Chosen By God (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.

The Host, the Show, and the Greece Tour

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. Mike Abendroth is your host. As a matter of fact, that's me. I am your host. Glad to be the host. Just got off the phone with Todd Friel. Todd Friel called me.

It's nice to look down at your cell phone and see Phil Johnson pop up or Todd Friel or somebody like that. And Todd is going to fill in for two No Compromise shows. Maybe after you hear this, he'll have already filled in.

So we'll see. I want to make sure you remember that we have the No Compromise slash Bethlehem Bible Church highlights of Greece 11-day tour and cruise, April 2013, 2013 rather. And if you'd like information, you can email me at info at nocompromiseradio .com.

We'll send you a brochure. We don't know exactly the dates yet, but they'll be known probably by the time this thing airs. And we are going to go to Thessalonica, Berea, Philippi. We're going to go to Corinth and Athens and Patmos, and we'll swing over to Turkey and go to Ephesus.

And there'll be Bible teaching along the way with yours truly, No Compromise Radio. So we'd love to have you go with us to Greece. If you want to get online, you can check that out. See, we've hit the big times, haven't we?

No Compromise Radio and we're doing the tour. And then we can sit and have our, on the luxury diner, I think I'll probably have the aft lower bulkhead room. I've been to Greece before. It's a great place.

And I think you'll be encouraged. Stand there on Mars Hill and I'll teach Acts 17. Wow. That is an amazing place to stand as you look at that passage in Acts 17. Well, my name is Mike Abendroth again, No Compromise Radio.

We are on locally at WVNE Radio, 760 AM. And then it goes to iTunes. It goes to Facebook. It goes to the website and it goes to, I don't know, the World Wide Web. Today we're going to talk about favorite books.

I haven't done this for a while, but I started a series and never finished it. Well, that's just the way things go here on radio and in my life, and I have a day job. This isn't the day job. And so I started a series, the top 10 books that influenced me the most early on in my Christian life.

And so the way I could probably promote this today would be top 10 books that would influence you if you would read them. If you're a Christian, the Spirit of God working through the Bible that are in these books, these aren't a substitute for the Bible, but these are books written to help you understand who God is, what Christ has done on behalf of sinners, and what the Bible teaches.

And so you need to read books. If you read one book a week for the next 10 years, you've got 500 books down. If you read one a year, well, I'm going to try to encourage you to read more, and I'm going to try to encourage you not just to walk in to your average, dopey, local radio, a Christian bookstore, because most Christian bookstores these days are big on bookstore and small on Christian, small C Christian.

I think there are some that do faithful, commendable jobs, and they won't sell the Joyce Myers and Benny Hinn and Roman Catholic books and other things, T .D. Jakes. But when you walk in and you see those things in a local bookstore, you know they're in it for money.

They might be in it for other things as well, but they are selling things that aren't good for you. And so if someone wants to sell something that is Arminian or is, you know, mildly charismatic, I don't have a problem with that.

We have a healthy ecumenical feel to life in general as a Christian, and certainly just because someone's not a Calvinist, it doesn't mean I can't have any fellowship with them, or if they speak in a private prayer language that they think is private, they think it's prayer, they think it's a language.

I'm not going to cut off fellowship, but I do want you to know that if you go to a bookstore and they've got the heretical things, you know, teachings by T .D. Jakes that deny the Trinity and Roman Catholic section—hey, if there's a Roman Catholic section, there's a Roman Catholic bookstore, and they don't sell Protestant books for a theological reason, I would agree with their stand.

That is to say, we don't have to all agree about everything, and because I stand for something, it means that I stand against something else. And so today is a positive, encouraging, something that we're doing proactively, so I won't do any more slamming or critiquing or bashing or acting in an unloving fashion.

I'm going to tell you one of the books—I think this might be book number five—that influenced me the most as a new Christian, and that if I reread now—see, this is what precipitated this whole thing—I began to reread books that changed my life.

Because I've been a Christian now almost 23 years, and so when I read these books 20 years ago, 21 years ago, 19 years ago, I have forgotten a lot of what I have read, and so I need to brush up on some of these.

So many new books come out that it just—they're not any good, so I might as well go reread what books have affected me, infected me, what books are classic in terms of Christianity instead of all the newfangled things.

