Brannon Howse Interview

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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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

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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.'"

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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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

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

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Mike Abendroth, glad to be your host today. We have a little slogan, and the slogan is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

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I wanna provoke your mind. I want you to think biblically about issues of the world, issues in the world, what to do about church life, ministry in general, and we try to focus on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, the one who never compromised. And so it was not that long ago, my new friend

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Brandon House called me up, and we wanted to talk about doing ministry together, Worldview Weekend, and since then we've become friends, and if I could just get the guy to quit calling me all the time during elders meetings and stuff like that, that'd be good.

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Brandon, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Good, good to be with you, Mike. Brandon, some folks don't know

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Worldview Weekend from No Compromise, although Worldview Weekend people are getting to know No Compromise.

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Tell us about your ministry, worldviewweekend .com, how you started it, your testimony.

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In this half hour, I just want people to get to know you because you're supporting the gospel of Christ Jesus through a lot of different ways, and so who are you and what makes you tick?

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Well, thank you, Mike, appreciate that. We're just really pleased to have you on board with our ministry broadcast outlets and the network of broadcasters we've put together, about 17 to 20 of them now, and we've got a great response from folks from literally all over the world with our apps and everything we have for a lot of people to access the programs, and so we're just really glad to have you on board with us and have you coming and speaking at one of our conferences in April in Branson, Missouri, so it's a great partnership, but we started in,

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Worldview Weekend officially started in 92, late 92, officially launched in February of 93, our first conference ever, and we were basically for many, many, many years until just last month known as a conference -based organization.

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At one point, we held up to 50 conferences in one year. In 2003, my family and I purchased a motorcoach and we started traveling with my wife and three children and three dogs all over the country.

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I'd been flying up to that point, got tired of that, and we became a real problem after 9 -11, and you couldn't always depend on the flights to be on time, so I got tired of traveling away from them, and the conferences were getting too big, but I needed help, and so my wife and I decided to travel by motorcoach and see the country and take our kids with us, and we did that from 2003, and still to this day, that's how we do that, up to, like I said, 50 cities in a year.

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The interesting thing, Mike, is that even though I started the conferences in 93, my conferences were definitely related to our world view, biblical world view.

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They were probably heavily laced with people, some of them who were

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Reconstructionists, thought we needed to reconstruct America. I wasn't committed to Reconstructionism, but I had no problem with them.

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We would talk about America's Christian heritage and America's Christian founding, and we would talk about the need to apply a biblical world view to all areas of life, and we would have politicians that would show up from Dick Armey to who, when he was

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U .S. House Majority Leader, and we'd have Michelle Bachmann, who I've known for many, many, many years, U .S.

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Congresswoman. She'd show up at some of them if she was in town, and we'd acknowledge her, and we had some great speakers, no doubt, from Josh McDowell to others, but it had a little bit of a moralizing theme to it, whether it was intended or not, it just did.

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The guys who were speaking for us, a lot of them were very good on world view. They were very good on defending some of the essential

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Christian doctrines as far as how we know the Bible is true, but theologically, pretty weak, and it wasn't until I became a

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Christian. You didn't know if you'd catch that or not, but it wasn't until I became a Christian that I then began to change my

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Christian conferences. I was a false convert. I was born and raised in a

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Christian home, attended a Christian school. Well, I prayed the sinner's prayer at five with my mother, walked the aisle at seven in our

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Baptist church, got baptized with my twin sister. By the way, my twin sister and I are not identical, so don't ask that question.

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You'd be shocked how many people ask if my twin sister and I are identical. I ask a lot of questions, but I don't think

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I would have asked that question. I guess those folks failed high school biology. But anyway, we got baptized when

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I was seven, and thought I was a good person for the most part.

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I needed a little bit of the cross, not all of it, and I was pretty much a good person. I was in the adult choir when

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I was in high school. We were heavily involved in my Christian school and our church, but if it had been taught to me, and I'm sure it had, maybe

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I wasn't listening, but it wasn't until I read some books by people like Ray Comfort, who then became a very close friend, and I read some books by John MacArthur and others, that I realized that I was a false convert, that I had been comparing myself to the standards set by my parents, set by my church, set by my

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Christian school, and because I pretty much met those standards, I felt like I was a good person. I didn't see myself as totally depraved and deserving of help, but when

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I was seeing myself in light of the standard by which God would judge me, have I ever looked at someone with lust, have

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I ever stolen anything, even of a small amount, have I ever had hatred towards someone, have I ever told a lie?

