Missional and Tim Keller

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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 apostle

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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 king.

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Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name's Mike Abendroth.

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Here today on Tuesday with the very famous, world -renowned, intellectually superior

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Steve Cooley. And I have my own line of sports drinks. I want one of those with Stevia in it.

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No. No? Stevia is nasty. Now, we do have different diet plans.

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That is to say, not going on a diet, but just kind of like food plans. Why is that? Aren't we supposed to be similar?

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We're at the same church and all that stuff, same education? Because you are John the Baptist, and I am not, brother.

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This man eats locusts and honey, and with occasional, you know, touches of garlic in them.

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Well, that might be good. That'd be the garlic festival in Gilroy. Did you ever go to that? No. Garlic ice cream?

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No. What's the one that's got the artichoke capital? Watsonville. Did you ever go there? No. Did you ever go to Santa Clarita?

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Yes. The swap meets there? You'd sort of have to understand, I grew up in, with all due respect to my

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Korean friends, I grew up in, like Korea, my mom put garlic in everything. Everything.

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You know, if it was scrambled eggs, garlic. If it was, you know, garlic, garlic, garlic, garlic.

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I did not know that about you. You get a little garlic, you know, we did garlic pills, garlic oil, you know, garlic, garlic, garlic.

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I'm not kidding, it was garlic central. Steve, there's someone here at church, I can't mention him by name, but he obviously takes garlic supplements or eats kimchi every morning before he comes to church on Sunday.

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And when I shake his hand and sometimes I give him a hug, I'm just thinking, woo, dog.

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Well, I've known people who smell so much like garlic that if you come in contact with them, you smell like garlic.

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Well, see? So today on No Compromise Radio, Steve, I have been studying

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Matthew 28, which is known as the Great Commission, where Jesus, with all his authority, heaven and earth, sends out his disciples and everyone else then, by implication, to make disciples, to tell people about the good news of Christ Jesus, the risen

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Savior. And then he ends it by saying, lo, I'm with you always, even at the end of the age. And so I've been thinking about evangelism.

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It's a good thing to think about when you're a pastor. You know what? It is excellent. People, you know, they want to know how to evangelize, when to evangelize, what to do.

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And so I thought I'd like to pull up an old article that's very influential, even for today, and see if it is copacetic.

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Is that a good word? Yeah, I don't know about this article, though. It's called Evangelism on Thursdays Only.

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I'm a little skeptical of the topic. So I pulled up the article,

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The Missional Church by Tim Keller, and thought we would talk about that today in light of biblical evangelism.

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And this article is, I think, eight to 10 years old, but it's still posted on the Redeemer site.

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And Steve, just in general, I don't think we've done shows on Tim Keller. In my mind,

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Tim Keller seems like he's a Christian man, but I think he's overly influential in the minds of the young, reformed, restless, well, he's influential in the

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Gospel Coalition because he and Carson, you know, are the leaders of the thing. But Tim Keller scares me in his methodology and some of his secondary doctrines, primary doctrines.

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He thinks Genesis 1 is poetry, and he's, you know, the biologos guy there. The homosexuality issue, he scares me there.

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He scares me when he's on Martin Breshear and doesn't fully preach like he should. But this maybe is the thing that I'm the most nervous about is how he influences ecclesiology and therefore evangelism with his missional mindset.

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Well, you know, just to kind of summarize a lot of what you were just saying, I would say this, that Tim Keller just reminds me, because you read a lot of it, the tweets and things, you know, because I'm on Twitter, at Tuesday Guy, by the way, at the

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Tuesday Guy. He's profoundly intellectual. And the problem with guys like him is sometimes

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I just look at him and go, okay, maybe he's too smart for his own good. He's smarter than me, maybe too smart for his own good.

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And this missional thing, you know, as I was reading this, I just thought, this is kind of like the intellectual version of the purpose -driven church.

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Well, I would say that maybe he's not smarter than Rick Warren. I don't know their IQs or anything.

