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The Broken Theological Way
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 Avendroth.
Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Avendroth, here with Steve, and I�m sorry to say Steve will no longer be on the show. He�s going to go off on his own with his new show.
It�s Maso Menos Radio. You know, is that true? Is that right?
Well, Maso Menos. I thought Lo Siento would be a better way to go about it. Lo Siento�s pretty good, too.
I don�t know. You know, maybe that�ll be my publishing, you know, thing, Lo Siento.
You know, I was looking for a new publishing imprint. Lo Siento Publishing. I think that�s very good. I think that worked out well. How do you say �publishing� in Espanol, I wonder? I don�t know. I�ll have to look it up.
Okay, so we have a man at our church who teaches the Bible, and he�d rather teach in Spanish, preach in Spanish, so I said, �Well, why don�t you preach in Spanish on a Sunday night here for Sunday night service
We�ll have a bunch of people here, and do you think we should have a translator, or should we just sit and listen and see?
I�m all for just sitting and listening and seeing. I mean, it�ll be fine for me. I�ll probably pick up every third word and figure out what�s going on. Palabras. De Dios. Yeah, my wife will be, you know, so I don�t think she�d get much out of it.
Steve, when I have sat in other countries, specifically Germany, and listened to sermons without translation, if I know the passage, and this isn�t Chinese or Russian, there will be a few words that we would know, right?
If you think, okay, what�s a Spanish word that is equivalent, you know, utilization or something? I would imagine it is �utilización� or something, right?
Something like that. Yeah, we have those, what we call cognates, you know, words that sound the same.
Uh-huh, and even if somebody said, �Vaya con Dios you would go,. �Oh, yeah. Or, �Vaya con queso. Yeah. I think people would pick up some of the words. Si. Uh-huh. Si. Okay. Claro que si. Claro que, yeah.
Okay. So, are you really starting your own show? No. Okay. Come on. All right. Well, you know, I like to hold people in my hands loosely, so if you ever want to, I�ll give you permission.
Everybody thinks they need their own radio show. I don�t need my own radio show.
Only prideful people have to have their own show.
Well, I don�t know. There are just a lot of, I mean, I�m amazed, you know, because I�m on Facebook, and I�m amazed at the number of people who have shows, and I�m like, you know, �Well, what�s your ministry
I just have the show.
Okay. I know. See, my pride, Steve, wants to say when they ask, �Is it just a podcast Well, I want to say, �Well, we used to be on the radio, but then we ran out of money or something, but it�s just a podcast now.
We were syndicated all across the area here on one station.
So yesterday, I got a phone call from Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and they are on� Allegedly. Uh-huh. No, it�s actually true. Okay. And they live up in the Oregon area, and we were talking about something. And I said, you know, �Here�s my phone number.
Please call me. Any time, night or day. No. I said, �I�ll be available in the next couple hours. And so they called, and I was at the gym. It was, I don�t know, 6 o�clock at night or something. And I answered the phone.
�This is Mike Ebendroth. True story. Happened last night. Guaranteed, certified. �We�re looking for the Tuesday guy, please.
And I said, �Oh, great. Thanks. Well, you know, Mr. and Mrs. Smith from Oregon are wonderful people that should be commended for their discernment.
Well, I have said before on this show that when I go to the Shepherds Conference, it�s neat to meet all kinds of people and see them I haven�t seen for years, fellow students, professors, students that used to be students and now are professors.
You know, even that, right? Right. And you get to see MacArthur and different people and Mark Devere and Steve Lawson and Phil Johnson and others. And then I�ll get a coffee or maybe a Krispy Kreme donut, and then they�ll say, �Mike Ebendroth, No Compromise Radio
And I�m thinking, you know, the faux pride and humility and, �Oh, yes, you know, nice to meet you. But then they say, �Where�s Tuesday guy It�s just, that�s the way life goes for me.
What I think is awesome is nobody ever comes up to me and says, �Aren�t you the Tuesday guy
You know, so nobody says that. Why don�t they say when they find out you�re the Tuesday guy, �Where�s the other guy I don�t know. Because you�re ubiquitous. You�re everywhere. You know? Ubiquitous.
That�s strange magic, by the way. Thank you. Uh-huh. Any country song that you like these days that you really like that I should listen to?
You know, I�m listening to a lot of Keith Urban, so �Break On Me� is a really good one. Okay.
Yeah. And would that be up there with, like, a Hank Williams senior song or something?
No. He�s more, you know, he�s definitely more modern. So. Would they play Pop and stuff. Okay. Well, I mean, country radio is a wasteland right now. It is an absolute.
It is pretty impressive. It�s searing. It�s incisive. Yesterday, Kim and I were in the car, and we had some channel on, and we were listening and there was a George Thurgood song and The Who came on afterwards.