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These are the standards by which God will judge us, and by that standard, yes, I was a lying, thieving, adulterer at heart and would deserve and deserve hell, and did deserve hell, and was headed to hell, and so I really spent several weeks and several months studying this topic and reading.

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It was a very, very troubling time in my life, personally, because of the fact that I was just not so sure about all this, and I was like, how did

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I come to a Christian school and Christian home and now run a Christian organization and not even a believer, potentially, and as I found out, yes,

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I didn't think I was. I studied the book of 1 John. I looked at what I found were 10 hallmarks of a believer.

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I found that I didn't meet a lot of them, and then I, as I said, couldn't figure out how this occurred, and then

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I came across 2 Corinthians chapter seven that talked about a godly sorrow versus a worldly sorrow, and then it says that there is a worldly sorrow that leads to death, but it spoke of a godly sorrow that produces repentance unto salvation, a godly sorrow that produces repentance unto salvation, but the sorrow of the world leads to death, and that's what

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I had. I had a sorrow of the world, and I have to tell you, many people who were hearing me on the radio back then and who hear me today, some of them every now and then will call in or email me and tell me you're not the same person we listened to many, many, many years ago, and people who attend our conferences know that they're not the same conferences.

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Today, we really focus on biblical theology and doctrine. Yes, we talk about biblical worldview, but we now look at theology and doctrine.

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A lot of guys talk worldview. A lot of guys talk Christian worldview, but there's very little

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Bible. They talk Christian worldview, creation, evolution, but they don't talk biblical theology, and you can't really have a biblical worldview without biblical theology.

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So we're not quite as popular as we used to be. We used to appeal to a lot of folks.

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We're not quite as popular as we used to be with some of those people, but we're certainly biblical now.

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We concentrate on bringing in people who have spotted the Scriptures verse by verse on their topic.

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We demand that they use a lot of Scripture, and we're not looking to entertain people. We cut out the

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God and country flag waving, raising the flag above the cross stuff. They cut all that out, and really got back to our first calling, fulfilling the

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Great Commission, making disciples, and defending the inerrancy of Scripture, the inspiration of Scripture, the sufficiency of Scripture, exclusivity of Jesus Christ, fighting and exposing ecumenicalism, and being willing to talk about, if necessary, what the

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Church of Rome believes, Mormonism. And a lot of those things, by the way, are not popular with some of the groups who are sponsoring us, some of the pro -family groups.

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They don't want to touch that stuff with a 10 -foot pole, because they get too much money from those kind of people. So, yes, we lost a lot of friends along the way.

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There's a lot of speakers who used to speak for us that probably today would not speak for us if we invited them. But they don't get the chance to say no, because we wouldn't dare invite a lot of them anymore.

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But you know what I'm saying? It's changed. We're a totally different organization than we were several years ago.

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Well, Brandon, what I've noticed is, even when I go to your website, worldviewweekend .com, instead of all these worldview issues, you'll have articles.

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The one from Cripplegate is up there today, Did Jesus Become a Sinner on the Cross? There are videos, your book,

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Religious Trojan Horse is up. And when you go there to the website, except for the name,

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I wouldn't say, oh, this guy only is dealing with worldview. And so, to me, it's encouraging that you can have a biblical worldview, but it has to be undergirded with these deep theological issues and six -day creation you've got here.

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And so I'm encouraged that people could go to this one spot, worldviewweekend .com, and then get a lot of gospel

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Bible teaching right there. Well, thank you for that. And we do cover what's going on in the news.

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We have a news section, and so we cover and put up some of the latest articles from the secular news websites of what's going on, that things maybe we wouldn't cover, but people ought to know about.

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It's a very diverse website in the things that we cover. But our whole emphasis is surrounding around what is the main important thing, which is the proclamation and defense of the gospel.

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And I think our emphasis, more than anything, has become about defending the gospel inside the church.

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I never thought that I would have an organization and radio program and TV programs that spent so much time dealing with, quote, the church.

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You know, I spent so much time dealing with the secular humanist and the New Agers. And quite frankly, the secular humanist is a thing of the past.

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Secular humanism is still around, but it's not very popular. And for those of you who don't know, secular humanism is the belief that man has no soul, you die, and that's it.

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You only believe in the natural world. Whereas the New Ager believes in the natural world and the spiritual world.

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Oprah Winfrey would be your classic New Ager. But I thought that was really the great threat.