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I know they're both smart. But this is a more Reformed view of Rick Warren, certainly, more biblical view, you know, talks more about the

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Bible. But I am totally with you. He is too smart for his own good. And Steve, we've discussed this many times.

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I'm glad to just be a guy who isn't this smart. So what do I have to do?

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I just kind of preach the next text and whatever church history has taught us through God's gifts of pastors and teachers.

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And I just teach what's next. And I don't really want to teach the new stuff and the new insight, but Tim Keller scares me.

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And in the circles we run in, Steve, too many people are quoting Tim Keller, promoting the books, and it's making me nervous because I think they're buying into what he's saying.

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Well, let me just flesh out a little bit, you know, this superfluous comparison

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I'm making here with Rick Warren. Down here, he says, down at the bottom of the first page here, it says, the missional church avoids tribal language, stylized prayer language, unnecessary evangelical pious jargon, and archaic language that seeks to set a spiritual tone.

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And I would say, what is so different about that than saying, we went out and did a survey of the community and found out what they wanted in sermons, and that's what we put in them?

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We want practical stuff. And so what he's saying is, don't do any of the old style church stuff.

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Make it relevant. Make it, you know, something that people can understand. Bring it down to the cultural level.

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And in methodology, I don't think it's any different than Rick Warren. Well, Steve, I think it's not different because what you've done is you've described it perfectly where it's just this, to me, it's a non -biblical approach.

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When Tim Keller says, eventually evangelical churches ensconced in alliteration, oh, and it didn't say that, sorry.

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Eventually evangelical churches ensconced in the declining remaining enclaves of Christendom will have to learn how to become missional.

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If it does not do that, it will decline or die. We don't simply need evangelical churches, but rather missional churches.

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And I just listen to that and think, you know, I just don't get it. I've been to two theological seminaries.

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I think I study quite a bit. And I just, I mean, this is this gnostic information.

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I don't know what he's talking about. Well, let me just summarize it for you. Here's what he's saying.

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He's saying the Bible isn't enough. The Bible isn't sufficient. You can't just preach the Bible and expect people to get saved because you're speaking in a different wavelength.

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It, the Holy Spirit doesn't use your preaching, right? If you're just focused on the

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Bible, he can't use your preaching. What, I think some people know better,

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Steve, but they still keep on quoting this guy and selling his books. Let's think big picture for a second.

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We have a bookstore at Bethlehem Bible Church. True or false? Oh, that's true. That's a big picture. That's the big picture.

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We sell literally millions of pages every decade. That's right.

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Well, we used to sell a lot of books when we got them pretty cheaply at CBD Warehouse. Yeah, before they got all hoity -toity on us.

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That's right. Before they started selling, you know, Reason of God and stuff by Tim Keller. But there's a reason why we don't sell

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Tim Keller books at our bookstore here. There's a reason why if forever, whatever reason

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I'd want to quote him, because sometimes he'd have a good quote or something, I wouldn't say his name. And there's a reason why

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I wouldn't let him come and preach from the pulpit. To me, that is the essence of, do we affirm somebody else's ministry?

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So if I were to say to someone, would you have Tim Keller come and preach? They'd say yes, but I'd say no for these reasons.

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Right, well, A, you can't really trust him. You don't really know what's gonna come, you know, out of the pulpit.

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But also, you don't want people to be broadly influenced by this man. You don't want people to go and, you know,

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Tim Keller's good, so I'm gonna read what he has to say about Genesis 1. Tim Keller's good, so I wanna check out this missional thing and really get missional.

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It is amazing to me because in other parts of this piece here, he says that there are parts of the

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United States where you can, you know, use typical evangelical language and it's understandable, but if you're not in the backwoods where Christianity is still kind of assumed, you can't do that.

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Again, the Bible's not sufficient for you. It's not enough to just declare the words of Jesus, you know, the words of scripture.