But speaking of newfangled things, this isn't meant to be a self-promotion. This is a praise to the Lord, just signed with a major book publisher for a book with my friend Clint Archer and Byron Yawn, and the three of us are going to write a book.

It's called Things That Go Bump in the Church. Instead of things that go bump in the night, things that go bump in the church, scary doctrines for new Christians, and so that book, it needs to be—it's probably half written and with the publisher to be announced here in just a few minutes, a few shows maybe.

We have to have that in by September 1st, and then hopefully by the end of the year, early next year, the book will come out, Things That Go Bump in the Church. So the working title right now is fixed.

The working picture of the cover is fixed as well, and it's going to show a church that's kind of foreboding and dark, and a couple windows that look like eyes, so a church personified. Kind of that Amityville horror look, the house that was personified looking very evil, and so kind of a scary, daunting-looking church building, and you first walk in and you hear about church discipline, you hear about election, you hear about hell, all kinds of spiritual warfare stuff talked about, you know, what is that?

What is sin? And so that's the new book, Things That Go Bump in the Church. And by the way, that's why I'm very thankful that things are alphabetical in this world because Abendroth is before Archer, which is before Jan.

So there you have it, broke the news. The fifth book in my plan here of helping you try to read books and encourage you to read Chosen by God by R .C. Sproul, subtitled Know God's Perfect Plan for His Glory and His Children.

This is a great book to help you understand the nature of God. It's Tyndale Books, so if you go to the front and it says, Tyndale House Publishers, Wheaton, Illinois, 1986, R .C. Sproul. Now let me give you the table of contents first.

Even if you are an Arminian, I would encourage you to read this book for several reasons. One, maybe you'll be convinced that this position is the biblical position, which I think it is. Two, you could understand things better because if you say, well, five-point Calvinists are hyper-Calvinist and they don't evangelize and they don't pray and all babies are damned, you just speak of your ignorance, both theologically and historically.

That's not what Calvinists believe, and that's not a hyper-Calvinist. And so if somebody's more Calvinistic than you, you might think they're hyper in comparison to you, but in comparison to church history, hyper-Calvinists are people that don't believe in prayer.

And I have never met, actually have never met a hyper-Calvinist who said, I don't believe in prayer. Hyper-Calvinists don't believe in evangelists. Now I think there are some, but I've never personally met someone who is Calvinistic who didn't think of evangelism.

Matter of fact, the best evangelists are the Calvinists because they know and they've been taught by God, and whether that is a Hudson Taylor or that is a David Brainerd, those men believed in sovereign, distinguishing grace.

And then lastly, why should you want to read this? Oh, I think that is the last one. So you just know what you're talking about. If you're going to slam Calvinism, which it's free for you to do of your own free will, you can do that.

You'll at least know what you're talking about. Table of Contents, R .C. Sproul's book, That Changed My Life, Chosen by God, Know God's Perfect Plan for His Glory and His Children. One, the struggle. Two, predestination and the sovereignty of God.

Three, predestination and free will. Four, Adam's fall and mine. That is a huge issue. We'll talk about that in just a moment. Number five, chapter five, spiritual death and spiritual life, colon, rebirth and faith.

Six, foreknowledge and predestination. I just got a letter the other day, a no-compromise listener, and he was Arminian, and he said, God foreknows. I quoted Romans chapter 11 and talked about God knows the people, or in this particular case in Romans 11, the nation ahead of time.

He foreloves them, and it has nothing to do with prescient, some kind of knowledge from ahead of time. It has to do with God foreknows Israel. Well, he foreknew all the nations, too. He knew all about them.

Foreknowledge isn't used of actions, although God does foreknow what they'll do, but the technical word foreknow is God loves them ahead of time, and it's talking about people. Number seven, double, double toil and trouble is predestination double.

Number eight, or chapter eight, can we know that we are saved? And finally, very excellent section, questions and objections concerning predestination. So on the back, here's what it says about the book.

If God is truly God, he is sovereign over all things, over all decisions. If God is truly God, then he chooses who goes to heaven and who doesn't. Predestination says the author, isn't just for Calvinists, it is for all biblical Christians.

Predestination doesn't create a whimsical or spiteful picture of God, but paints the portrait of a loving God who provides redemption for radically corrupt humans. There is mystery in God's ways, but not contradiction.

