E. Burns Interview (Part 2) (2018)

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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, a ministry.

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Mike Abendroth here. This is probably our eighth year doing No Compromise Radio, Monday to Friday, and since my health is better�thank you, by the way, for praying and for all the encouragement�we�re kind of back to the old format.

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Monday is the sermon that I preached at Bethlehem Bible Church, or maybe Pastor Steve has preached.

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We�re in Hebrews 4. Tuesday, Pastor Steve and I usually talk about church issues.

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Wednesday, I have guests, either in person or over the phone. Thursdays, I talk about�these days,

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I talk about Hebrews and the great high priest Jesus. We have, present tense, a high priest.

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And then Fridays, I�m back to reruns. So for a while, I was doing live shows every day, or at least recorded live.

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I guess that�s how you do it, recorded live. But now we�re back to rerun Fridays. So Fred Butler, eat your heart out.

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If you�d only give more to the show, I might not do the reruns on Fridays. Part two today, Evan Burns is in the studio.

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If you haven�t listened to part one, which just played a couple days ago or last week, it just depends when the rotation will be, listen to that first and then now listen to us today, because I think it�ll be helpful as you get to know him in the last show, and then what we�ll talk about today.

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Dr. Burns, welcome back to No Compromise Radio. I�m really glad to be here, Mike, thanks. Er, doctor. So you got your doctorate at the

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Southern Baptist Theological Seminary? I did. Dissertation was entitled? �A Supreme Desire to Please Him, the

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Spirituality of Adoniram Judson.� You can get that book, by the way, and I would encourage our listeners, if you would like to read something about Judson that is a theological, you know, what did he think about theologically?

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This is the book to get. It�s probably the only book that I know of, and Evan can tell me a little bit more about it.

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If you want just the bio, it�s the Courtney, is it Anderson? Yeah. I would recommend reading

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Courtney Anderson�s To the Golden Shore first and then reading my book. Okay. And then the good part about it was when

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I read your book, I didn�t say to myself, except maybe the footnotes, �Oh, this is dissertation.�

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I mean, it�s footnoted well like a dissertation should be, but any layperson can read that and learn and say in the cauldron of suffering,

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Job wasn�t the only one who suffered, and how do you respond to suffering? And you see the buoyancy received by Judson and his spouse and his colleagues that he received from the

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Lord. So I�d encourage our listeners to get a copy. You can get it online, yes? Yeah. Amazon is the easiest place.

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Okay. Evan, we talked some about ministry last time, and you had been on a couple years ago when you were here at the church, and we support you as a missionary, and I would really encourage those who don�t have missionaries to support, and they want to, and they want to support gospel -oriented missionaries who live the gospel in other lands�sorry, just kidding�who preach the gospel in other lands and to train up other people in those countries.

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29 countries you�ve been to? Yes. How many�have you preached the gospel in 29 countries, or maybe you weren�t saved when you did some traveling?

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No, it was all for missions. Okay. Twenty -nine countries. I thought I�d been to a lot, but that�s amazing.

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If you would like to have questions answered about missions, many churches, and our church is one of them,

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I was never trained on how to put together a missionary program, how to support missionaries, how to encourage them, what to do, should a certain percentage of the budget be for missions, etc.

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If you email me, infoatnocompromiseradio .com, I�ll make sure Evan gets it, and I�m sure he would help you and direct you to the right kind of resources.

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It was only a couple weeks ago someone asked me, �We�d like to support a church plant in New England. How can we do that ?�

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And I wanted to help. How can we have a missionary to support who isn�t into racial reconciliation and social justice and everything else?

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It�s fine if you want to support missionaries who give clean water to Kenya, that�s important, but other liberal people do that, and so I want to support only at this church people that�s why we�re glad to have you.

04:56

Evan, you wrote the book on Judson. Is that a definite article there? The book. The book.

05:02

The book of books. Out of all the Lord�s lording and all the king�s kinging and all the books of booking, this was the book.

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Just like the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Yeah, that�s right. So today, it�s kind of a free day, you�re teaching the home group tonight here at the church at Bethlehem Bible Church, and you wanted to go see

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Judson�s house up in Maynard, Manfield, Moreau, the island of Dr.

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Moreau. Malden. Malden, yes. And so we did that secondly, so before we talk about what we did that was even more fun, what�s going on with the house there in Malden, anything?

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It looked like a rental house, had a bunch of cable cords on the outside and a satellite dish. I didn�t want to knock and ask to go in.