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And when I became a believer and started studying the scriptures more and really getting into biblical theology and doctrine, and got a good set of Bible commentaries, and I just love studying the

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Bible and teaching it, which is something I did not do, enjoy doing at all, and really didn't do as a false convert.

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I found the Bible quite boring and didn't really, I would only study it if I had to to have a good verse to make my point.

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I just didn't have a love for the scriptures or studying it, like I have today. I love the fact

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I have a job that allows me to spend hours studying the scriptures and studying the word. And that's another sign of my true conversion,

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I believe. But, you know, our whole emphasis has gotta be around that.

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And I never anticipated, I spent so much of my life dealing with people who call themselves

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Christians or in the church and within evangelicalism and within the new religious right, who I think are a greater threat to the church than Oprah Winfrey, a greater threat to the true gospel in the church than secular humanism.

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I think much of the religious leaders today are a greater threat to our country and to people eternally than Barack Obama.

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And so many of the new religious right groups spend all their time screaming and hollering about Barack Obama, and I don't care for his policies.

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But many of them that are screaming and hollering are far greater a threat to people and our nation than Barack Obama.

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So it's interesting. I used to run with a lot of these people, some of them I used to vacation with, and now

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I'm busy, and I tried to explain to them privately for hours and hours on end and could not, and many of them turned against me.

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And now I publicly have no problem naming some of these people and who their organizations are, and that, quite frankly, I think they're moralizing, they're raising the flag above the cross.

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They're a religious Trojan horse, and that's why I wrote that book, 485 pages, almost 600 footnotes, that there's a religious

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Trojan horse in the camp, and Satan loves to take false teaching and false teachers. I think that's his greatest tool, and I think that's what

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Jesus warned us about in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24, these signs of his second coming, the number one being false teachers, false

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Christ, false Messiah. And so whether it's the obvious, Benny Hinn and the

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Creflo Dollar, I find a lot of the false teachers aren't quite as obvious. They're more of the

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Rick Warren type, they're more of the moralizing of the new religious right and the ecumenicalism of the work with Glenn Beck and the work with the

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Catholic Church. We all get together and have conferences called One Nation Under God, and we all see we're all believers, and this is the great threat to the church today, and this is what we're trying to warn people about, and as you can well imagine, it means that we don't have just the biggest following we could have.

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If we went back to the other things we were doing years before I was a believer, we were a much bigger organization as far as some of our conferences.

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But reality is, Mike, that a lot of the pro -family guys were writing emails to each other, which would make their way back to us, that houses picked this hill to die on and house is a troublemaker and house is no longer what it used to be, which is true, because house became a believer, and a lot of them,

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I think, are not. I think a lot of them are false converts. I know a lot of them personally, enough to be able to say that for some of them, but I think that they declared my death as an organization, but in reality, our organization in the last few years has exploded in growth, and particularly on a global scale when we removed the flag from our website, got rid of the red, white, and blue from our website, and really went toward just ministering the gospel and defending the gospel, proclaiming the

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Great Commission, making disciples. We went global, so we went beyond America, we went global, and now we have a study from our own web guide that shows that in any given month, we have right around 100 ,000 unique visitors, 100 ,000 different people, 100 ,000 unique visitors who go to our website in any given month from 120 countries, and so the interesting thing is,

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Mike, in some ways, we're becoming more popular outside the U .S. than we are even in the U .S. Well, we're talking to Brandon House today, worldviewweekend .com.

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I'm glad to have him on No Compromise Radio, and I'm glad to be in the Situation Room and have us,

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No Compromise Radio, on your website, and you're talking about going global. I think I can shrink your audience with a few of my shows.

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Well, good, you know, it's like the guy that started, he came on board with a youth group and had 200 kids, and he grew the youth group down to 20 kids, you know?

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But you know what he did? He threw out all the fun, junky stuff, you know, not that they're all that fun, but I mean, he went from everything being about fun to actually discipling these kids and grew the church youth group down to 20, but he ended up with 20 solid people, and you know, young people, and that's kind of where we're at, you know?

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We're just wanting to train and equip and encourage the saints and edify them with truth, and I'd rather have 100 ,000 unique visitors coming to our website every month that love the gospel and want to learn and be equipped and then have a half a million that are interested in false teaching and mixing

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Christianity with New Age, and so, yeah, we'll take what we've got that are really wanting to be trained versus those who are just wanting a religious experience.

