R. Scott Clark Conference Promo

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.

My name is Mike Abendroth, and some have asked me how we got the show's name. No, it wasn't from a

Keith Green song or album or show or whatever the book was, maybe. My wife said, you should be called

No Compromise Radio. And at the time, 10 years ago, I thought to myself, yeah, that's right, I'm not going to compromise.

Well, over the years, I've thought about it a little bit more and I've recalibrated.

Here's the recalibration. The Lord Jesus Christ never compromised. I love it in John where he said,

I always do what's pleasing to the Father. So we like to talk about the Lord Jesus. Number two, at Calvary, none of his attributes were compromised.

And you see the Lord Jesus, and you see the display of the Father's holiness, the Lord, the

Son's holiness as well, with all the other attributes. And then in light of that, I don't want to compromise.

But since I know I do regularly, that's why we have to default to the person and work of Jesus, representative and substitute.

Today online, I have my friend R. Scott Clark, who's coming to Massachusetts. Dr. Clark, welcome back to No Compromise Radio.

Hey, Mike. I'm looking forward to being out there. Well, I don't think people realize how much we have in common.

When you and I sat together in Escondido a while ago, it's kind of like one after another from Nebraska to Runza to Benson to University of Nebraska at Lincoln to disc jockeying.

Is there anything else? I don't know. Yeah. We are essentially the same person.

I know. That's what this means. Well, I think you, like me, when we're meeting people in person, they probably think that we're, you know, we try to disarm them, right?

Because you can be tough on your blog and I can be tough on the show. And then when they meet us in person, they think, oh, they're actually fairly nice people.

They're image bearers. I'm nothing but warm and friendly and affirming of all points of view on the

Heidel blog. I don't know what you're talking about. We, anything anyone wants to say is fine with me because I'm just an easygoing, open -minded, affirming, broad, tolerant guy.

See heidelblog .net for more of that toleration and Dr. Clark is a professor at Westminster Seminary.

He has studied at Oxford as well and has his DPhil there. By the way, just a side note, what's the difference between,

I know what a DMin is compared to a DPhil, but how about a PhD and a DPhil?

What's the difference? It's a different organization of the letters, that's all I can say. It could be, and I don't know this, but it could be that it's an older way of doing it, but I really don't know that.

All right. But the D, putting the D first is an honorific, it just, yeah, it is parallel to the

M, they have an MPhil and then they have a DPhil. So it follows the pattern

BA, MA, MPhil, DPhil, and then there are other

Ds as well. That's all it is. All right. Well, I usually think DPhils are smarter than PhDs, but that's all right.

So Scott, we're having you come out to Massachusetts this October 11th and 12th, five sessions.

People can go online, they can see a blurb on your website, or they can go to bbcchurch .org,

bbcchurch .org, and you're going to do a session Friday night on Law Gospel.

And then I've got some questions, not from the congregation, although I might open it up, but questions that I have for you in the session to follow.

And then Saturday, we're going to talk a lot about the quest for illegitimate religious experience is session one that day, biblicism,

Sola Scriptura session two that day, and then Sola Fide and its modern attractors is the third session.

Now let me ask you this, why do you think I picked those topics? I mean, if you're looking at it, you know, you're the speaker,

I get, you know, asked to speak places, and I'm thinking, they just asked me to speak on these topics. I think I know why, and I think

I know the backstory. What do you think my backstory is? Well, I know some of your backstories.

I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say in public. You know, coming out of American dispensationalism, there are essentially two options in the modern period, or there tended to be.

One of them is antinomianism, represented by, you know, the Zayn Hodges folks who see the, for example, the

Ten Commandments is so historically conditioned, so much a part of the Mosaic economy and sort of original to that, that they get, you know, once the

Mosaic covenant is fulfilled, then we're done with them. You know, that's then, and this is now, but it's part of the

Old Testament, and we're free in Christ, and then people talk about the law of Christ over against the law of Moses, and so people, you get a kind of antinomianism, you know, that whole business,

I prayed the prayer, I walked the aisle, I'm in, you know, bada -bim, bada -boom, ex -opera, operato, and nothing

I do or say can ever have any effect or change, you know, the conclusion that I'm in.

And that produces a reaction, you know, known as the Lordship Salvation View, which, at least in some of its articulations, and it's the earliest articulation, said that you're in, if you meet certain conditions, yes, you have to believe in Jesus, but you also have to obey, and that these two conditions become parallel to each other, and there's no order to them, no logical order.

And as you start rediscovering the Reformation, you realize, well, wait a minute, there's a whole other way of talking about these things that doesn't agree with either one of those approaches, the so -called, quote -unquote, free grace view, which is obviously misleadingly titled, and the

Lordship Salvation View, which is also misleading, because Reformation Christianity says, yes, grace is free, and Jesus is

Lord, and we don't have to pick between them. And so, you know,

I suspect that's part of the background, where we want to get straight things like law and gospel and the confusion of those things, for example.