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I am the host of Evan this weekend, and I want to make sure he has a good time and we try to treat him right and, you know, we go get some nice food and have a couple little culinary treats and stuff like that, and I want to pay for those things.

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But I wasn�t about to go knock on that door for you. There�s a shotgun. There�s some kind of, you know, 12 -gauge shotgun on the other side of that, or maybe a tactical shovel of all things.

06:10

Of all things, yeah. Yeah, do you like tactical shovels? Oh, those are awesome. I have a great video for you to watch. Well, what

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Evan didn�t know is I have a little background here in New England, been here 21 years, and I knew

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Salem was the port of call and the place where Judson traveled to go overseas.

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I think he was on his way to India, and then Evan can tell you the rest of the story. So I thought, �Well, let�s go there ,� and there�s a particular church, the

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Tabernacle Church. And at the Tabernacle Church, interestingly named for and after the

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London Tabernacle. Whitefield would preach there in the London Tabernacle in London, and so they tried to make a replica, burnt down, but they remade it in a similar fashion.

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There�s a special museum there with Adoniram Judson�s stuff and historical things.

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And it said from 10 to 2, it was open. So we got there. What time did we get there today? Was it like 11 .30?

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Yeah, something like that. We just pulled up, and I parked in, it�s like clergy parking, right? I was clergy.

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Yeah, it didn�t say �the pastor.� It said �pastor parking.� So you�re ordained, I�m ordained. Hey, it just had a bunch of rainbow flags here, and I thought that was for me.

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Hey, everybody�s welcome. Hey, I like the rainbow. I do too. Right, what a great� I know. God will not flood the world anymore.

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Revelation 4, there�s that rainbow. Yeah, you�re right. Okay. So we go in and buzz the door, and they basically say, �The curator�s not there.

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You need an appointment.� And I pull the card, I�ve got here somebody from Burma who wrote the book on Judson, �Pretty

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Pleased with Sugar.� I�ll give you any amount of money. I�ll even move my car. And we talked, and the lady buzzed us in, and boy, we were happy.

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I just was thinking to myself, �Yes.� And I called myself the pastor, and I called Evan, �Doctor.�

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And both of those are true. She was thinking I was going to be a short Burmese man, but I think she�s a little disappointed. Yeah. Well, they got the short right.

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Yeah, okay. That�s true. And so we walked in, and neither of us had our backward collars on.

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That was funny. I told you, if you�re going to come and minister at Bethel Bible Church, Geneva gowns are a must.

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And they took us... I forgot my wig, too. And they took us to the back, and then now, Evan, since you have done all kinds of research and have read everything,

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I think, Judson has written, and some stuff in Burma, Burmese. Everything he ever wrote, even in Burmese, had it all translated.

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And you�ve read every word. Everything, plus everything written about him. Do you think anybody else has ever read all those words?

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I don�t think so, because there are things that I found that nobody knew even existed that I found through some antiquity stores.

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There�s no record of them, and they�re in Burmese. And so even his most exhaustive biographer was not aware of some of these things

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I found. Okay, so this is exciting to me, because here we have Adoniram Judson, and in the vein of John Patton and William Carey, and even lady missionaries,

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Mary Schleser, someone like that, or the Stams in China, I thought to myself, I have the world�s most foremost

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Judson scholar, who happens to be evangelical, which that helps, by the way. And we�re gonna go see this

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Judson stuff. And so I get the little private tour. So we go to the very back and walk in the little room. She unlocks it, and she says, �I think

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I can trust you guys.� She was looking more at me than she was at you, though. I think so. You looked more trustworthy,

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I think. Very much so. And then we walked in. What do we see? So the first thing that stood out was the bench that he sat on when they ordained him.

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It�s still there, and it had a little plaque above it, and we saw, oh, let�s see, we saw a roll chart from where the people would sit in the�

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So before we get to that, tell us a little bit more about that bench. I know that at your home church, you�ve got the anxious bench for the altar calls and all that stuff, but this is�just kidding.

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This was the bench. How many other men were sitting on that when they were ordained to be gospel missionaries? So there were three, and then their fianc�s were there.

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Of course, they weren�t ordained on the bench with them, but they were in the service. And then they were married on February 6th and sent out, essentially, within the next 24, 48 hours, newlyweds, on a small little ship.