Point by point, the author examines the scriptures on predestination and refutes the naysayers. We choose God because he has opened our eyes to see his beauty. We love him because he first loved us. And so if you haven't read this book by Sproul, I encourage you to do that because you will see a transcendent God, as Machen talks about God, the awful transcendence of God.

And so we're just going to give you a few quotes from this book to try to whet your appetite so that you might want to go buy this book. This is a book that will change the way you look at things. This will give you a big view of God.

Steve Lawson, who was here years ago, preached a series of psalms, and he called them Big God Psalms. You will see God not in terms of fatalism, despairing notion of fatalism, where you're reduced to a mere puppet, as R .C. Sproul would say, or a meaningless puppet, but really about a God who loves.

Ephesians chapter 1, in love he predestined us. And here's what Sproul says, we talk about predestination because the Bible talks about predestination. If we desire to build our theology on the Bible, we run head-on into this concept.

We soon discover that John Calvin did not invent predestination. Isn't that interesting? Forget the word Calvinism. I say that word because it's just shorthand for God is on the throne, and he's in charge of not just the weather, but people as well.

And left to ourselves, we would never choose God, so we need to be chosen by God. And if you look at Ephesians chapter 1, verse 4, just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, not because we were holy and blameless, but the text says that we should be holy and blameless before him in love, having predestined us to adoptions as sons by Jesus Christ to himself.

John Gershner is quoted here in the book. Sproul calls him the king of Calvinists. I thought that is super funny. Sproul said, Gershner is to predestination what Einstein is to physics, or to what Arnold Palmer is to golf.

I challenged Gershner in the classroom time after time, making a total pest of myself. I resisted for well over a year the concept of predestination. My surrender came in stages, painful stages. It started when I began work as a student pastor in a church.

I wrote a note to myself that I kept on my desk in a place where I could always see it. Here's what Sproul had on his desk. As an Arminian, you are required to believe, to preach, and to teach what the Bible says is true, not what you want the Bible to say is true.

The note haunted me. My final crisis came in my senior year, and then it talks about the freedom of the will in Jonathan Edwards' book. That is the issue. The issue is, for instance, and for R .C. Sproul and for you, the ninth chapter of Romans.

It is the clincher, and once you see the riches of God's sovereign grace there, you can't go back to your Arminianism, your semi-Pelagianism. You can't do it. You will become a zealous embracer of the doctrine of election, our predestination, our God for knowing people, and setting His love on them ahead of time.

All right, let's just give you a true or false thing. I'm looking through R .C. Sproul's book here today, Chosen by God, one of the top ten books that influenced my life as a new Christian. True or false?

Luther wrote more about predestination than did Calvin. Answer? True. Luther wrote more about it. Why don't we call ourselves Lutherans? Well, I don't know. He gives an interesting chart here, our table.

Reform view, Francis Schaeffer, Van Til, Roger Nicole, James Boyce, Philip Hughes. Now maybe he would update that a little bit, because that's, you know, after all, 20 years ago. Opposing views, the non-Calvinistic view, C .S. Lewis, Norm Geisler, John Montgomery, Clark Pinnock, of course, Pinnock is now off the deep end big time, and Billy Graham.

Predestination and the Sovereignty of God

Chapter two, predestination and the sovereignty of God. Just how sovereign is God? Like I've said millions of times, God's sovereign over skin color, He's sovereign over where you were born, He's sovereign over when you were born, He's sovereign over your parents, He's sovereign over weather, He's sovereign over the major issues that go on in the world, minor issues, He's sovereign over the king's heart, and He's sovereign over who goes to heaven or hell.

And He is sovereign over that and has decided that and has established that before you are even born. And see, that rubs people the wrong way. And so we have to remember that when we think we have free choice, let's call ours free agency, when that runs against the sovereignty of God and His free will, His free will, God's, wins.

We are not dualist. We don't believe we have supreme power. God has supreme power and locked in the war who will win. Sproul quotes the Westminster Confession, God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.

And then he gives illustrations of how small things in history have been ordained and have changed outcomes of history. If a grain of sand in the kidney of Oliver Cromwell changed the course of English history, so our maverick molecule could change the course of all redemption history, maybe that one molecule will be the thing that prevents Christ from returning.

