The Need For Preaching (Part 1)

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. Mike Abendroth, your host here, glad to be back, WVNE Flagship Station. And we today want to remind you how to contact us. Info at NoCompromiseRadio .com. Info at NoCompromiseRadio .com, or you could probably go to bbcchurch .org, bbcchurch .org, write us at info at bbcchurch .org.

Or if you�d like to write the management at WVNE, go to wvne .net, look for the Contact Us. And if it�s going to be a positive, encouraging, K-love kind of email, then you can go ahead and email Manny there at WVNE, or ask for Manny.

And if it�s going to be negative, we don�t like Abendroth, stop sending his voice across the airwaves, quit it, stop it, stop the insanity, then you write to Dave at WVNE. You ask for Dave. Preaching.

Why Preaching Must Be Central for Pastors and Teachers

We�ve been talking about preaching, doing a little mini-series on one of my all-time favorite topics, preaching. A topic that basically defines me. If you want to know what I�m like, at least at the top of the list, what defines me maybe more than anything else, is I am a preacher.

I believe that God has done a variety of things, many, many things over the years to mold me into the person that I am, who I am. And so I am a preacher. If you only know me as a preacher, if you only know me on WVNE, and No Compromise Radio, you don�t really know everything about me, because I really am nice to children, I�m nice to old ladies, I�m not always dogmatic, I�m not always this kind of in-your-face.

I really don�t think it�s that much in-your-face. I just try to pick a topic that some people I know are going to disagree with, because I�m trying to goad them into what does the Bible say. If you think you hear from God today, and I try to tell you that it�s just some kind of intuition, some kind of hunch, some kind of, you know, Dan Phillips says, some gizzard talking to you, well then let�s hash it out.

We can be nice about it, we can be friendly about it, can�t we? Well, I think we can, although society today basically says if you disagree, you�re really jerky. If you�ve got your own opinion and you want to allow other opinions, then you�re just, you know, a rabid fundamentalist.

I think there�s probably time for dialogue, but do you realize this is radio, and so it�s quite hard to dialogue on the radio. You say, well, you don�t take phone callers. Well, maybe Tom Krause is better than I am at taking phone calls, I think he is better than I am.

But he has an hour, and I have 24 and a half minutes. And he�s at the studio, and I�m here at Bethlehem Bible Church without all the accoutrement, and so we don�t take phone calls. But you can write us, and if you write us, and you have a question, say, could you deal with this on the air, I�ll try to do it.

I will really try to do it. Preaching, where is all the preaching today? And by the way, pastors ought to be preachers because they are going to stand before God on Judgment Day and give an account of their preaching.

Don�t you think if you were a pastor, that would kind of shock you, that would kind of shock some sense into you? It would kind of be some kind of shock and awe where you think, you know, as I sit and prepare this message today, and I�m doing what people say that I should exegete the congregation, just kind of scan through in my mind and scan through the directory the people that are here, and I�m preparing the text, and let me prepare the text kind of with them in mind.

Now, in one sense, that�s not bad because the pastor knows his sheep, and if the sheep are struggling, then he preaches the same truth from the Scriptures in a way that he knows his flock will be able to understand and consume and to eat.

But if you�re sitting there saying, I�ve got to now water down things, I have to contour, I have to get the block plane out and kind of cut the corners off this cornery text, this edgy text, because I just want it to go down smoother, I just want them to like me more.

And believe me, if you�re a pastor, you want to be liked. I�ve been a pastor before where we�ve had a lot of people in the church who did not like me, and I�ve been the pastor of the church now where a lot of people in the church, by the grace of God, in spite of myself, they like me.

That�s actually a good thing. I like it. It feels good. So, I want them to like me, though, because I want them to see that frail though I may be, far from sinless though I am, sinful, I�m trying to be faithful to preach the word and then people like that, give me Christ, show me Jesus, and people like that.

So in the back of our minds as preachers are for you, let�s say you say I don�t preach, for you teaching Sunday school out there in Radio Land, for you typing in some kind of chat room teaching other people about who God is or trying to correct somebody in some kind of meta on a blog, if you are an evangelist, if you are any other kind of person who opens their mouth and talks about God, this has good application for you.

Preach the Word Under Christ's Authority and Judgment

2 Timothy chapter 4, Paul said to Timothy, �I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word.

Acts chapter 20, verse 26 and 27, �Therefore, I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all men, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God. Paul is very clear here, there is a mandate for biblical preaching, Christ-centered preaching.