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And so we walked around Salem today, and we saw the little area where the harbor was and where they would sail off, and today in real time, it�s

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January 19th, and so pretty close in terms of weather -wise.

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Cold, snowy. I just want to think, brr. Cold. I�m thankful, though, that they had

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Patagonia jackets back then in Gore -Tex. That was probably helpful. Yeah. And what are those

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Aussie boots you wear? Yeah, yeah, these� What are they called? Blundstones or something?

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Blundstones, yeah. Oh, yeah, man, I love these boots. So we�re there in the back room. Now let�s pause for a second because there�s other things of interest there.

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Tell our listeners a little bit about how God used that particular man, and I know the man�s name, but I�ll let you tell him, off down to New York and then back up, and there�s the sick man and everything else.

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Okay, yeah. So when Judson was in university, he went to Brown University, and he was flirting with the ideas of deism, they called

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French infidelity in those days, and his real good friend, maybe not his best friend, but a real good friend who influenced him in that direction was named

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Jacob Eames, and Jacob Eames was a skeptic, he was essentially�he was a deist but functionally an atheist and had completely distorted

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Judson�s thinking, had deceived him, and Judson was a very arrogant young man.

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He wanted to be the best of everything, and in his valedictory address, he graduated early, in his valedictory address, he basically gave an apologetic for deism, and then he proudly asked his dad for a horse and went off to New York to write for the theater, and they rode around.

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They wanted to go into law, he and his buddies, and they basically went around and stayed in these inns and ran away before they could pay the landlord, and they were just a�what he describes in a journal diary as a vagabond of players bilking the landlord wherever they went.

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And then, so he's writing off to visit his uncle

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Ephraim in Sheffield, Massachusetts, and he stays in an inn, and it's cold at night, and it's not safe because of the robbers on the trail, and they go off, or he goes into the inn, and it's too late to keep on going, and the man says, well, there's one room, and essentially this room has a sheet between it and the other side, a little partition, and he said, but that's all

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I can give you for the night, and the judge said, well, what's wrong with the room? He said, well, there's a man in there dying, and he's really sick, and there's lots of noise, and the judge said, well,

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I'll take it because the alternative's not great, so he's in there. He can hardly sleep because the man's coughing and wailing and groaning and crying, and finally it quiets down later in the late morning, and Judson can sleep a little bit, and he gets up, and he goes down and talks to the innkeeper, and the innkeeper is dismissing him in his pain, and Judson said, what happened to the man?

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And he said, oh, he died in his sleep. I'm gonna have to call his family, call for his family, and as Judson's getting his stuff, he's about ready to walk out the door, he turns around, and he says, do you know who he was?

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And the man said, yeah, he was a young man from Brown. His name was Eames, Jacob Eames, and Judson was just petrified.

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He was just frozen, and the fear of God just rushed over him because he kept thinking if Jacob Eames is right, all that suffering was meaningless because he's, you know,

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God's the great clockmaker. He stepped away. There's no judgment. There should be no fear of God, but Judson was rattled to the core.

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And Judson's father was a Bible teaching evangelical, and of course, Judson turned his back on him and then now does not, after his buddy's death, he starts to think about all this and goes back to his father to try to make amends?

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Yeah, he does, and he goes back to his father, and he's not a believer yet, but actually, on his way to see his uncle, he visits his uncle's house, but the uncle isn't there, but there's a young man who is described as a pious young man who spoke with warmth and love for the

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Savior. His father encouraged Judson, and this would have been one of the pastors -in -training because his uncle was part of the

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School of the Prophets that the New Divinity men had, and so this was a pastoral intern.

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And so after talking to him, he went home and essentially joined his father's church, and his father—I mean, it was a

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Congregationalist church, so it wasn't what you think of membership today, but his father put him in touch with these men who were soon to be seminary professors and they were planting a school called

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Andover Seminary, and Judson was allowed into the seminary even as an unbeliever, but with the hope that maybe he would become a believer and within the semester,

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God got a hold of his heart and he was converted. Okay, so fast forward his conversion and theological training to the time when he was going to sail off with his brand -new bride.

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What was the timeframe in between, approximately? So, he studied at Andover, he was discipled by these men who had a high view of God's sovereignty, who saw that—not that we owe it to God, but that our natural response should be to declare

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His glory among the nations. He was influenced by men who took the

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Bible seriously, and he heard a sermon, or he read a sermon about the eastern islands out of Isaiah, a light coming to the islands of the east by Claudius Buchanan, that was the sermon, and he read a book on the stories or the biography of a

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British colonel in Burma. And so, between the book and the sermon, and then a walk in the woods behind Andover Seminary, he was praying, walking out in the woods one day,

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December of his first semester, and he was praying, and suddenly Mark 16, 15 comes to his mind, and go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.