And I said, are there any rock bands these days? You know, you don't even have the Grammys have a rock award that's on the TV. You have to have the tape delay or something.
The closest thing to rock music these days is Bruno Mars. But...
See, that's why you should have your own show.
Tom Petty produced an album for a group called The Shelters. He was gonna produce another album for them and they're kind of a rock band. They're, you know, so, but there just aren't very many of them and they don't get on the air.
So that's just kind of... Someday, you know, maybe rock will make a resurgence, but I don't know. I mean, it's like people have lost their capacity to do anything.
Well, now that The Who's in my mind, you know, long live rock.
Yeah. Yeah. Although it is dead, just about. Rock is here to stay. Okay. If you say so. Have you ever listened to Who's Next in the last six months? You know, it's funny because I just had that album up on my Apple, my iTunes list yesterday, so.
How about if I were to go to your phone and look at Pandora or Spotify, would you have a particular channel? What would the channel be that you listen to?
Hi. Well, I don't have either one of those. I don't use them. In the car, in Janet's car though, I do have Sirius XM and it's usually, if I'm listening to that, I'm usually listening to Tom Petty Radio.
Okay, now, when Ann Voskamp put that new record out, kind of, it was almost rockabilly, like Stray Cats and such. Do you like it?
I like the Stray Cats. They have a great, one of my favorite, it's probably a song you don't even know. It's called Elvis on Velvet. You ever heard that song?
No, but a lot of their songs sound alike.
This song does not sound alike and it is an awesome sound. It is really fun.
I saw the Stray Cats strut one day and I think right by Hollywood and Vine.
Can't remember. You should pull up Elvis on Velvet. It's a great song.
So we're talking about Ann Voskamp and she's very popular and we think she is not good for you to listen to or read. Listen to the Stray Cats instead. Stray Cats. Kim and I went out dancing the other night to some swing band deal and they played a Stray Cats song.
I said, honey, we got to dance to that. Come on, what's better than that? Like Fun Boy 3 or something? The Blasters. Oh, you know the Blasters, Dave Alvin, he can play. Marie Marie. That's right. How about Dave Edmonds?
We can just do a whole show on secular music. I love me some Dave Edmonds.
All right, I'm gonna give you some quotes, Steve. These are Ann Voskamp quotes. I was hoping for some Dave Edmonds quotes.
Her new broken, wounded. Broken wing. The broken way. The broken wing. What happens when you each hold a different side of the wishbone and you get the bigger side, right? Yeah, you win. The only way to abundant life is the broken way of risk.
Now, see, here's the game today. Is that a fortune cookie or is it Ann Voskamp? Yeah, that's right. What we're trying to do is figure out.
What does she really mean? This is called authorial intent.
You should write these down and, you know, Ann Voskamp or, you know, we should do that quiz. Yeah, our cookie. Yeah. Yeah, our Chinese cookie. Which one's real?
Okay, this one's a little bit longer. Maybe it wouldn't fit on the small print and the fortune cookie, but it says, maybe this is what real love feels like. A slight breaking of the heart and a slight breathless surprise at finding yourself put back together into a kind of wholeness.
Shalom.
I'd rather listen to the Doogie Brothers with Michael McDonald sing real love. I'd trade it all right now for just one minute of real love. Okay, number three.
Isn't the cross a sign of Christ believing in us? No. Believing that the busted are to be believed in? No.
Which feels unbelievable. No, it is none of those things. Do not believe that.
It is none of those things. That's the broken way. This is the broken theological way.
I think that'd be the good name. If you wanted to say that the cross, isn't the cross a sign of God's love for men? I would say, yes it is. That he was willing to die in the place of men. Sinful men and women take their sins upon himself and die for them.
Yes, I would say that is a symbol of love. It's also a symbol of offense. It's a symbol of a lot of things, but it's not a symbol of, what did she say? Of belief in men? No, it's because he doesn't believe in men.
He's not entrusting himself in men. He knows what's in them.
I was thinking about bands and I was thinking about Ann Boskamp and she said, and a slight breathless surprise. I thought that was Exene Cervenka and the John Doe ex-Breathless. You make me breathless.
Yeah, I wasn't a big ex-fan, you know. Now see, that was too mainstream for me,.
The Breathless album, but the Los Angeles album I thought was pretty good. Fourth of July. Yeah. Wait, do you see that acoustically delivered?
Didn't Dave Alvin write that? Wasn't that him? Oh, it could have been.
I think it was. Could have been. Do you think, Steve, when Boskamp writes, she uses this kind of different technique of writing that so appeals to people's emotions and experiences and people identify with her that they just throw the theological constructs that they have out the window as they're experiencing?