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Brandon, you know this for certain, but when you look at the downgrade controversy with Spurgeon, he was voted out of the

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Baptist Union 2000 to seven. Edwards, Jonathan Edwards, voted out of his church,

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I think the numbers were about 230 to 23. Might doesn't always make right, and so when 1

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Corinthians 4, it says, it's required that stewards be found trustworthy. I love where you are now, theologically, methodologically, and so we proclaim the truth, and then whatever happens to the size of our audience happens.

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That's God's prerogative, right? Absolutely, absolutely, and so we're just going out looking for guys like you that we can add to our team that we think are gonna hold the line, and so when we found out about you through a website

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I visited and they kept having these little 90 -second videos, no -compromise or no -co 90 -second commentaries by you,

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I became very intrigued, who is this guy? And so I did a little research on you and asked a few friends about you who were aware of you and found out about your background and where you go to school, and then

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I reached out to you to add you to our team, and that's what we're doing. We're trying to use our email list of nearly 200 ,000 people, our social media pages, and the traffic comes to our site to lift up to the body of Christ on a global scale, men and women that are holding the line.

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Now we have only one lady on our website because we don't believe that women ought to be teaching men but we do believe that women have a very powerful role in equipping children and training children and not only their own children but other children, but also teaching other women, and so we've recently added a lady to our website,

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Susan Heck, who leads a ladies' Bible study. It's called Women with the Master, so it's specifically, they give it a title, let people know it's a ladies'

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Bible study for ladies. Susan has memorized 24 books of the Bible. She's working on book number 25, and so other than Susan, the rest are men, but we handpick these guys very carefully to have a lineup of men that are teaching, and some of them are

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Bible teachers. Some of them are like you. It's a combination. Sometimes you'll hear a sermon by Mike and his pulpit, and then sometimes he's interviewing someone like he's doing today, and that's the kind of people we have.

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It's a wide variety, so it's not all verse -by -verse Bible teaching. Some of it is, and then some of it is, okay, here's what's going on in the world.

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Here's what's going on in the church. What does the Bible say about this topic? So it's very diverse, but it's all biblically based.

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Well, Brandon, I told you the story when I was in California, and some lady was talking to me at a church.

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She didn't know I was going to be the preacher that day, and we were discussing things, and she was trying to prove a point to me, and she was trying to prove a point to me by saying she learned about this truth from Worldview Weekend, and I said, well,

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I have to tell you, ma 'am, that I'm now on Worldview Weekend, so I won the debate. You did because you're social with us, so that helps you win the debate.

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I'm glad. See, how does it work out, Brandon? Walk me through your sanctification. Let's think specifically about MacArthur and Worldview and government, and can we change things?

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I would imagine early on, I don't know this for a fact, but early on, MacArthur's methodology and his theology applied when it comes to winning the world or winning the

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USA for Jesus. I bet you didn't like the way he did things, but now I know you support

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John and Phil Johnson, and John has a unique style of saying, we're going to just teach the

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Bible and let the chips fall where they may versus let's march with Catholics to say we're against abortion.

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Have you changed your philosophy or your theology of MacArthur in light of where the

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Lord has brought you? Oh, yes. I recognize MacArthur as a good Bible teacher, but when it came to the issue of moralizing or the issue of Christian activism,

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I thought he was just wrong, and privately to my friend, I was very critical of him privately, but then when

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I became a believer and I began to study the topic more and more, I realized he was 100 % right, and I could tell you that because I knew

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Dray Falwell, and I'm not saying this to boast, but just to give the audience an understanding of where I came from.

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I spent eight years being raised in Washington, D .C. My father was with the government. I was raised around those monuments and going there constantly with friends and relatives who'd come to town.

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I was raised and I've discussed politics quite a bit, and so I was raised in an environment that really bred that interest in history,

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American history, patriotism, and there's nothing wrong with being patriotic, but there's nothing wrong with being patriotic to what we have today, which is nationalism.

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I think a lot of what we smell from the religious right today smells a lot like the 1930s and the nationalism and the merging of the church with the state in Nazi Germany, where Hitler was able to convince all the denominations to resolve and unite under the right bishop and picked by himself,

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Hitler, under Mueller. So I think that nationalism is dangerous. I think it's what we see today with the religious right.

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It's a nationalism. It's very dangerous, but I was raised in a patriotism, and then when

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I got hooked up with the religious right, I got really into that this is our calling, this is what we must do, and I met

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Jerry Falwell when I was probably about seven or eight in our church in Virginia.

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Of course, he was there in Lynchburg. Years later, I would write for his magazine or his newspaper.