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It was at that moment that he felt first compelled to be a missionary. To his parents' dismay, they wanted him to be a famous preacher.

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He was very well -spoken, he was a great preacher, and he was offered the most prestigious pastorate in Boston, and he turned it down to be a missionary, broke his parents' heart, but they ended up supporting him anyways.

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Great story, Dr. Evan Burns, on No Compromise Radio, here at Bethlehem Bible Church Sunday School Home Groups, preaching

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Sunday morning. You can go to bbcchurch .org to hear his Sunday morning message, which is gonna be on, do we know yet?

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I believe it's gonna be on Psalm 24. Okay. Is that a messianic psalm, or is, what we say about Jesus, I'll be glad to know.

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They're all messianic. Is Psalm 2 and Psalm 110 more messianic?

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Just depends on how you look at them. Some there's more explicit verses, and some are just shadows.

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Alright. Let's talk a little bit about Judson and that room. We saw the bench there.

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What else was found in that room that was of interest that we saw today? Well there was the chicken. You were fascinated with the chick -oo -coo.

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The stuffed chicken, named K -O -O -K -O -O, cuckoo. And what's up with the chicken?

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Well it has no relation to Judson, it was just another missionary from the church, but apparently the chicken was used on a ship going to China, and then used in China, and the eggs of the chicken were used to keep the sailors alive, and then it was the chicken and its chicks and eggs thereafter kept a lot of the missionaries alive at the missionary station.

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Somehow they stuffed the chicken and sent him back. You know, that's like you've got a bunch of seed in the winter, and you eat the seed and then you, because you're starving, and then you have nothing to plant in the spring.

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Do we eat the chicken now, and then we can't have the eggs, right? So it's very Catch -22. So there's a pastor who is ordaining those young men, or commissioning those men,

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Worcester, Pastor Worcester. We here are in a town just north of Worcester, Massachusetts. It looks like Worchester, but pronounced

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Worcester, or if you're in Boston, Worcester. And then

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Judson, on the ship to go overseas, studies the

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Bible, and becomes no longer a...moves from paedo -baptism, infant baptism, to immersion baptism, and then what does

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Worcester do? Tell us that story. Yeah, so Judson was... By the way, Scott Clark, if you're listening, you can just fast forward five minutes now.

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I'll try to take longer than five, so. Okay. Yeah, so he was on the ship, working on his

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Bible translation. He was translating his own English version from the Greek Hebrew text, and he just kept coming over the word for baptism in the

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New Testament, and was compelled by the dictionaries and lexicons he would have had, the tools he had, that it was baptism by immersion.

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And so he just became convinced over and over that baptism refers to immersion water, and which must be believer's baptism, and then he was so distraught, because what happens when you become a

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Baptist and are no longer a Congregationalist is, well, guess what? You lose all your support, and his wife was...she

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was a little angry with him, and then she became convinced by reading the text as well, and they both...they

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said, we decided to obey the Scriptures at all costs. Read into that meaning, we will lose all of our support, but by faith, we'll be obedient to the word of God.

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And so then those godly men who sent him of the Congregationalist churches heard, and it was a...in

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a sense, it was an insult to them, because they had done all this to send Judson, and what does he do? The perception is he's this cocky, young, impetuous man who just cares little about his elders and those above him, and so he was issued a formal reprimand, is what the letter was called, and Wooster and others issued it, and he was basically in a...what

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we might call an email war or a Twitter fight, but letters back and forth about his intentions and their perceived...or

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their perceptions of his arrogance, and he basically got to the point where he said, these guys nitpick this doctrine, which is important, it was so important that we had to change our denomination, essentially, but they have completely lost the gravity and the weight of the

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Great Commission. Can't we just get the gospel out there and focus on these perishing souls? And so Judson would have...he

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came back years later and asked forgiveness for some of his impetuousness, but he was a man driven for one idea, primarily to obey the

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Bible and to fulfill the Great Commission. Do you know about this book here, Adoniram Judson, on Christian baptism? William Carey said it's the best work on Christian baptism he had ever read.