One day, everyone will stand before God, the unbelievers will stand before the great white throne judgment of God and they will be damned based on their works and their sins to an eternal lake of fire.

Christians who have already had their sins judged at Calvary, the justice of God would never require their sins to be examined and judged again, but their deeds according to 2 Timothy chapter 5, verse 10, what they've done in the body, either good or worthless, will be examined and then God will reward, take away rewards, but he will reward the people for what they have done with his name on it.

For those selfish things, there'll be no reward. And so, when God has given someone the ability to teach, he wants them to be teachers, faithfully proclaiming the truth. If James chapter 3, verse 1, following, talks about there ought not to be very many teachers because you're going to incur the stricter judgment, then we need to use that prod, we need to use that poker, we need to use that verse to say we ought to be motivated to preach.

And sometimes people just are not motivated to preach. So Paul says, I solemnly charge you in 2 Timothy 4, this is a solemn declaration. This is to testify, this is I am under oath. Do you swear to tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth and all the truth and so help you God?

How does that go? Do you swear? I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help you God. And Paul is going to say, Timothy, you better say I do. Because it's not your own authority, Timothy.

Preachers don't have their own authority. So if preachers get up and preach and you're like, well, don't point at me, don't talk to me that way, they have delegated authority. And that authority is God of the universe, and so they better talk that way to you.

They better say you must repent. You must value Christ's life and death and resurrection. You, this is not Timothy's own authority. Here's this young man, Timothy, he doesn't have any authority to get up and tell people at Ephesus what to do, but he has delegated authority, Jesus to Paul to Timothy.

And here we see in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, even of Christ Jesus, that's his authority. That must have really stuck in the mind of Timothy, where here's this Jesus who's going to come and judge people.

You have that authority to teach, and if you don't teach, you're going to be the one who is judged. That should leave an impression on a young man to have prudence in his preaching, care in his preaching, faithfulness, discretion.

This is a God who probably is in the form of a creed who's going to judge the living and the dead, or as we used to say back in my Lutheran church, the what? The quick and the dead. There's a judgment day for pastors.

There's a judgment day for all Bible teachers. There's a judgment day for Sunday school teachers, home group leaders, those who evangelize. And the question of all questions is, as a top priority, did you preach the word faithfully?

Did you preach all the word? Did you reprove, rebuke, exhort with great patience and doctrine? And so we need to be preachers because we answer to another, ultimately, and that should help us as preachers not to shy away from saying, you know, well, if I say this, I'm going to get in trouble.

How could I preach this? Because we're going to have lots of trouble if I say these things. No, there's something, there's someone who you really don't want to be in trouble with. You know, there's that old phrase with married couples, if mama ain't happy, nobody's happy.

Well, I'm not going to argue the merits or demerits of that particular phrase, but I will say this. If the entire universe is happy with you as a preacher, and you are the preacher extraordinaire, and you are set on a pedestal and vaulted to the highest heavens on earth on the top of Everest as the preacher of all preachers, and people come from continents to come and hear you, and they're so happy with you, and they applaud you, and they affirm you, and they want to be like you, and they worship you, and they give you money, and they do all kinds of things.

They name your kids after you. But God isn't happy. If God isn't happy, you ought not to be happy. And even if everybody else is happy, that matters not. That matters not, because it's between you and God.

Don't put people in between your relationship as a teacher and God. Here's me, people in between, and then God. No, you put them back behind God, and so you have you preaching the face of God before Him.

You want Him to smile. You want His face to be smiling with a wonderful countenance of approval and happiness and pleasure, and then in the background, you see the people, and you see the people, and you think, okay, I'll faithfully preach to my people, Jesus Christ.

There's a great picture I got when I was in Wittenberg, Germany, and it was a Karnex painting that showed Luther in a pulpit on the right-hand side. I'm looking at it right now. I just turned my head.

There's the congregants looking more like serfs and peasants in a balcony in a little seated area to the left. So you have Luther on the right-hand side, raised up some, and then you have the people on the far left-hand side.

This is a large rectangular kind of painting. I just have a copy of the painting, and so it's not square, it's rectangular with looking more horizontally in length, not up and down, but horizontally. And long story short, Luther on one side, the people on the other, and it shows Jesus right in the middle, Jesus on a cross in the middle.

And so what's the point there? Luther wanted to preach Christ Jesus to the people. Now, if you put the people in the middle and Jesus on the cross to the far end, you've got a big problem. You see, it's not just for pastors only.