I don't think people have theological constructs and I think that's what the problem is, right? If you're going to a typical evangelical church which is utterly devoid of any kind of theology and you read Ann Voskamp, it seems deep.
Steve, you're right, and here's what I can't figure out, how people can defend this, right? They're defending this. Here's another quote from her book, page 55 to 56. And we have to say 55 to 56 and those kind of things because it's so unbelievably bad.
They'll think we're making this up. Right, yeah, you can go to the bookstore. Do not buy the book.
You can pick it up and read it for yourself. I reach for the pen on my nightstand the way I've reached for ink to count a thousand ways he loves me. Say that little plug for the old book. The way ink's been the cheapest of medicines but now can the ink be lived, branded onto the skin?
How could it leave the page and lead away through pain? The ink would start right there on my scarred wrist, right where part of me wanted to kind of die and not in the saving way. And somehow there's a good brokenness that grows out of every scar and wound we will ever suffer.
Draw one line vertically down my wrist right over the scars. I mean, that is just, I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Okay, then let me just interrupt you. Draw another line horizontally across my wrist, breaking scar lines with cross lines.
That's so putrid. Listen, listen. We've had people leave the church for less than that, Steve.
I'm just, you know, I'm getting a little upset because instead of infantilizing whatever this supposed Christianity is, why don't we just say, you know, like when I wanted to die or whatever, well, what is that?
That's a sin. I don't know how to tell you. This is really hard to hear, but it's sinful to have those kinds of thoughts. And we have them, right? We have them from time to time. We think different things, and we are sinful when we do them.
The cross is not about healing our brokenness. It's about paying for our sins, that we can have a right standing before God. He pays for our sins, and then we get also his righteousness, which we need to enter heaven.
None of this, none of this brokenness rubbish is anywhere in the Bible. You're broken people. No, you're sinful people. You're sinful people who need a great savior, not someone who, you know, was also broken.
We need somebody who was broken for us because it was his broken body that paid for our sins. That's what we need.
We need a substitute. Steve, but if I sprinkle throughout my book these words often enough, they make sense like communion and intimacy and brokenness and cruciform.
It's just an assault on my mind. I mean, this is just the kind of, if you have this book, I would invite you to shred it. You know, it doesn't even deserve to be burned. This is bad.
Well, would you write a book, Steve, and then tell people, listen, I had my 40th birthday, and Happy birthday. We go out on the town, and it wasn't to go see a movie and go have a dinner, go to, I don't know, buy some macaroons or something.
It was to celebrate our brokenness. It was to go out gifting. That's nice, that's nice. Yeah, and you go do acts of kindness and stuff. That's very nice. And you find a policeman and such, and you go to a food bank.
What if you take a policeman to a food bank? Would that double the Eucharist? As long as you're not robbing the bank. Get it? Oh, sorry. You can't rob a food bank. Oh, yes, I can. We talked last time a little bit about God believing in us.
Steve, when we believe in us, then we want God to believe in us. What does that say about Adam's fall and how that really affected us? Does not Proverbs 26 say he who trusts in his own heart is a fool?
It sounds like, you know, she's trying to neutralize that, that there's some inherent goodness in us, and that's why God is believing in us. What does God see when he looks at us? Does he see goodness?
I don't think so. If he saw goodness, then like you said, he wouldn't see the full effects of the fall, but he also wouldn't need to send his son, the second person in the Trinity, to take on humanity, live a perfect life, die in our place, and be raised on the third day.
He wouldn't need to do those things because we're good. Yeah.
Steve, if you could give some advice to Ann Voskamp, would you say she should amend her book? Should she have her book theologically edited?
Any kind of advice that you have? I think she should write a biography of Jeff Lynne and just forget about all this. I mean, the best thing she could do, in my mind, is stop writing theological books.
Yes, but how can people like the Gospel Coalition and others promote it? I mean, really, that's what we're after here. How does that happen? I don't know.
I mean, I really have no idea. Maybe, you know, I think there are many connections in evangelicalism where you just go, how can so-and-so say something nice about so-and-so? Or how come so-and-so doesn't criticize this other person or whatever?
And I think a lot of it has to do with friendships and connections, and she's such a nice person. Well, okay, she might be a peach, right? That's not the issue. The issue is she's writing this heresy, and how can people, you know, love the sinner, hate the sin, right?
That's okay for us, right?
Steve, if you were gonna write a book under the moniker of Tuesday Guy or, you know, what's the other thing you said, Masomenos?
Masomenos, or Los Ciento Ministries.
Would there be a problem if you said, I'm gonna talk to people about God through my autobiographical lens? Because isn't that what Voskamp is really doing?