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Interesting. In this particular book, printed by Audubon Press, Laurel, Mississippi, it says in Appendix 3,

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The Testimony of an Almost Judson, the following is taken directly from the life of Archibald Alexander, D .D.,

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by J .W. Alexander, D .D., Sprinkle Publications. He must have all...you

22:32

know, here we have these Princetonians almost getting convinced of believers' baptism. I think that's what this is about, yes?

22:37

Yeah. Amazing. All right. One of the funny things that we talk about in missionaries and having them at your church is...maybe

22:47

it's not so funny, but interesting and funny, well, give us the snake stories.

22:53

Give us the tarantula stories. Give us the, you know, when the wild hog got loose and you had to, you know, spear the boar and all this stuff.

23:01

I think those are interesting. Evan has some of those interesting stories, but before I ask him,

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Judson comes back 25 -plus years, a quarter of a century, Evan knows the exact number, and he's speaking at churches.

23:17

And he's probably got all kinds of stories, I mean, rip -roaring stories, stories that would, you know, make your eyes bulge out, and 22 months in prison, and all these other kind of things, weird things he probably ate, you know, he would make

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Phil Johnson envious. You know, Phil had that blog with the weird things I've eaten. I mean,

23:35

Judson probably had it all. But when he came back and he would preach, what would be his

23:40

M .O., and then tell our listeners the story about people that were upset that he didn't only tell missionary stories full of centipedes and bugs.

23:47

Yeah. So, he came back 1847 after being gone since 1812, and he met his...then

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his third wife, her name was Emily, and he was at Emily's home church. And so, she has lots of roots here, and she was proud of him.

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They wanted to hear what he said, stories of the antipodes, or in other words, like adventure stories, you know, snakes, tigers, jail, torture, the drama of missions.

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And he said to his wife, he said, I don't come here to entertain them.

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I don't want to be some sort of, and he used the word celebrity. I want to teach them the gospel, no more, no less than I do in Burma, because that's what

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I'm commissioned to do. And he said, if the gospel was good enough for Paul and Peter and John, the gospel is good enough for me, let them listen to others about stories.

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I have one story to tell, and it's the story of Jesus Christ. And so, he got up and he preached the gospel at that church.

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And another example of that was he was in another church, and there was this young man.

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This was in the Washington, D .C. area. This young man heard Judson speaking, and he said in his diary, he said,

25:05

I was so impressed with this man, this great heroic veteran missionary, this man above all men that so many of us have looked up to and have so longed to hear from.

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And he said, and he stood up there, and all he could talk about in such a sweet, humble tone was pleasing

25:21

Jesus, that the main aim of his life was just to please Jesus. And he said, and then he said, a boy as I, if I could hear such a vaulted man, such an honorable man speak about only pleasing

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Christ, might not I? And that man became a great preacher, D .W. Font, a preacher in Washington, D .C.,

25:40

and knew from a boy, boy's age, that that man could do it. And so, he lived to preach

25:46

Christ himself. I think the account, and here I am talking to the experts, so what do

25:52

I know? It was almost like Judson said in that earlier account that you were discussing. If that's what they want, these stories about snakes and drama and everything, then that means

26:03

I should give them Jesus all the more, right? I'm going to give you what you don't think you want, you know, kind of similar to Paul in 1

26:10

Corinthians 1. He had a singular commission, and that was to preach Christ. Okay. So now we've got that all taken care of.

26:16

Now let's get to the snake stories. So I always find it fascinating,

26:23

Evan, because you're in Alaska some of the year and then overseas the other part of the year, and when you're out riding bicycles with your boys, you have to bring a couple weapons because a 44 won't do when it comes to bear.

26:36

What do you have to do? So when I say comes to bear, I mean B -E -A -R. Like grizzly bear. Yeah. Right.

26:42

Not little black bear. Comes to bear, B -A -R -E, right? Yeah. So yeah, a 44

26:47

Magnum is decent, but it's probably not sufficient, so you need at least a 12 -gauge shotgun with a bunch of slugs in it, and that'll at least put a bear down, and you just better pray that there's only one.

26:59

Now on bicycles, you know, you have a little saddlebag, and you have your things for your drinks, right, you know, that are on the frame, and maybe a light or something like that, and, you know, just a few little things here.

27:14

And maybe you've got your pump, and then where's the little sling holder rifle clip adhesive?

27:22

Just in the sling over my, crossways over my shoulder. What if you pop a wheelie and it goes off or something?