This is for Sunday school teachers too, and home group leaders, and women's Bible studies, and children's Bible studies, and high school groups, and junior high groups, and everyone else. This is for dads who teach the kids the Bible at home.

This is for single moms who teach their kids the Bible at home. This is for married moms who teach their kids the Bible at home and supplemental education for, you know, to help the dad, help the husband.

You need to preach Christ. I'm pretty much done with biographical sketches, with some kind of story, with some kind of how-to manual for life, how to get by when people get, you know, when things are hard.

Let's just tell them about Jesus. And if you want to make it real easy, pick a gospel and teach through the gospel. That's a lot easier than figuring out how am I going to preach Jesus in the book of Jeremiah, something like that.

How am I going to preach Jesus in the book of Numbers? Well I'm not saying those can't be done or shouldn't be done. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying it's a lot easier to preach Jesus, to talk about Jesus, when you're going through Matthew or Mark.

Pick Mark. What an exciting book to show us the person and work of Christ. And so I believe that you need to remember that you stand before God when you teach. And that's why we don't say, well, here's Jesus.

He died on a cross, rose from the dead for sinners. Are you a sinner? Yes, I am. Okay. Better believe in Jesus except in your heart. Good to go. Now let's get on to life application. The gospel is never disassociated from life application.

That is life application. In light of what God has done, how do I respond? Because I have now the spirit of God, I now can obey God in response to, out of thankfulness, out of joy, out of responsibility, I now want to respond to these promises of God.

I am now in Christ and now I need to act like I am. I'm positionally justified and I should live up to my position in Christ Jesus. I'm in union with Christ and I ought to live out those implications.

And so if the story said by VBS, VBS is the worst typically in churches to just learn how to tell the truth, learn how to work hard, learn how to stand in line and not pull Cindy's hair, learn how to stand in line and not trip Jimmy, keep your hands to yourself, eyes up, have a lot of fun.

I think VBS should be a lot of fun. But the teaching time needs to be about Jesus, needs to be about Christ. We don't preach ourselves, we preach Christ. There's only one person who preaches himself and he did preach himself and that person was Jesus.

That person was Christ Jesus. So when you're in Sunday school tomorrow and next day, whatever day Sunday is, whenever the show airs, make sure you just don't turn your messages into, Daniel was faithful, kids, you be faithful too.

There has to be more than that. I don't mind you talking about the faithfulness of Daniel and working through Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, but you need to figure out a way to teach the kids about who Jesus is.

One of the easiest ways to do it is if there's sin in a biblical character's life, then you can talk about their need for Jesus. You can talk about those, if you're talking about prayer, you're talking about faithfulness, you're talking about walking uprightly, then you can tell the kids, good thing we have Jesus who did all those things.

Good thing we can have God's perfect righteousness. God would treat us like we did always obey, that we did always tell the truth when our trust is in Christ Jesus, the Messiah, the risen savior, and God looks at us like we obeyed like Jesus did.

So there's a variety of ways to get there to preach about Jesus. But even if you teach through Daniel and you're talking about daring to be a Daniel in the curriculum, at the end of the thing, here would be the best thing to do if you have no idea how to preach Jesus from a verse.

You should say, you know, children, I don't know how this verse relates to Jesus. I don't know how Daniel relates to Jesus specifically. I'm sure he does, but I just don't know how. Let me just tell you about the God who made Daniel.

Let me tell you about the God who enabled Daniel to do these great things. Let me tell you about Jesus and how he died on a cross 2 ,000 years ago, bearing the wrath of God. He didn't have to go, but out of love for people, the Father sent the Son and the Son willingly went and the Spirit of God impelled him to go.

And this great God died on a cross, a vicious death, and it was bad with the nails. It was bad with the torture. It was bad with the punching. It was bad with the spitting. It was bad with the mocking.

It was bad because if he was naked. It was bad, but something was worse than just his physical torment because 30 ,000 people died on a cross, 30 ,000 people were crucified. Why is this one so special?

Well, number one, Jesus never sinned, so he wasn't dying for his own sins. Every one of these other people who got crucified, they had sins. They deserve to die. Yet Jesus never deserved to die. He was sinless.

Even Daniel sinned. Maybe the text doesn't say he sinned, but we know all have sinned, fallen short of the glory of God. And so Jesus was receiving our punishment. The Father should have punished us. He and his justice had to punish sin, so he, Jesus, stepped in and absorbed our punishment for us.