That would be Friday night, on the 11th, we'll be talking about these things, and then we'll have a

Q &A, because the Reformation actually was addressing these very kinds of questions, because in effect,

Rome was saying, you're in by baptism, but you stay in, ultimately, by perseverance or cooperation with grace.

And the Remonstrants, the Arminians, said something like that, and there were others in between the beginning of the

Reformation, and Dort, and then there were some after Dort who said these kinds of things. Richard Baxter said, in the 17th century, you know, yeah, grace is important, and faith is important, but there's more.

And that's sort of what the original version of the Lordship Salvation Doctrine said, and what some people are still saying, that it's not enough to say that good works are fruit and evidence of new life and true faith, they're actually a part of either the basis of your final salvation, or the instrument through which you are finally saved.

We get both. So, if we can distinguish between what's law, that is, what's bad news, and what's gospel, what's good news, and how those relate, and if we can figure out how, you know, as we close the conference at 11 o 'clock on Saturday, on the 12th, we'll be talking about Sola Fide, right?

And that's a Latin phrase that means, by faith alone, or through faith alone.

Faith is the only instrument, we say. And so those are kind of the book -ending issues, and then in between, we'll be talking about a bunch of other things as well.

Our Scott Clark is on today, No Compromise Radio, and will be here at Bethlehem Bible Church this

October 11th and 12th. You can sign up online, or if you just want to show up, you can pay per day if you'd like.

It's a small amount of money, just to cover some costs this October 11th and 12th.

And how much will that cost? I think it's $10 a day. So $20, $35 for a family, and I tell people, if you can't afford it, please come, you're my guest.

So, and I just got... Yeah, don't let that keep you. Right. And I just got a bunch of your books, the Recovering Reformed Confessions from the publisher, and those should be here at a discounted price, too, for the folks.

Some of the other books that I want them to order, or to buy, that is The Congregation, they're way too expensive, and they're out of print.

But we can talk about that another time. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. Some of them are really terrible.

And yeah, just so the listener knows, I'm not flying in on a private jet, so I'm not

Benny Hinn. But we insisted it'd be nonstop, so you're going to fly into Boston, you'll get here later in the night on Thursday, then

Friday, I hope to take you around the Second Great Awakening stuff.

And so let me ask you this, Scott, while I've got you here on the line. When I first moved to Massachusetts 22 years ago, someone would come to town like you, a pastor, and I wanted to show off David Brainerd's tombstone and where Edward's family plot was, and the church that he pastored, and Whitfield's Rock, where he preached to 2 ,000 people.

And I find those fascinating now, because it's part of theological history in America, even pre -America.

But I'm not so excited about the Second Great Awakening anymore, now that I'm learning some of these other truths.

Does that seem to make sense to you in my trajectory? Are you tracking with me? Sure. One thing we want to clear up, yeah, we're talking about the

First Great Awakening, you know, we're talking about Edwards and Whitfield and those guys, and of course we'd have some more sympathy,

I would, I'm not speaking for you or necessarily for everyone else. Well, you can speak for me, because I don't know the difference between the

First and the Second Great Awakening. Well, it's easy to get confused, because they are somewhat related.

The Second One, contrary to the story that's often told, the Second One, which dominated the 19th century, and which arguably lasted, you know, two -thirds of the 19th century, in some ways, and we're still feeling the effects of it, you know, all these years later.

The Second One didn't drop out of the sky, you know, it was in some ways an extension of aspects of the

First. But the First is interesting because it marks, in my view, a turn in Reformed theology, piety, and practice to experience, and this gets to some of the things we're going to be talking about on Saturday morning, the first session from 9 to 10 on the 12th, on Saturday, October 12th, the quest for illegitimate religious experience, or the choir,

Q -I -R -E, and what happens in the early 18th century in the

Americas, in the New World, in the colonies, is that there's a concern about nominalism, the concern that people are

Christian in name only and just showing up and going to the motions, and Edwards begins preaching, not in a very emotive way, actually, in what would certainly today be regarded as a fairly dry and academic manner, but it produced a remarkable response, and it wasn't just Edwards, you know,

Whitefield, to make things a little more complicated, is an Anglican, Edwards is a Congregationalist, and Whitefield is traveling around from England, a

Wesley, traveling around with a very different kind of theology from Edwards and Whitefield, and Whitefield is a bit of a showman and a provocateur, and so between the three of them and others, there's this movement, the so -called

First Great Awakening, lots of religious excitement, people are now moaning in the pews and falling over, there's at least, the doctor,

Martin Lloyd -Jones, tells the story, and he's the only one I've found telling the story, that Edwards' wife floated across a room.

