, no co-tagline for all you haters out there. I don�t know why you listen if you don�t like the show. Life is too short, just get on any place you want to listen and you can just listen away, as my father would say, different strokes for different folks.

Isn�t that true? Aren�t you glad there are so many different types and kinds of preachers with different backgrounds and different delivery styles, and if they are preaching God�s word, you can see why God has done that because he has different congregations for those kind of preachers and vice versa.

Sermo, word, synonymous with verbum, QV. Sermo, word, that�s a good sermon. Preach the sermon. Preach the word. There�s another sermon in the New Testament, and it�s probably second most favorite sermon that I have ever read.

I�ve never heard it, per se. I guess somebody could read it out loud. But next to Jesus�s Sermon on the Mount, my favorite sermon in the world, second favorite, is the book of Hebrews. Hebrews is a sermon, and it is a masterpiece.

Hebrews 13 .22, I appeal to you, brothers, bear with my word of exhortation, for I have written to you briefly. Now, of course, you could immediately talk about chapters 1 through 13 of this epistle, epistlatory sermon, homiletical epistle, expository sermon, a collection of expositions.

There�s lots of ways we could talk about it, but it is more than just a brief message. It is a word, a sermo of exhortation. It is preached to people, men, women. I�m sure there were children there, since we don�t really believe in adolescence.

They were teenagers. They were in their teens. That is a real category, people that are in between 13 and 20, right? They are teen-agers, which at your age, you�re a teen tween. R .T. Francis writes, �There is, however, one book of the New Testament which seems to offer a closer analogy to modern expository preaching than the rest.

That is the letter to the Hebrews. Out of all the sermons ever written down, second to Jesus, this is right up there. I mean, how can you say one�s better than the other? One�s just preached by Jesus, and this is the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, who breathes these out.

We don�t believe in red-letter, black-letter Bibles and difference. I get all that. A sermon is preached to a congregation, and they�re listening to it. This is it. This is it. Remember, Jesus, it�s pre-Christian, because he�s not been raised from the dead.

And here we actually have not just first-generation believers, but when you look at Hebrews 2, second-generation believers. Now there were some in the congregation I know that were not believers, and he addresses them.

But the issue here is Jesus is so great. If you turn your back on Jesus, there�s nowhere to go to. Oh, you could go back to Judaism, but that�s not really an option. It�s a bad option. And in this book, the book of Hebrews, I love looking at it as a sermon because it so highlights so many different things about sermons.

But one in particular, and that is the heart of every sermon, the dominating theme of every sermon. If Hebrews is the example, if Hebrews is the only example we have of a sermon to Christians in the New Testament, the focus is and should not only be for every sermon, but for every VBS, Awana, family worship.

By the way, VBS, I just saw Roger Patterson with Answers in Genesis, said that this must be their curriculum for 2018. Christology is Tuesday. Eternal Sonship is Tuesday. What VBS curriculum, he said, rightfully so, he said, talks about Eternal Sonship.

Sold, Roger. Thanks, by the way, Roger, for taking care of Roddick, my Czech friend and his family, when they were there with you. Makes it a small world after all. Jesus is the center of Hebrews, the sermon.

And for every evangelistic outreach, evangelistic message, funeral, wedding, Sunday school, Jesus is the focus. It's not lifestyle evangelism. I'm going to write that down right here, lifestyle. Fifth gospel.

You're not the fifth gospel. The focus is on Jesus. Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus. The Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The great high priest. He is the center of this message.

Now, we could talk a lot about Christ-centered preaching. And what about when you're preaching passages that are imperatives, law passages, how should we go about those? That's not my point at the moment.

When you're preaching expositionally, that is, sequentially, verse by verse, and you pick it up the next week where you left off the last week, there must be the exhortations of God given. And you preach and you exhort.

You just don't inform or you just don't tell people what's happened. Revelation demands a response. And the response could be believe, repent, trust, forsake, don't complain. There's a lot of responses.

But you cannot argue with me that Hebrews is Christ-saturated. Sinclair Ferguson asks in his book that you should get for free on Christian Audio, October 2017 only. He said, it is obvious to me and of engrossing concern that the chief focus, the dominant note in the sermons I preach or hear is Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

Is it? Well, for the book of Hebrews, yes. Or, Ferguson says, is the dominant emphasis and perhaps the greatest energies of the preacher our evangelist, our teacher, our Juana leader, family worship leader, Sunday school leader, focused somewhere else, perhaps on how to overcome sin or how to live the Christian life or on the benefits to be received from the gospel.

All are legitimate emphasis in their place. But that place is never center stage. Think about the book of Hebrews. Think about the sermon you heard from your church last week and from your pastor. What about the sermons you're listening to online?

What about NOCO Radio, for that matter? The same question can be asked, Ferguson goes on to state, more starkly in our techno-sermon age when many Christians listen not only to their preaching in their own church but to their favorite preachers in the contemporary galaxy.

Is the dominant theme, the lasting impression, the most natural word association in relation to the preaching I hear, Jesus Christ and Him crucified? Or something else? I can go to Mormon churches to have them tell me what to do every single week.

And maybe they even talk about Jesus. It happens to be the wrong Jesus. I can go to Jehovah's Witnesses. I can go to, I heard an ad yesterday on the radio, on the sports talk radio here in Los Angeles, on KNX 1070 News Radio.

I heard on NOAA's 98 .5 here in Boston, men need to get together to help others and strengthen their relationship and have camaraderie. Mason's, Masonic Lodge. They'll tell you to be nice to your wife.

They'll tell you to work hard. They'll tell you to tell the truth. They will tell you to be civically responsible. They will tell you, don't be a drunk. They will tell you, stay away from needles and heroin.

