D. Scott Meadows Interview (2022)

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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. My name is

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Mike Abendroth, and I've done many shows solo, many shows with Pastor Steve, and I've done fewer shows with live, in -house guests.

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And today, I have a friend in. We're sitting next to each other, what, two feet away, one foot away?

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And Scott Meadows, welcome back to No Compromise Radio ministry. Thank you very much, Mike. How long has it been since you've been in that seat, in that hot seat at my right side?

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A couple of years. Okay. Well, I am so thankful that you're back.

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You are the pastor in New Hampshire. Do they have Christians still up in New Hampshire? How does that work?

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We do have a few. When people talk about the frozen chosen, see, you're farther north than I am.

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How cold does it get in New Hampshire in the winter? It's pretty frigid. Can you imagine the old days where you've got a meeting house, and you need to get there early, and you put the fire in the back, and warm it up, and you've got the little pew warmers?

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What was that like? That must have been something. Well, I thought maybe you're old enough, you would have experienced that, so I wanted some personal testimony.

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So Scott, good to have you back on. And you've been in the same church now for 31 years, is that right? That's right.

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Serving as pastor there. And if you had to go back in time, if you were able, and say to Scott Meadows 31 years ago, here's a few hints, a few things that I've learned along the way that you probably should know at the beginning of ministry, at the end.

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What would you say? Well, the first thing that pops into my mind is, you have very little idea how ignorant you are, and you need to read hundreds of books.

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That is so true. I mean, I think to myself, you know, the more I learn, the more I realize I know less than I thought.

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Right? You're delving into the infinite mind of God, and of course, He's revealed Himself to some degree, and we think, oh, we better study what

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He has revealed. Right. When you don't know much, you don't know what you don't know, so you think you know more than you do know.

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Are you patient with these younger men as you train them?

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I think you are, but maybe I should ask the question this way. How do you remain patient?

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No, I'm not patient with them. I crack the whip, and I tell them to get with the program. Well, just yesterday,

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I had a young pastor call me and ask about theology, and we talked over an hour.

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He was asking me to recommend some introductory books into a certain aspect of theology proper.

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From listening to him, he's read a few really good books, and he's a very intelligent man, but I said, don't read introductory books.

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Read the hard stuff, and let me give you some hard stuff. Even if you don't get it all, you'll get some of it, and it will stretch you.

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Excellent. I've been in your personal study at your home, and I've looked at some of your books.

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When Scott Meadows is sitting on that nice little lounge chair reading in the evening and the sun is setting, what do you like to just pick up for fun?

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Do you read for fun? No. Okay. What do you like to pick up for maybe devotional reading?

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Well, I'm reading Orations on God and Christ by Gregory of Nazianzus for fun right now.

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Okay. Well, I'm glad you can pronounce his name. I just say Greg. Okay. Gregovan. But my big reading project this year is the 10 volumes of the works of William Perkins, the father of the

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Puritans. And how far have you gotten? Volume a month is my plan, and I'm just about a week behind.

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So I'm in volume eight right now out of 10 volumes. When I think of William Perkins in that set,

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I think to myself, that should be... I'm going through Owen now, like you are, but not one a month.

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Probably it's taking me one every two months. So I'm about ready to finish volume seven, and there's 16 in the

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Banner of Truth edition plus seven additional Hebrews commentaries, and then that one odd biblical theology or something.

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Then I thought to myself, do I do the works of Thomas Goodwin or do I do William Perkins? I can hear in the background there's a water main that broke, and if you hear buzzing,

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Scott is not shaving himself, but we're going to just record anyway. Well, I say read both. Okay, good.

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Who published the new Thomas Goodwin series? Reformation Heritage Books.

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That's right. It seemed like it was really well done. It is excellently edited and formatted, and I had never read anything by Perkins except The Art of Prophesying, which is a sliver of what he wrote, and I am finding time in these 10 volumes of Perkins immensely profitable.

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Tell our listeners, if you would, about how Perkins regularly leads all the benefits that we receive because of Christ and the

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Father sending Him and the Spirit applying, but he ties them back to the Lord Jesus Himself.

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In other words, or maybe this helps with the question, Scott, I was listening to the audiobook of The Whole Christ by Sinclair Ferguson the other day, and I've read it a few times, listened to it a few times, and he was talking about how

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Bunyan did this chart, almost like the order of salvation and the flow chart of salvation, and Perkins did the same thing, and Bunyan had benefits of Christ, but he didn't tie them all to Christ, whereas William Perkins' charts, that's what he did.