I doubt that's true, but at least this is, in some circles, part of the story, the myth, if you will, and so this really shapes expectations for what constitutes a heart religion in America, that you have to have a particular kind of experience, and Edwards writes a book on this to make sure that you're having the right kind of experience with the right quality of experience.

And all I'm saying is, listen, for whatever benefit there was in the First Great Awakening, it tended to draw people's eyes away from Christ, away from the

Gospel, away from the objective, and to the subjective. And that's problematic, but it comes to sort of define what real heart religion, what real evangelical religion should look like, and I'm saying that's a bad definition, because in the

Reformation, and in the New Testament, or the Old Testament for that matter, we really don't see that much emphasis on the quality of religious experience.

What we see is people preaching the Law and the Gospel, pointing people to Christ, focusing on Christ, and then when they want to talk about me, it's about dying to sin, living to Christ, and then the fruit of the

Spirit, rather than a book on making sure you're having the right kind of religious experience.

So we're going to be talking about that, because a lot of American evangelicalism is defined by this quest for an illegitimate religious experience.

Whether it's continuing Revelation, you know, people have a canon opener in their back pocket and they want to open it up and get continuing

Revelation, or whether it's being slain in the Spirit, or even if it's just little things like, you know, praying for direct

Revelation for guidance. You know, this is a thing that we do, and this is a thing that I was taught, and I suppose you were taught,

I don't know, but I know I was taught this in the mid -seventies as a young Christian, that I should pray and wait for a still, small voice to tell me what

I should do. And all of these things, in one way or another, lead us away from Scripture, they lead us away from Christ, and they cause us to look at ourselves rather than the things at which we should be looking.

Sometimes the still, small voice in my life sounds a lot like my wife's voice. Well, followed by a rap on the back of her head!

I just read Harry Stout's Divine Dramatist about Whitefield, and your comments,

Dr. Clark, about the subjective nature of much of the ministry and the acting and everything else is one of the other reasons why

I'm having you here. We have, at Bethlehem Bible Church, many people that come from pretty mainstream, evangelical, seeker -sensitive type churches, but especially these days,

I've met several families in the last month or two from Word -Faith charismatic churches, and so some of these

Assemblies of God churches start off fairly decently. They're talking about heaven and hell, and Jesus is the only way, and they tend to spiral into Word -Faith stuff, because Word -Faith is popular,

Bethel's popular, etc. So I'm hoping some of the folks in town can really benefit from a look at the truth of the

Scriptures, to have their lives led in an objective way versus all these subjective leanings that then eventually, once they're privatized, demand corporate worship as well.

I mean, they're demanding those things to be brought into corporate worship. Is that what you've seen? Well, that's right. People say, well,

I just do this privately. Well, for now, but historically, what people do in private ultimately ends up showing up in public.

So the things we used to sing, you know, when you and I were kids, the things that we sold and sang in youth group are the things that are now being sung, or we've moved beyond that.

You know, the youth group songs have become corporate worship songs. So this stuff, as you say, doesn't remain private.

You know, I've had people say, well, I receive private revelations, but I don't impose those on other people.

Well, I remember standing in a foyer in an ancient church in England, in which people were discussing a private revelation that somebody had received and dated, and they were treating it as a canonical revelation, a revelation of such and such a date.

Of course, they didn't tell me what it was, and I don't know what it was, but I was clear that they were describing a revelation that both of them accepted as canonical, that one or other of them had received, allegedly, directly and privately.

So now this has a kind of canonical authority to them, alongside Holy Scripture. And as I always tell my students, you know, just wait 500 years.

So things that start out that don't seem very consequential, they have long -term consequences.

This is how people end up adding to Scripture. And they really do. I remember, oddly, this was back when we were in England, attending a

Pentecostal worship service. We didn't know what it was. It was called a community church. And in America, a community church usually designates a

Bible church, usually with a dispensational background, or can. Not here.

This was a Pentecostal church. And a gal, a lady, received, she said, a revelation, and this was during the service when we were supposed to be receiving direct revelations.

Well, then the musical director was trying to play her off the stage, if you will.

She had a marvelous singing voice, and she was singing this revelation. But, you know, the musical director was apparently getting a revelation from the

Holy Spirit that she was supposed to wrap it up. I always thought that was very interesting. I mean, how do you tell the Holy Spirit to wrap it up?

Well, maybe that's where rap was born, because you're supposed to wrap it up, and then she started doing some beatbox.

I don't think so, no. I mean, I love my...I

spend a lot of time at different points in my life, you know, a fair bit of time with Pentecostal and Charismatic friends, praying with them and listening to them and talking with them and reading their materials.

And I think, you know, because we're in the midst of this third wave, or maybe post -third wave

Pentecostalism, that, again, it's changed the paradigm and the expectations. And I just want to draw people back to this basic Biblical Reformation principle that Scripture is sufficient for the

Christian faith and the Christian life. And I have a right to be skeptical about your claims to additional revelation, and you can't bind me to things that are not clearly revealed or good and necessary consequences of what's revealed in Scripture.