God is God and He ordains all that comes to pass, means, Sproul said, God is sovereign over His entire creation. To quote Abraham Kuyper, this entire world, Jesus says, over it, mine. This is mine. God is God, Sproul says, and that is a good way to remember that God is sovereign.

Sproul says on page 31, we know that God is sovereign because we know that God is God. Therefore, we must conclude that God foreordains sin. What else can we conclude? We must conclude that God's decision to allow sin to enter the world was a good decision.

This is not to say that our sin is really a good thing, but merely that God's allowing us to do sin, which is evil, is a good thing. God's allowing evil is good, but the evil He allows is still evil. God's involvement in all this is perfectly righteous.

Our involvement in it is wicked. The fact that God decided to allow us to sin does not absolve us from our responsibility from sin. Now see, doesn't that blow your mind? Don't you almost want to stop that kind of talk?

God ordains sin. Don't you want to relegate sin and its entrance into the world? That's all Satan's fault, and I don't know what God was doing at the time, but I guess He permitted it, He allowed it, it snuck in somehow.

Satan was a morally free agent, so God had to let him do that, and then He constructs redemption later. See, that's what we try to do. But whatever happens has been ordained, and God has ordained the fall.

God has ordained Christ's reconciling work in eternity past, before the fall. Grace isn't obligated, grace isn't deserved, and therefore God says, Sproul, always reserves the right to have mercy upon whom He will have mercy.

God may owe people justice, but never mercy. This is the kind of book that makes you just sit there and think, hmm, hard to digest, but once you submit, and that's really the issue here, submitting to the Word, you will never see God in the same way, you'll never go back, you'll never go back.

God is God. Sproul says, the Calvinist view of predestination teaches that God actively intervenes in the lives of the elect to make absolutely sure that they are saved. Of course, the rest are invited to Christ and given an opportunity to be saved if they want to, italics, but Calvinism assures that without the intervention of God, no one will ever want Christ, left to themselves, no one will ever choose Christ.

Non-reformed views of predestination assume that every fallen person is left with the capacity to choose Christ. Man is not viewed as being so fallen that it requires the direct intervention of God to the degree that Calvinism asserts.

The non-reformed views all leave it in man's power to cast the deciding ballot for man's ultimate destiny. But see here the problem, no compromise, listeners, as you know, man is fallen and therefore will always cast the same vote, no, we will not have this man rule over us.

The Calvinist asks, what is wrong with God creating faith in the heart of a sinner? See that's a great question, that's why I love this book. What is wrong with God creating faith in the heart of a sinner?

I'm so thankful there's nothing wrong because that's exactly what he did in my heart in 1989. God is not required to seek the sinner's permission for doing with the sinner what he pleases. You can read Matthew 20 to think about that.

The sinner didn't ask to be born in the country of his birth to his parents or even to be born at all, nor did the sinner ask to be born with a fallen nature. All these things were determined by God's sovereign decision.

If God does all this that affects the sinner's eternal destiny, what could possibly be wrong for him to go one more step to ensure his salvation? Oh Lord, in Jeremiah 20, you have overwhelmed me and I am overwhelmed.

Certainly Jeremiah did not invite God to overwhelm him. The only answer I can give to this question is that I don't know. I have no idea why God saves some but not all. One thing I do know, if it pleases God to save some and not all, there is nothing wrong with that.

God is not under obligation to save anybody. If he chooses to save some, that in no way obligates him to save the rest. Again, the Bible insists that it is God's divine prerogative to have mercy upon whom he will have mercy.

But that's not fair. But what is meant by fairness here? If by fair we mean equal, then of course the protest is accurate. God does not treat all men equally. Nothing could be clearer from the Bible than that.

God appeared to Moses in a way that he did not appear to Hammurabi. God gave blessings to Israel that he did not give to Persia. Christ appeared to Paul on the way to Damascus in a way he did not manifest himself to Pilate.

God simply has not treated every human being in history in the exact same manner. This much is obvious. But we've all deserved justice. Some get grace. What happens to the person who says, I want to adopt one child out of the Bosnian orphanage, and we're mad at him that he doesn't adopt all of them?

No, we say, good job adopting one. My name is Mike Avendroth. Top Ten Book, Chosen by God, R .C. Sproul. We're going to do part two next time just because this book is so great, because the God of this book is so great.

God is God. God is sovereign. And we are very thankful for that being the case.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Avendroth 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.