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Do you know anything about that? Is that fair to comment upon? I think it's a fair characterization, and that chart you're referencing is a very famous illustration of predestination and reprobation.

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Well, see, I'm glad I asked you because I didn't know the exacts. I don't think I've seen Bunyan's, but not Perkins'. Yes, it's a fold -out.

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It's in the Reformation Heritage edition of Perkins' works. You come to the volume with that chart in it, and I think it unfolds into four pages that are all one sheet of paper, so it's a real bonus.

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It's like the prize in the bottom of the Cracker Jacks box. Remember those days? I do. Now kids know about Cracker Jacks just because they can see a picture on their phone, kind of like Tonka Trucks.

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Oh, I don't think most kids today would have any idea about what Cracker Jacks is, but I'm close to your age,

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I guess. I'm 62. How old are you? 62. Well, okay, May. All right. June.

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Okay, I am your senior, Scott Meadows. Yes, you are. What's the D stand for in D. Scott Meadows? Douglas.

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And why do you go by Scott? Because my parents called me Scott when I was growing up, Scotty. For some reason, they named me

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Douglas Scott Meadows and called me Scotty, and I remember when I was in school, my friends would call me

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Scott, but the teachers often would go by your first name and call me Doug or Douglas.

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And Mrs. Rumberg, my history teacher in the ninth grade, was confused, and she said, well, what is your name?

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And we're sitting in class, all the students around, and here I am, ninth grade, what's that, like 15 years old, and I said to her in front of everyone, well, my friends call me

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Scott. You can call me Doug. And I got a

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B in history that year, and I know that I deserve an A. Tell us a little bit about your philosophy of preaching and how you encourage other men to preach.

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It seems like the landscape of evangelicalism is chocked full of basically no mystic preaching, law only preaching.

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Obviously, law is good and holy and right, it reflects God's nature, but just law only. How do you encourage men to talk about the

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Lord Jesus, not just for pardon, but for power? Wow, that's a lot.

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That's a lot to ask of me. Sounded pretty good, didn't it? It seemed like a good question to ask. Oh, you're a true professional. I just made it up.

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At first, I thought the answer was one thing, and then as you proceeded to complicate the question, it went in a different direction.

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See, only you're smart enough to figure out, oh, he did a non -sequitur there. So, any thoughts about any of that?

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Well, one of the most important things a preacher needs to do is to preach the text of Scripture, and sadly, with a generally low preaching standard, one of the big problems is, you know, the sermons are poor in biblical content.

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They don't have much. They're not expounding the Scriptures. One of my mentors, an older pastor, once said, some men's sermons are so far removed from Scripture that if the

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Bible had measles, their sermons wouldn't catch them. We need to expound the text of Scripture.

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But the latter part of your question emphasizes the importance of knowing the scope or focus of Scripture on Christ and redemption.

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And then you threw another wrinkle in there about the believer's progress, and we have to be committed to the idea that the gospel is not just for the unconverted, but it is the bread of the children of God, and by which we have life and continue to have life and grow strong in the

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Father's house. So we present Christ the bread of life in every sermon.

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We really ought to preach Christ. How do you go about it in your sermons from Psalm 119?

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How many sermons did you preach in Psalm 119? 167. Okay, 167. How many verses are there?

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176. Come on, you should have just done a few more. Well, there were a few that took two verses or three verses that went together textually, so that's why there are fewer than the number of verses.

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And you go to Psalm 119, you think it's in the Christian canon of the 66 books, and what was your strategy for making sure you talked about the second person of the

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Trinity or the triune God, or what was your strategy for preaching that many psalms and not saying the same thing in every psalm?

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Yes. And I'm also engaged in a series through all 150 psalms right now, one after another, and I just finished preaching

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Psalm 132 last Lord's Day. So I've preached one to 132.

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Steve Lawson challenged us, me and some others to do this, and I accepted the challenge.

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So we're most of the way through the whole Psalter now in exposition. But in general,

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Mike, I remember for Psalm 119 preparing for each message on a verse with Thomas Manton's three -volume commentary on Psalm 119.

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Three volumes of Manton's 22 -volume works are just on that one psalm. And so I used that, and he was a master preacher, so commendable in his teaching and preaching.

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And C. H. Spurgeon's Treasury of David is helpful, and Spurgeon also has a gospel focus on those things.

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But now as I'm preaching through the whole Psalter, I resort again and again to these preachers in history that understand that Christ is the focus of Scripture and bring that out faithfully in the psalms, like Augustine's six -volume commentary, well, really six volumes of sermons on the psalms.