27:29

You just don't. Now is it loaded? It's loaded, but - Safety on? Safety's on, but there's nothing in the chamber.

27:36

You don't want to do that. That's, you know, as stupid as stupid does, you don't do stuff like that. Darwin Awards.

27:43

Yep, absolutely. Okay. So I always find that fascinating. Yeah, we have to go out, you know, we're going to go out mountain biking, but I have to bring the two guns.

27:51

Now when you're overseas in different countries, you said there's stuff, like, tell me about the one or two foot long centipede with the tail that will sting you worse than a scorpion type of thing that can crawl underneath your door at night, but you walk in your house barefoot.

28:07

Tell me that story. So this is the point where everybody turns the radio, because - No, no, they know a no -compromise radio.

28:12

I like operating room stories. I like to know about, you know, venom and pus and, you know.

28:20

Okay, so there's these centipedes in Thailand that are, they can be over a foot long.

28:25

I've seen them as long as probably a foot and a half, and that's really long, but they have a very strong exoskeleton, so strong that if you tried to step on them, they don't even, they don't even crack, but their tails curl up and they sting you on the top of your foot and they have these two big prongs on the end of their tails that are more potent than a scorpion sting, and so it's double, quadruple the potency of scorpion, and your foot can swell up large as a volleyball, basketball.

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Have you ever gotten stung by one? No. I've almost stepped on one barefoot in our house. Now when you get up in the night, you know,

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I have to get up in the night and use the restroom or whatever, and the kid's crying, you got to go check him out in a room. What do you do?

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Do you have a flashlight immediately? Oh, yeah. The very first night we lived in our house, I was walking barefoot, going down the stairs to the bathroom, and there was a scorpion on the stairs.

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I almost stepped on it and I fell down the stairs. Oh, because your foot was about ready and then you caught yourself. I overstepped it and I missed the next stair and then

29:17

I tumbled down the stairs. But you did not get stung? Nope. When you put your shoes on, do you shake your shoes out?

29:23

Definitely. For spiders, too. I at least know that much. How big are the spiders there? The ones, the typical ones are about,

29:30

I don't know, the size of a saucer, like a teacup, but there are bigger ones that are the size of a, like a big pancake.

29:36

Do you ever eat spider? No, I've had a scorpion, but I've never eaten a spider. Okay. Speaking of food, you and I were talking on the phone the other day or Skyping or something like that, and you're telling me about some kind of oil and grease and stuff.

29:51

You don't go down the street to the, like, little fast food places when they're going to boil the noodles in grease.

29:56

Why would you not want to do that? So in some countries, those food stands on the side of the street, they fry everything.

30:06

Well, sometimes they will take grease from the sewers that has been blocked up and coagulated over months and months and months, and they will take it, they'll scrape it out, and then they'll re -boil it to tell it's in a water type form, liquid form, and then use that to fry food in, and they're called fatbergs.

30:25

Google it. No, we didn't say fatburger, but it's as if you took the grease from a fatburger and poured it down the drain into the sewer, and then now people go down to the sewer, and if you

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Google image fatbergs, B -E -R -G -S, you will see.

30:43

They're huge. And they can be so big that they can clog up a whole sewer, like in London.

30:50

Yeah. They actually have people in major cities go underground to get these, but many people don't use them for the oil for their noodles.

30:58

No. Yeah. Udon noodles or something like that. I pray over everything I eat. Yeah, seriously?

31:03

I do. Uh -huh. Wow. All right. Now, see? This is the underbelly of ministry, right?

31:12

This is... Okay, what else? I'm thinking about stories, snakes, spiders.

31:19

You told me some other story about something happened to you in some country with a weird animal or something.

31:25

Do you remember any of those? Well, just a few weeks ago when we were in Thailand, we were walking at night, and there was a big

31:30

Burmese python right in our way. Come on. How many feet long? You told me. Yeah, I think it was eight or nine feet, and its girth was, well, about as big as round as the girth of a football in the middle.

31:40

It's big. And I wanted to go get my machete, but it was moving too quick.

31:46

And so you can't have a gun in these countries, right? Not legally. Some people do.

31:51

I don't. But yes, you're not allowed. Okay. Yeah. And you go to a lot of different countries to teach the

31:57

Bible. What's your approach in a country, let's say, that doesn't really like Christianity? Is there a certain way you think through it, or maybe you can't talk about it on the radio?