They will tell you, be thankful. They will tell you, be nice to the neighbor across the street. She's old and needs your help. But what they won't tell you is something about the real Jesus Christ from the Bible.

Ferguson wraps this up. Without wanting to denigrate the value many experience from listening to sermons on the World Wide Web, two words of caution are surely in order here. Namely, number one, he writes like a Presbyterian, doesn't he?

Am I fully aware of the emphasis to which I'm allowing myself to be exposed? Is it a Christ full emphasis? Do I know what I'm getting? And do I know it when I see it? A Christ full emphasis. You don't have to worry about the book of Hebrews.

Jesus is the dominant theme. Preaching Jesus Christ. He's the dominant theme. And does he not embody good news? I think the tendency, if I were to say to you, Jesus is the gospel. Now, you might recoil.

And maybe more needs to be said than Jesus is the gospel. Preaching Jesus is preaching the gospel. But certainly, if we came at it from this tact, the gospel is about Jesus. Good news is about Jesus. You'd be fine with that.

You might even be fine if I said the gospel is, according to Calvin, Christ clothed with his gospel. And you would agree with me that we shouldn't falsely make a difference between Jesus, his person, and his work.

That is to say, you take what Jesus accomplished. And, of course, the list could go on because the cross is so manifold. Justification, redemption, reconciliation, adoption, forgiveness, imputation. There's lots of words you could use.

Propitiation. And you really want to move them away from Jesus? They're over here. They're just in this other realm. Ferguson said the proclamation of the gospel is made in terms of what it offers rather than in terms of Christ himself.

Thus, in a subtle way, we become insensitive to the difference between offering the benefits of Christ and offering Christ himself. Talk a lot about Jesus. I think we could all agree about that. Why wouldn't we?

Well, but it's not in the text. Well, at the atomistic level, it's not in the text in some places. I don't want hyper-Lutheranism when you have interpretation. But is the Bible about Jesus? Luke 24, John 5.

Big picture. Macro. Paul said, I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, even the crucified one. Ferguson spoke the whole Christ. I've been thinking about it because I've been on the bicycle listening to it.

And since iTunes with iOS 11 is so ridiculously stupid, it does not play one podcast to the next to the next. I just went on my new podcast to download automatically. I hit go. And then the next thing you know, I'm learning about the Civil War.

I'm learning about war hero stories with Oliver North. Then I'm listening to R. Scott Clark. Then I'm listening to what else do I listen to? I don't know. Whatever it is. Lance Armstrong. Then it's just one after the next to the next.

But since that doesn't work, I'm on iBooks audio and I'm listening to the whole Christ. Totus Christus, the whole Christ. You might have a category of person and work, but are they really separable or inseparable?

And Ferguson said, quote, there is no work of Christ that takes place abstracted from and in that sense outside of his person. The blessings of his work cannot be appropriated apart from receiving Christ himself with all his benefits.

And that is the book of Hebrews. This is our only template of a sermon to the church in a church setting, congregational setting, one generation past. I mean, you want to tell me about Acts 3 and Acts 2 and stuff like that.

Okay, I understand. I understand. But this Christ exalting book, of course, it's all about Jesus. And then it has exhortations. It has warnings. Jesus is excellent. Jesus is abounding in his excellence over against Judaism and every other religion for that matter.

I mean, before the intertestamental period, I mean, it was beautiful. There's still even a lot of beauty to the Old Testament in its regalia in the temple and its pomp and circumstance. And it's wonderful.

But the veil was torn from the top down for a reason. Hebrews 8 tells us pretty much what this whole sermon is about. And this is a good preacher saying it. Now, the point in what we are saying is this.

Don't you love that? This is the point. The point in what we are saying is this. Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Now to Chapter 8, verse 1. We have present tense. We have right now. We're continuing to have.

We'll have right now. We had in the past as believers, in the future as believers. We have right now. We always will have such a high priest. One who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in heaven.

This is the high priest we have. One who, Chapter 1, verse 1, makes the world, is the radiance of the glory of God, who purges sin by being a substitutionary atonement. He's raised from the dead because he's seated at the right hand.

And he is a high priest. High priests die. High priests have sin. Jesus is alive. Yes, I know he died. But he's been raised from the dead. And he never sinned. So he must have died for somebody else's sin.

This sermon is all about Jesus. And the writer won't let you forget it. As we wrap up today's show, if you teach the Bible to your family. We used to just go through, let's say, a book of the Bible, Exodus, Chapter 1 tonight, what do we learn about God and man?

The next night, what did we learn last week in Exodus 1? Let's read Exodus 2, what did we learn? Exodus 3 to the next night, what did we learn in 1, 2? And off we go. If you ask even simple questions like that, what do we learn about God?

Remember, you have the entire Bible at your disposal. And you know what happens and where all these things are pointing. And to whom they're pointing to. So don't forget when you're talking about the paradigm in Exodus.

The paradigm. That is to say, rescued out of Egypt. Redeemed out of Egypt. Redeemed. Then you ought to be thinking, what can I say about Jesus? If you teach Sunday school, junior church, BBS, it better be about Jesus.

People know to love their spouses. Can you preach a sermon on loving your spouse? I hope you do in Ephesians 5. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. I would like to hear sermons about Jesus, please.

And even if they are full of exhortations and imperatives like the book of James, there's a way you can do it. It just takes work. And you need to step back from your study, teacher, preacher, BBS leader, and say, what am I going to say about Jesus today?

That's the key. We have this great sermon. Why is it such a great sermon? I think it's about Jesus, that's why.

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.