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You have to make them relevant. They are not relevant inherently.

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I think this is why we're seeing trouble in the PCA. There are other reasons as well, but you've got the Ligon Duncan kind of PCA, Presbyterian Church of America preacher, pastor, philosophy, and that is similar to what we would have on No Compromise Radio, just sequential verse -by -verse teaching.

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I have a lot of respect for Ligon Duncan. Yeah, could we have him do a conference? I mean, if he would, you know, come on. Yeah, he wouldn't respond to us.

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He'd send us his press kit. No, just kidding. He's a really, you know, humble guy. The Sinclair Fergussons were, what am

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I looking for? Sequential exposition, but Tim Keller's this, it's kind of a West Coast thing, even though he's in New York City, a

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West Coast feel to it. Steve, when I read him say in his article, to enter, you've got to enter into the stories of the culture, it says, to enter means to show sympathy toward and deep acquaintance with the literature, music, theater of the existing cultures, hopes, dreams, and heroic narratives and fears.

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Just everything in me just says that is nonsense. Now, if I know about a culture, let's say

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I'm in biking culture, I am the contextualization of the gospel in the biking culture because I'm a

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Christian who happens to be, I should say cyclist. Yes. If you think biker, you think I'm going to ride up on my motorcycle.

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By the way, once I spoke down in Virginia and it says when Mike is not with his family or work or whatever, he's often seen on this and they put motorcycle on, or he's often seen on his motorcycle.

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So, but anyway, why do I have to engage in societies and show sympathy towards and deep acquaintance with literature, music, and theater?

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There are some of the most godly people that I have read about or know of that have no idea what the culture's literature and music is, and do you have to be an expert in the literature of New York City to preach the gospel to New York City?

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That's the question. And I was just thinking, who does Tim Keller remind us of? He reminds me of more than anybody else.

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And I was thinking about a few theologians, but the person I eventually landed on was Steve Jobs, because he's more of a guru and more of somebody that people look to for deep thoughts.

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They don't go to him necessarily for deep biblical truths. I mean, think about something else he says here.

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The missional church avoids we -them language, disdainful jokes that mock people of different politics and beliefs, and dismissive, disrespectful comments about those who differ with us.

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Well, you know, so it's more, that's, again, an intellectual way of saying what? We don't want to say what we're against.

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We want to say what we're for. Well, what does Titus say that we, you know, the letter to Titus, Paul writes that we need to be able to refute those who contradict sound doctrine.

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Steve, I'm not - That's what we do. I'm not a motive reader, but if I were. If I could get inside the psyche of Tim Keller.

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Now, see, I do this too, although I just don't like it in myself when I do it. How do

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I get people who are the world's equivalent of cool people, intellectually, sports, literature, media?

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How do I get the cool people not to think I'm a troglodyte who believes in six -day creation, penal substitution, literal resurrection, and the exclusivity of the gospel?

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How do I do that? Well, now I engage in art and literature and all that stuff. At the end of the day, though, 1

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Corinthians chapter one says the cross is offensive. So let's just get that out of the way. You think

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I'm a loon? I think you're a pagan. Now let's talk shop. I mean, this idea, again, you know, that it's somehow going to, we're going to appeal to them on some other basis, and it really is kind of like, well, then later on, we'll just kind of slip the truth to them and they won't even know.

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I mean, he says, unless all the above discussing all these aspects of the missional church is the outflow of a truly humbly, humble, gold,

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I can read, humble, bold, gospel -changed heart, it is just marketing and spin.

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And so ultimately what he's saying is, when he's talking about how you do church, he's saying, well, it's church for unbelievers, but we do it in a genuine way so that they don't feel like they're being put on or anything like this.

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And this whole idea of, he divides the world into Christendom. In other words, those people that have been influenced by the outgrowth of Christianity and the gospel and those who live outside of Christendom.

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But he says in Christendom, it is possible to exhort Christianized people to do what they know what they should. Well, so what does that mean?