32:06

Yeah, no, I can. So let's just take Islam, for example. There's Muslims all over the world, and unless it's a explicitly

32:15

Muslim country, oftentimes they are not well -liked, because, I mean, say, even in a communist or a

32:22

Buddhist country, they're afraid of Muslims because of what they see on the news. And so I like to get in taxis and talk to the taxi driver, and a lot of times in a lot of big cities, there are

32:34

Muslims. Not always. It's not the case in, say, Bangkok, for instance, but in other countries, they are. And what

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I start doing is I start asking them about their life, their family, and then it naturally comes up their religion.

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And I segue into the gospel pretty easily, because I just say, hey, I'm a Christian. Has anybody ever told you what

32:55

Christianity is about? It's just a natural, easy conversation. I could go on about it, but it's just treat them like a person.

33:04

They have the same kinds of needs that everybody else does, and just know that they're deceived and just assume they're going to be pretty friendly, and you treat them like with lots of sugar, not so salty, and they'll respond just as sweet sometimes.

33:16

And when you're talking to them, you told me earlier, and you were telling my daughter and wife this as well, that it's easier to evangelize, humanly speaking, easier to evangelize a

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Muslim than a Buddhist because of Muslim categories of this is a holy book, or Jesus really was alive, or sin,

33:37

God's a creator. Is that why it's easier? Oh, yeah. And there's a lot of categories that are assumed in Islam that you can just build off of.

33:46

Now, sometimes you have to undo some of their projections upon Christianity, like we worship three gods.

33:52

I mean, they have a skew. And one of them's Mary, right? The father, the son, Mary. Yeah. So, they think we're tritheists, not monotheists.

34:03

And so, there's a lot of things, and they don't even know about their own Quran. And so, because it's not permissible, let's say, in Quranic Islam to read the

34:16

Quran in any other language except the classical Arabic. So, if they're Turkish speakers, or Urdu speakers, or Farsi speakers, chances are they've never even read the

34:23

Quran. So, anything they know about the Quran is what they've heard on Fridays from their imam. That's a very generalization, but that's pretty typical.

34:32

And so, if you know anything about the Quran, they'll just perk up and they'll listen. And you don't have to be an expert, just say, hey, yeah,

34:39

I've read a few things in the Quran. And then you can segue into the Injil, which is the Gospels, and yeah.

34:45

When you tell them you've read the entire Quran, they usually say what? Well, they'll first say, did you read it in the

34:51

Arabic? And to be honest, they'll say, no, I read it in English. But do you know much about what the

34:58

Quran says? And I could tell you based upon what I understand in English. And they'll admit that it's not the perfect translation, but they'll still be interested.

35:07

Okay. And they probably haven't read it in Arabic either. How about a Buddhist? What are the problems there, evangelizing

35:14

Buddhists, without these, you know, they have no concrete categories for things, and everything's just kind of nebulous and vague.

35:22

Yeah, I find Buddhism very difficult. And a lot of times, I don't even know if Buddhists really know, propositionally speaking, things they believe.

35:31

But one of the big things that's a hurdle to get over for those who are trained or educated as Buddhists is that to suffer is to suffer as a result of sin.

35:42

To say that Christ died for sinners, it has meaning to them, but still, they can't conceptualize the fact that somebody could suffer as a substitute for someone else.

35:53

So there's not a concept of substitution. So substitutionary atonement is a major category that just takes a lot of chewing on for them to understand.

36:02

So my approach is typically to start with the creation event. So just start telling the

36:08

Bible story historically as a narrative, so that they start having even biblical categories,

36:14

God as creator, God as sustainer, God as judge, God as redeemer. And then what

36:20

I call teaching evangelism, as opposed to, I mean, put crassly, hit and run evangelism.

36:25

It's just really hard to share the gospel with the Buddhists in three or four minutes like I could with a Muslim, but a

36:31

Buddhist, it takes time. But what I do emphasize just briefly is I emphasize the paradigms of honor and shame with Buddhists, and that I've seen actually talking about the gospel, not through honor shame paradigm solely, but just as a means into the overall paradigms of the gospel.

36:51

Can you preach in Chinese? Is it Mandarin or what kind of a dialect? Yeah, it would be

36:56

Mandarin. I don't know Cantonese. Okay. Yeah. And is it a big difference between the two? I mean, I don't know.