And again, this was a principle that we fought for in the Reformation for good reason, because the

Church imposed all kinds of things on God's people on the basis of the claim that they were entitled to receive, in effect, additional revelation.

And so, again, everything, as my friend Bob Godfrey says, all roads lead to Rome.

And this is one of those roads that effectively leads us back to the same kind of theology, piety, and practice that we left in the

Reformation. Talking to R. Scott Clark, one of the things our listeners could do is that they could go to heidelblog .net,

or if they go to rscottclark .org and click on Syllabi, and then open up Confessionalism.

And one of the things that struck me, Scott, was when I looked at some of the syllabi there, this particular syllabus on Reformed Confessions, the course requirements for a two -credit class.

Not four credits, not eight credits, but two credits. I can't believe how much you're making them read.

Well, this is Westminster Seminary, and this is what we do. I mean, honestly, it's not that...

it's... yeah. Well, compared to my background, or maybe what

I give out for reading, it seemed like a lot, and so I just... Well, my students agree with you, but I think they're soft.

No, this is great stuff they're reading, and in that particular course, I'm not actually testing them over the reading, but mainly

I just want to expose them to these various authors and texts so that they become a part of their life, and they'll be able to go back to it over time and relearn some of this stuff.

Amen. Well, we're wrapping up the show. We don't have too much time left, but there's something that's related to the

Law Gospel discussion and some of the other things we've talked about in previous shows on No Compromise Radio with Dr.

Clark. You have an article about legal preaching, and there are many people that run, especially in my circles, and they're preaching the

Bible verse by verse, and they talk about Christ's work, and they talk about the requirements of God, and maybe their paradigm might be indicative -imperative, but the way they come across maybe is more scolding, or maybe more policeman -like, or to describe

Thomas Boston's use that Ferguson uses in his whole Christ book, there's not the tincture of the gospel, there's not this dye of the gospel.

What do you mean by legal preaching, and how can good men, essentially, who really want to teach the

Bible fall into this teaching good news in a legal way? Well, yeah, that's a great question.

It's easy to do. I have done it. I did it for, I'd say, most of ten years, not meaning to, but because I didn't know as clearly as I should have known the distinction between law and gospel, and I hadn't learned until 1998.

I learned it from Mike Horton, and a short conference talk that he gave really was for me revolutionary.

So from 87 to 98, really, I really struggled with this. So I am that legal preacher, and there are lots of others, or at least

I was, where a sermon can even have some gospel themes in it, but the sermon is essentially bad news.

When we leave the listener under the covenant of works, and by that I mean we say to them,

God will accept you if...that's really what I mean. If we leave the listener thinking, well, here are the conditions under which

God will accept you, and you have to meet these conditions. And if you do, then God will accept you. That is a legal sermon.

And I've done that many times, and I know it gets done. I hear it.

There are some other symptoms of this kind of preaching. You know, it tends to be a kind of angry preaching, or the minister gives off that he's dissatisfied with the people.

An old friend of mine, one of the fellows who helped me get started in ministry, said to me that somebody approached him and said,

Pastor, you seem unhappy with us. Are we doing something wrong? And he didn't even realize that he was sending off that message.

He didn't mean to send that message. So there are lots of symptoms where the sermon is focused on do's.

It's always, you need to do this, you need to do that, and then there are soft versions.

You know, three steps to this, seven steps to that. Those are all versions of legal preaching, and while certainly we need to preach the law in all of its uses, we also need to preach the gospel, because that's the one thing that we can do that nobody else can do, and it's the one thing that actually saves, that God uses to save His people, is to announce the good news, and to offer it to people, and to promise all that the good news promises to needy sinners.

Well, thank you for that answer. I'm going to ask you the same type of question during the Q &A session that Friday night.

I often sit and listen to people as pastors, ordained pastors, prepare our hearts for the

Lord's Supper, and to me, that's the pinnacle of legal preaching that I hear, is when it comes out right before the

Lord's Supper, instead of this great, do this in remembrance of me, Jesus said, the focus is always and only on examining self and everything else.

So, this bleeds out in a lot of areas, and I hope to talk about this in person. I'm getting the green

M &Ms ready. The no -code dog is going to be at your feet there in the spare bedroom, so you won't miss the heidel dog as much, and maybe we'll have some

Nebraska snacks or something. Oh, that'd be great. Scott Clark is going to be here at Bethlehem Bible Church, bbcchurch .org.

You can order online, and that will be October 11th and 12th.

Scott, look forward to seeing you face -to -face at Logan Airport, and I'll have my New England accent for you. Okay, great.

Looking forward to it. 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 bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.