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That church should be about telling people how to be better, live a better life, be a better husband, be a better neighbor, all these kinds of things.

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And you just go, that's not what the Bible says. This is never the message of the gospel. Steve, when he says in this article, missional church,

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Tim Keller, and the thing is, I will say, because this is just, you have to throw caveats now in our society today, probably 80 % of the stuff that he says in his ministry is correct, maybe it's a higher percentage, but it's this stuff that seems to be so pervasive in what used to be just regular, straight up evangelical churches.

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Here's what it says. To retell means to show how only in Christ can we have freedom without slavery and embracing the other without injustice.

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Now see, this kind of language strikes against Paul's epistle to Romans in Romans 6.

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Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness.

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But thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed and have become slaves of righteousness.

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If someone came to me off the streets of New York City drinking a Pete's coffee down at the corner of 53rd and 3rd and said, does your

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Christianity offer freedom from slavery? Because I'm not into slavery in any way, shape or form.

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Well, I'd sit down with them and I would talk about the Broadway plays. No, and I would have to answer the question.

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Free from sin's slavery and bondage unto free to the yoke of Christ, which is, if you want to use this, it's a form of obedient slavery.

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So everybody's got to serve somebody. So I'll quote him a Bob Dylan line. Well, and it is marvelous to wear turtleneck sweaters and pontificate and say all these kinds of things.

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But here's the question, is all this stuff, all this accoutrement, as we like to say, is that gonna change anyone's lives?

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Is that gonna change a single life? He says here in a missional church, however, Christian community must go beyond to embody a counterculture, showing the world how radically different a

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Christian society is with regard to sex, money, and power. Why do we have to do that?

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Steve, I'll never forget the time I was in Kansas at a Bible conference there, a no compromise conference. And there's a bunch of farmers there.

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So this is interesting. If you want to put this template on New York City or Boston or London or something like that, fine.

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But what do you do in West Boylston where there's 6 ,000 people? And what do you do if you're a farmer? Now, okay, to do proper missional churches, you've got to engage in the culture and literature of the day and all this kind of stuff.

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This is this, your, I think, did you just say hoity -toity on the show or was that another show? Yeah, it must've been another show.

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Must've been another show. Well, it might've been a show. How do we come across as cool and relevant and authentic in front of a media that hates

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Christianity? This isn't it. This isn't the way. We don't endorse this at No Compromise Radio.

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You don't have to do what he says, and that is to know what cultural practices are common grace and to be embraced, what practices of the culture are antithetical to the gospel and must be rejected, and what practices can be adapted or revised.

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I don't want the end game for me to study culture. I study Christ and the Bible, and then

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I'll know what to do with culture, and that is I have a gospel mandate to make disciples.

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But don't you have to exegete the culture? See, that's what's wrong with all this, but it sounds good.

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The guy's smart. He writes well, but I don't wanna be missional. There's nothing missional about Bethlehem Bible Church or No Compromise Radio.

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I don't even know how I would be missional. What do I do? And if I'm not smart enough to figure it out, what about the poor people that attend the church here?

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Well, the whole idea is, again, it's just upside down. It is, the gospel is an offense, but listen to this.

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We also exhibit love rather than hostility or fear toward those whose sexual life patterns are different.

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You know what I call that? That is like an implied straw man. In other words, nobody's saying that we shouldn't,

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I'm not saying that we shouldn't love homosexuals or love these, we do love them, and the most loving thing we can do is call them to repentance.

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You know, that's what's strangely missing here is there is no call to repentance. There is no proclamation of the cross.

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It's odd that he talks over and over again about what a church should be like, and yet we don't see words like Bible, cross, gospel.

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Well, what I think should be done, let's say we buy into this. I would like to see a lot more written in this article about how does a

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Christian who's tempted to become worldly anyway avoid being sucked in by the black hole's gravitational pull of worldliness because it affects everyone.