37:02

Yeah, yeah. No, it's different enough that, say, people living in Beijing where I learned Mandarin, they can't always understand people in Hong Kong or even parts of Shanghai because the

37:14

Cantonese is so thick. And so sometimes they can, but generally speaking, they don't. Now, we've hung out for the last day and a half together, and you're probably double my

37:24

IQ, and when you're talking and you pause and you kind of look into the sky, I'm thinking, does he have a stuttering problem?

37:32

And you told me, and I obviously am exaggerating, but when you just pause for a second, sometimes you're thinking

37:38

Chinese words. That's right? Yeah. Sometimes I feel like Moses. I'm a little tongue -tied because I want to say something in Chinese or Turkish or occasionally even

37:46

Thai. We're in the studio here with Evan Burns, Dr. Evan Burns, wrapping up our extended

37:52

No Compromise Radio show, talking about the Lord, His word, missions, Adoniram Judson, etc.

37:59

If you want to get a hold of me, info at nocompromiseradio .com. If you want to go to the website there, you can listen to Evan's old shows.

38:07

One of the great things about what Jonathan and Josh and Spencer and Linton have done with the website is if you go to the search engine and type in Burns, for instance, it'll pull up the shows.

38:19

So it'll pull up all four shows, and you can listen to even the old ones. I might have asked you some of the same questions, so the reader, the listener can check those out.

38:27

We don't have that much time left. If I were to ask you, Evan, what do you wish sending churches understood about missions, but they don't seem to really grasp?

38:41

And it can just be general statements. I know you're not picking on any particular church. You can pick on ours if you want, but what do you wish they would know?

38:47

Yeah, well, one thing that I, just a general statement is, and I don't know if there's an easy answer for this, but for churches to understand that the longer a missionary is overseas and hopefully involved with an indigenous church, not just a foreigner church, the more he does that, the more he builds relationship.

39:09

And at some point, he will likely start functioning as a pastor or elder in that church just to hand off the leadership eventually to other elders.

39:18

And I think one of the challenges I hear and I see personally in my church relationships is the tension between feeling part of a body here in the

39:28

States over against feeling part of a body overseas in that at some point, the sending church needs to start to relinquish even not just oversight, but relinquish a sense of ownership.

39:43

Let's say that's maybe how they view it over the missionary, not so much as a overseer, but as a supporting church.

39:49

And there's a delicate time where the indigenous church really does become the missionary's home church.

39:58

And I've seen it happen well where that one instance I'm thinking of that indigenous church becomes the sending church of the missionary to go back somewhere else.

40:07

And I've seen it done well and I've seen it done poorly. But that's a relational thing that we need to think through more and more in this day with digital communication and instant communication and jet travel where it seems easy to get the missionary back, but in his heart, he's not back yet.

40:24

Evan, one other thing that I was thinking about because that's propelling me to think of other problems, just think how hard it is for a local church.

40:37

You've got a pastor. He gets fired. He does something improper. The church kicks him out.

40:42

He moves on to another church. He dies, whatever. I mean, pastors come and go for good reasons and for bad.

40:49

And then if the missionary's relationship is with the pastor only, let's say, now the new pastor comes along.

40:56

What if he's less Calvinistic? What if he's more charismatic? What if he's this, that, or the other? And now it's almost like not only the church has to deal with getting the new pastor, the missionaries do too.

41:06

Yeah. And so it seems like in some churches they cycle through pastors so much and yeah, the missionary has to come back.

41:14

And the way the missionary feels is, I'm the only thing that hasn't changed since the last time

41:21

I was here. This whole church is a brand new people, brand new pastors, maybe some similar elders, but they have to relearn the culture of this, essentially this new church, same building, different people.

41:31

And so that's why you need to be nice to me. And that's why we...

41:41

I'll write you some good book reviews. How about that? Well, and that, there are other reasons, but that's one of the reasons why you stayed with me last night and you're staying with Pastor Steve tonight and you're going to go to Pradeep's house tomorrow and other folks are coming over because it is not just some type of elder, solo elder rule and there's a lot of other men and we'll come and go.

42:00

And so thanks for your ministry. I appreciate the fun day we had today talking about Judson and the

42:06

Lord and now doing the radio show. God bless you. If people want to support you or learn more about you, the website they go to is?

42:12

Yeah, they can go to lastfrontierglobal .org and my name is not explicitly on the website, but the ministry is there and you can, you can read about what we do and support us through that website.

42:22

Mike Abendroth with Evan Burns, No Compromise Radio. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

42:32

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.

42:41

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.

42:49

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