He was our substitute. Instead of our throats getting slit, the Lamb's throat got slit. So that's the way you do it. At the end of the day, you can say, well, you know, it's Psalm 33. I don't know what this has to do with Jesus, but I love Jesus, and let me tell you about who Jesus is.

That is it. That's maybe not the finest theological way to do it, but at least you're faithful, and we are to preach not ourselves, but we are to preach Christ, especially if you're in the Old Testament, because John 5 and Luke 24 talk about how the Old Testament relates to Christ.

Now, I don't know if it's at, I know it's at a macro level. How micro we go, that's another show. We are to preach Christ Jesus in season and out of season. And if you are a Sunday school teacher, you must do that as well.

P .S. for Sunday school teachers, don't assume your kids are saved, so preach the gospel of them every single week. Don't ask for some kind of commitment, raising the hand and all that. Just keep preaching Christ.

Keep talking about the kid's sin, the kid's fallenness, the kid's rebellion, the kid's lawlessness. Keep talking about God's standards of perfection. Talk about how they've broken the law of God and how they haven't loved God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Tell them about God and His grace and His love and how He sent His Son. Tell them about the gospel that we just talked about before and this risen Savior as a substitute, and then tell them to repent and to believe and to trust and to follow.

And just keep doing that every week and every week and every week, and God saves people through the preaching of His word. Faith comes by hearing, hearing a message or a word about Christ Jesus. Well, some say we don't want preaching because it's not relevant.

Mike Ebenroth here, No Compromise Radio Ministry, info at nocompromiseradio .com. Some don't think we should preach because they think the Bible's wrong. Robert Green in Ingersoll, if a man would follow today the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal.

If he would follow the teachings of the New, he would be insane. That's what the culture thinks, more or less, that the Bible is old-fashioned, antiquated, culturally not up to speed, 2 ,000 years old.

But my questions are always, is it relevant that God is still holy? Is that a relevant thing? Is dying and paying for your own sins still relevant? Is understanding how to have forgiveness relevant? Is understanding the nature of sin relevant?

Is understanding reconciling, being reconciled with God and with others, is that still relevant? Dying is definitely relevant. And if you bury enough people, you realize somehow they listen a little bit more.

But in the same regard, that's why we have so many people trying to cover death. We don't talk about it. We don't deal with it. We don't die at home anymore. They die in hospitals and rest homes and everything else.

We want to preach the Word of God because it is relevant. Because by definition, God is relevant. And so if you say to yourself, what do I teach the kids today in Sunday school? What kind of curriculum?

I think you should just probably teach the Bible. That might be good. I don't mind if you get a Bible curriculum. But the Bible is sufficient for every need, for every work. It is sufficient. And whether you're a teacher of a Sunday school, it is sufficient for all the children's needs, for all the adults' needs.

And we want revival in churches. So why don't you preach the Word? Because revival isn't even a noun. It's a verb. Revive me, O Lord, according to Thy Word. Well, the last five minutes, I think I've rambled some.

You probably say I've rambled a lot. If you are at a Sunday school this Sunday, demand biblical preaching. Demand Bible teaching. Or, I wouldn't go. If it's not going to be the Bible, why bother? If you are at a church and your pastor will not preach the Word of God, first of all, if he does preach the Word of God, thank him.

Thank the Lord. But if he doesn't, fire him. Fire him. He is to preach the Word of God. He is not to somehow preach philosophy, psychology, book reviews, Oprah stuff. He needs to preach the Word, or he needs to get fired.

And maybe getting fired would put some sense into the man that he should get up and preach the Word. You need to demand the Bible, no matter what the costs are. If the church closes, then the church closes.

If there's controversy, then there's controversy. You can't even avoid controversy because the Bible is controversial from the beginning to the end. It separates truth and error. We talk about that a lot.

You should demand verse-by-verse preaching that extols Christ. I have a little letter here. The deacons have met with our pastor several times on issues that have concerned our people. One of the main concerns that hasn't been resolved is the pastor's sermon topics and method of delivery.

This was an issue that the deacons were conscious of, even when the pastor was considered for a trial sermon. After several discussions with the deacons, our pastor still leans towards biblical exposition.

So basically, respectfully, you're fired. It's a real letter, by the way, a tragic one. I praise God for men who stand up unabashedly to say, I will preach the Word if it's fashionable, if it's vogue, if it's tolerant, or if it's not.

Blessed art thou, O Lord, teach me thy statutes. This is Mike Abendroth, Bethlehem Bible Church, NoCompromiseRadio .com.

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.