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I'd be on his TV show. I would speak before the thousands of students at Liberty. I walked, last time

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I saw Jerry, I walked into the room with my wife and Jerry was leaning against the wall with his son, and he looked at me from quite a ways off, smiled at me as I walked toward him.

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He said, Brandon, how are you? So he would remember my name, and that would be the case with a lot of these guys.

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I grew up around some of them, meaning that I knew them when I was a child. I met them as a child, then when I was an adult,

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I got to work with them, be a guest on their shows, speak for their schools, speak in their churches, and so I ran in those circles.

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Like I said, Dick Armey, U .S. House Majority Leader at our conference. We've had state U .S. Senators at our conference.

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We had U .S. Congressmen at our conferences, and I was running in that crowd, and so then when I became a believer, and I realized what

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MacArthur was teaching was 100 % right, and so I have a unique perspective from which I write and speak, because I was in that, and you can imagine, that drives the religious right crazy.

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They do not like the fact that I was running with them, and now I'm speaking out against them, because I can tell you a lot of things from behind the scenes.

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I can tell you a lot of things that are going on behind the curtain of what this movement is really, really all about in the end, and I think it comes down to money and power.

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Money, power, and pride is what a lot of it comes down to, and a bad theology or a lack of theology.

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Some of them have an eschatology that says we have to take back America, Christianize all the institutions, and then

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Christ can return, and God will let Christ return to his kingdom. Some of it is actually steeped in their eschatology, which drives their bad theology.

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For a lot of them, there's no theology at all. I know them. These people are about as empty as they come theologically.

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I mean, I've talked to one guy who's a major religious right leader, asked him, well, what is your eschatology?

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When do you believe Christ will return, or at least into the second coming, but the rapture? And he couldn't tell me.

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He had to turn to one of his aides and ask him, what do we believe? And the aide had to tell him what it is he believed when the rapture would occur, pre -trib, mid -trib, post -trib, he didn't know.

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I remember talking to one major Christian leader in broadcasting and said, well, you know, that guy couldn't be a

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Christian. He doesn't believe Jesus is the only way. And the guy said, what are you talking about? You can still be a believer and believe

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Jesus isn't the only way? To which then the sitting president of the National Religious Broadcasters at that point came to my defense and said, no, you can't be.

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I mean, I know a lot of these guys. A lot of them are an inch deep and a mile wide. I hate to say it, as a former false convert, hanging out with a lot of them, a lot of them are false converts that lead the new religious right.

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And then those that aren't are just so theologically weak. They're drinking milk and not eating meat.

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And this is who the church is leaning on, many of them, to think they're gonna reclaim America. They can't even reclaim their own

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Bible colleges, colleges, institutions, organizations, and yet somehow they think they're gonna take back America.

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You know, I call it the pro -family industrial complex. Eisenhower called it the military industrial complex.

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His farewell address. And I call the pro -family groups a pro -family industrial complex. It is a money -making machine.

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Don't you forget that. We're talking to Brandon House today. Thank you, Brandon, for being on No Compromise Radio. You know,

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I have to say to people before I interview them off air, now make sure you talk a little bit and don't just give me yes or no answers.

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And so I didn't have to say that to you. People can go to worldviewweekend .com

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and at the top there, the website, you've got news, radio, conferences.

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I'm thankful to be able to go to the Oak Ridge Boys Theater. I've never been there. You gotta take me backstage.

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Oh, I will. For the conference there in Branson. And the other thing I wanted to say to our listeners is if you go to your smartphones, there's a smartphone app,

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Worldview Weekend, and you can just download that for free. It's Worldview Weekend online. And the last several shows are on there.

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Erwin Lutzer and your show, Brandon's there. My show and some other men as well.

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And Susan Hex, Jesse Johnson. And so that's a good way to have Worldview on the go.

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And I'd also encourage people to look at the books. And I think maybe my best thing about, my favorite thing,

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Brandon, is I like the idea of twisted scripture, twisted theology, these Bible verses that are twisted.

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And then you do a little, you don't do a little show. It's a long show on seeing the

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Bible in context. And so I think our listeners would be encouraged by that as well. Nine hours on that.

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Nine hours on twisting 41 of the most popular scriptures. And in January, the book comes out.

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Oh, excellent. Well, let's have you back on when the book comes out so we can support that. Brandon House today, Worldview Weekend.

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Thanks for being a partner with No Compromise Radio. We appreciate you and your ministry. We appreciate you being a partner with us,

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Mike. God bless. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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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.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.