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So Christian, I know you study the world, you missionalize with the world, you engage in the world, you think what they think, you do what they do unless it is against the gospel, but here's how you should watch out.

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But he doesn't say anything like that. And so I think this is gonna go down in flames, especially when he says a church must be more deeply and practically committed to deeds of compassion and social justice than traditional liberal churches and more deeply and practically committed to evangelism and conversion than traditional fundamentalist churches.

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So there we have it, false dichotomy. You're either a liberal or you're a fundamentalist. The kind of church is profoundly counterintuitive to American observers.

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It breaks their ability to categorize it as liberal or conservative, that is the missional church.

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Well, you know, maybe Tim Keller, to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he's really adept at kind of surfing the cultural wave.

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Maybe he's able to do this and keep things in balance and be biblical. I don't see that, but maybe.

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But what's gonna happen to the next generation? Oh, see, now that's just, now you're bringing up things that we ought not to bring up.

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Well, I mean, the problem is when you set your foundation, as I think he's doing, basically on the edge, the biblical edge and maybe falling over the edge, what happens when the next guy comes along?

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Is he going to pull it back? And it just becomes too personality -driven. And at the end of the day,

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I think what Tim Keller is doing is basically leading a bunch of people off a cliff. Well, Steve, do you like the tolerance talk?

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I mean, I thought D .A. Carson's book about the intolerance of tolerance was an excellent book, but I don't think it's influenced

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Keller yet, maybe this because that's written after this. But Keller says, "'This tolerance should equal or exceed "'that which opposing views show toward Christians.

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"'The charge of intolerance is perhaps the main defeater "'of the gospel in the non -Christian West.'" Really? That is rubbish.

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The main defeater of Christianity in the Western world is something we like to call depravity.

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And I would say, and I know you'll echo the sentiments, there's no defeat of Christianity. Jesus is building

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His church. So here's what I think we ought to do positively. We are called to be stewards who are faithful, 1

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Corinthians 4. And so we aren't adequate for these things. We just preach the gospel, let the

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Holy Spirit do what He does. This Sunday, I'm going to talk about the greatest evangelist is God Himself.

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Not just the person and work of Jesus, but the Holy Spirit. Was that because He exegetes the culture?

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Remember, Jesus is talking to the people. Listen, you want morose, you want aesthetic, you want, ascetic rather, you want

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John the Baptist with, you know, repent and camel haired stuff.

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And you know what? You didn't want that. And so I come along, Jesus says, and I eat with sinners and drink wine with them and have a meal and you call me a glutton.

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And so, you know, you don't want either one. And so it's similar here. And I just think people who want to buy

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Tim Keller's stuff ought to be very careful. And I guess what we're saying today is, what?

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Well, I think if you just compare what he says to the Bible, often

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Tim Keller is found wanting. Yeah, I think there are different ways to go about it with evangelism and there are biblical ways.

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And so we don't want to endorse Tim Keller. I don't want to come across like I don't think he's a Christian, but he's not the kind of Christian that I want to model my ministry after.

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And the stepchildren that follow along in the wake of Tim Keller's ministry, I think it's going to lead us just to liberalism.

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And my suggestion would be read Machen's book, Christianity and Liberalism. And I think you can sort through this stuff because I think he's got liberal tendencies that I want to avoid.

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Well, it almost has to, because when you discuss things like civil justice, that we should be super concerned with social justice and all these other things, then really what you're saying is you're pushing a church towards social activism and social awareness and social relativism rather than just calling them to the

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Bible. Call them to the scriptural standard, show them Christ. Today on No Compromise Radio, Steve and I have talked about the missional church by Tim Keller.

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You could pull it up. I encourage you to read it and then ask yourself the question, is this biblical evangelism?

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And I think you'll answer, this isn't. And so let's go out and make sure we preach the personal work of Christ Jesus to everyone, even though they're going to think we're foolish.

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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 six. 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.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.