If I was to talk about God through my autobiographical lens, here's what I would say, me personally, I would say God is amazing because he took somebody who hated him, who was absolutely worthless and good for no good thing, and saved me in spite of myself, and then uses me in spite of myself, right?
I mean, the greatness of God is not measured in Steve. Well, in some ways it is because only a great God could save me, right? But he doesn't believe in me.
He doesn't need me. Steve, her previous book, 1 ,000 Gifts, is that what it's called? I think I have it here. I think it's Find 1 ,000 Ways. It's a song by James Ingram. Okay. Steve, she talks about God in a way, I don't even talk to other people about my wife, right?
If a husband and wife went to talk to each other and they wanna say some things intimately to one another, that's fine. This has nothing to do with this point. But when she writes a book and she says things like, on page 201, I fly to Paris and discover how to make love to God.
I wouldn't say that about my wife. I don't talk out loud about things that she has on her book, pages 216 and 217, wooing, intimate pursuit, passionate love, making love, embrace, intercourse disrobed.
I mean, really?
I mean, there are things in life that don't go together, like Steve and the NBA, or... Right? Right, I can't play in the NBA. How about Christian erotica? That's right, yeah. And the answer is no. What do you think of Christian erotica?
It doesn't exist, right? I mean, what do I think about my career in the NBA? It doesn't exist.
Yes, but see, for Voskamp in her earlier book, instead of having love be, and this is God's love, not that we loved us, not that we loved us, well, we did love us. Not that we loved him, yeah, but he loved us and gave himself for us.
It turns into, oh God, I'm making love with God,.
And I'm having intimacy with God. I don't even know what that, I don't even, I mean, first of all, I don't know what that means. Secondly, I don't want to know what it means, you know what I mean?
So Steve, cannot a man and a woman both read the scriptures and should have the same kind of response, and it shouldn't be some kind of weird physical love? No, it shouldn't.
I mean, here's what I would say. I listen to that quote, and I go, okay, Ann, I have a couple words for you, three words. Increase your medication, right? I mean, there's a real problem there. This is so unbiblical and so idolatrous and so blasphemous.
I don't know why anybody would commend it, read it, or spend any time studying the words of Ann Voskamp.
And the reason why we're saying this is, I hate to say it out loud, but you need to know that this is not to be trifled with, these kind of doctrines and eroticizing God's love. It turns agape love into something else that it's not.
We have different words for love. There's eros and there's phileo and there's storge and there's agape, and I think we have different words for different reasons.
That is just so, I mean, seriously, there's no other way to describe it other than blasphemy.
That's just horrible. First, John four, in this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.
And that is a lot different than long embraces and mystical love unions and the yearning to merge with beauty himself. I am not at all certain that I want consummation, all quotes by Voskamp. That is trivializing and...
God's love is not romantic, it's not emotional, and it's not erotic, right? It is action, it is attitude, it is something that he has declared, but it is none of the things that she describes it as. And if you so misunderstand the love of God, well, it comes from a few things.
One is having a really faulty view of who God is, but another one is, as you've indicated before, having a real faulty view of who you are. If you think that you are lovable, that God is in love with you, and that he longs for you in some kind of whacked out way, then you don't know the God of the Bible.
Steve, when I put together S. Lewis Johnson's material for the Romans commentary, Zondervan, and Zondervan, you know, while they've published many things that are very conservative, I would not say that when I work with them, nor even now, that they are the most conservative of all Christian publishers.
No, that'd be lo sciento. Right, but Zondervan, for my book, gave me not only a literary editor, but a theological editor. And he was asking me all kinds of questions, about, well, this could infer than this, about premillennialism, and what about Romans 9, and what did Johnson say earlier in his life?
Where's the theological editor here? Absent, gone. Absent from the body. Present with the Lord. I have in my notes, I'm sure I stole it from someplace. This is fish and chips theology. She's just fishing around, and then everybody chips in.
Is that how that works?
That sounds like some S. Lewis Johnson there.
How about we end the show like we started? See, this is a good bookend, Steve. We talked about music, rock music. I know you love The Beatles. Did not John Lennon say, give me some truth?
All I need is some truth, just give me some truth.
And then, when you have the truth, then the emotions and the experience has moorings. It has validity. It doesn't have this kind of walking off, it reminds me of a spacewalk without the rope, without the cord, without the oxygen, and they just walk off into nowhere, and that's just what happens here with the Voskampian way.
What are we to turn to? Where can we find truth? Where can we anchor our souls? And it's in the word of God, not in the mystic ramblings of Ann Voskamp. That is just bizarre.
Mike Gabenroth here, Steve Cooley. If you've got any problems with today's show, it is TheTuesdayGuy at NoCompromisedRadio .com. Please.
Please. No Compromised Radio with Pastor Mike Gabenroth 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 10 .15 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.