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And so that is one great resource. Martin Luther also has written so much on the psalms.

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Bishop George Horn, he's called, has a short commentary on the psalms that is gospel -drenched, you know.

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So you learn that there are certain works that if that's what you're looking for, you can find how the psalms testify to Christ in particulars.

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And if people want to access those, it's sermonaudio .com, and they can look up D. Scott Meadows, is that correct?

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What, the sermons on the psalms? Yes. I don't know how many of those are posted on Sermon Audio, but there's a website called, or a ministry called

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ExposetheWord, are you familiar with that? Yes, I am. So they gave me the psalms, apparently.

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They give a pastor different books of the Bible, and they wanted to have 66 pastors doing 66 books, and I guess

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I'm Mr. Psalms there. So they can find them there. At least they didn't ask - Some of them, at least, yes. Ask 666 pastors, at least.

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Yes. We're talking to Scott Meadows today on No Compromise Radio. Is Rich Barcelos nice in person?

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Well, I've heard he is. I met him in person, actually, only on one visit.

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So most, I was visiting my mom in California, and we met at,

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Rich and I drove to Fresno. He from Palmdale, and me from Groveland, California, met in Fresno at his parents' house, and I got to spend most of a day there with him.

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But that's the only personal meeting I've ever had with Rich. However, over so many years of conferring together about matters of theology, we have grown to be close friends and intimately acquainted with each other's thinking on matters of theology and the

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Church. That's how he always responds to tweets, right? H -M -M -M or something, yes.

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When you said acquainted, I thought of Aquinas. I'm not going to ask you to get down in the weeds with this whole

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Aquinas controversy, but, Scott, why do you think it even is a controversy?

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I think if we read theologians, the Reformation theologians, they quote favorably

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Aquinas, and they quote things that Aquinas said wrongly, and they call him out on it.

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But people do things for reasons. What would you guess the reason would be why this is such an inflammatory issue now?

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Right, right. Well, basically, I think in the 20th century, there was a major influence against Protestants, and particularly

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Calvinists, reading and profiting from things Aquinas said due to Cornelius Van Til and Francis Schaeffer.

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And what I would just say is, if we are well -educated theologians, we read across all the centuries of Church history, and we read philosophers, and we make an eclectic use of all these sources because none of them are all good, and hardly anything is all bad.

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And this is what has been the tradition of the Church forever, is to be educated and make eclectic use of sources like this that have something positive to contribute to our understanding of truth.

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That's very insightful. I'm glad I asked the question. This one just popped in my mind a few minutes ago.

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Was John Gill really a hyper -Calvinist? Not in my book. Because I heard at his ordination he was asked certain questions, maybe about prayer, evangelism, and he would give the orthodox answer.

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But typically, at least I was taught, oh, John Gill, yeah, he's got some good stuff, but be careful, he's a hyper -Calvinist.

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Yeah, that's a pejorative term. Sometimes it's thrown around for more of an influence than because it has a real justification.

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I appreciate Gill very much. And again, I make an eclectic use of Gill. I already know

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I don't agree with Gill on everything. But Gill was a great preacher and teacher of the gospel of our

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Lord Jesus Christ, and a great scholar besides. I just picked up his Body of Divinity.

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Is that what it's called? And it's on my desk, and I want to start reading it. Well, that book, and Gill's Doctrine of God, is particularly commendable, and also very traditional.

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So when you read Gill, you read a Baptist who is later in church history compared to some, and he is saying nothing novel.

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He is rehearsing what was generally a consensus view of theology proper.

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And for that reason, it's great for us to read Gill, because he's pre -Enlightenment theology.

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Tell our listeners a little bit, Scott, if people want to read something you've written. I know you just contributed to a new book.

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Tell us about the book and the chapter that you contributed. So there's a new book Christopher McShaffery and Jeffrey Riddle edited, which is an anthology of essays by Reformed ministers under the title,

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Why I Preach from the Received Text, referring to that traditional text of the

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New Testament, Greek New Testament. It's not about the King James Version, and the men who contributed,

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I'm sure, have different judgments about that. But what they have in common is confidence in the traditional ecclesiastical text known as the

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Received Text. So I'm not an expert in this area, but Jeff Riddle, in particular, who's a friend of mine, asked if I wanted to offer a testimony of my own thoughts and experience preaching from the

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Received Text, and I said, sure. And it's just a short, I think it's 2 ,500 words or something, of my own.

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And mine is probably the worst of the essays in the collection, because it's homespun and simple, but I give my story about my preaching.

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Excellent. You got converted when you were how old? Well, I made a profession of faith at 10 when

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I was terrified by a traveling evangelist named Jack Van Impey that told me if I didn't accept

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Jesus as my personal Savior, I would go into the Great Tribulation Period and be decapitated and go to hell.

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So that pretty much scared me. So I prayed the prayer, and I was saved and baptized at 10, supposedly.

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But it wasn't until I was 20 that, unbeknownst to me at the time,

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God was pleased to regenerate my soul, I believe. So there's a big difference between being a nominal

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Christian and being a truly regenerate saint. Did you get baptized after that?

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I did, actually, as a young husband. My wife and I both received assurance of salvation in a way that was beyond our childhood experience.

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So we were baptized together as pretty much newlyweds. Someone gave me a leather -bound, high -quality, probably worth $100,

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Jack Van Impey study Bible. Wow. I think it's called a prophecy Bible or something like that. And you know,

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I'm sure he said some things that were true. Oh, yes. Yes, of course. Sin and death and hell.

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Well, one thing you can say about Van Impey is he had the Bible in his mouth all the time when he would preach.

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He was called the walking Bible because he had memorized so many verses out of the

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Bible. Now look, my background in churches is in conservative

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Bible -believing type churches, but not necessarily that theologically astute. But here's what

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I found. And looking back, I can appreciate this. If a man is committed to preach what the

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Bible says, he's going to be preaching the truth so often when he doesn't even realize how true what he's saying it is.

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Stick with the text. And that's a comfort to me as I get to preach on Sundays. I mean, my pastor, for example, in Maryland, I remember him preaching the word and he would expound the text and he didn't even realize this, but his doctrine didn't agree with what he just said from the text sometimes.

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But because he was committed to expounding the text, he would fall into the truth without meaning to.

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That reminds me of a James Montgomery Boyce story. And he was helping Bible study fellowship leaders to teach through the book of Romans.

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And so they all flew in. He was going to help them. This is how you teach. And of course, with Bible study fellowship, there's lots of people from different backgrounds,

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Catholics, Methodists, you just come to study the Bible. And he said, when it comes to Romans 9, dear class, you're going to get a lot of questions about Romans 9.

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And you just need to go back, put your finger underneath the text and say, but the

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Bible says this, and then read the text again in Romans 9. And then you don't have to try to figure out, is this individual, is this national, is this this or that or the other?

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But the Bible says, Jacob have I loved, right, et cetera. Scott, we don't have too much time, so maybe short answers on this.

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Biggest weakness in evangelicalism, biggest strength in evangelicalism. You can start with whichever one you want.

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As you survey the landscape of evangelicalism popularly, biggest strength, biggest weakness.

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Well, you know, when Jesus was going to give an assessment of the churches in Revelation 2 and 3, there was a different assessment for each of the churches.

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And when I hear men pontificate on questions like this, I think you are speaking above your pay grade.

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You almost, in a nice way, made me feel bad I asked the question. I'm not, I'm not the

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Pope of Christianity or I'm not Jesus, so. How about here in New England? When you see the swath of different churches here in New England, do you see some good signs?

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Yes. Yes, of course. You know, there was a parable of the wheat and the tares.

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And Jesus told how the wheat and the tares grow up together. And then in the end, you know, the wheat is gathered and the tares are burned.

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And I, as I preached through that a couple of years ago, I realized things are getting better and things are getting worse at the same time because the kingdom of God is growing exactly according to plan and the kingdom of darkness is growing.

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And a big showdown is coming on judgment day when the Lord returns. That's so true.

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I have a preaching discipleship class here at the church and it's about 13 week class and I have nine men, nine young men signed up for it.

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Lots of reading, lots of homework. It's not to be audited and just makes me encouraged that, yes, the

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Lord is raising up the next generation and he uses us, but he doesn't need us.

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And I'm just thankful to be used by the Lord. And I think to myself, I'm 62. How long do I live? Who knows?

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But is it a life well spent? Well, I didn't spend it well all the time, but the reason why it's spent, that's a good reason for the

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Lord's glory. Scott, thanks for being on No Compromise Radio again today. You can pull up Scott's sermons and sermon audio if you're in New Hampshire.

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He's in Exeter, New Hampshire. What's the address of the church there? 12 Little River Road.

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And the main time I would like people to know is 1030 for the morning worship service.

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Show up then and we'll worship together. Okay. Thanks again for being on. You can write me if you want to get all the

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Scott info at NoCompromiseRadio .com. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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