Pet Peeves (Part 4)

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 I'm seated here at Bethlehem Bible Church in my study. We have our studios here.

This is not some kind of EIB studio, it's just a regular church studio here with some recording equipment.

I have a Bible. I have a No Compromise beanie here. No Compromise beanies are cool. You should try to get yourself one of those if you're able to.

Always biblical, always provocative, always in that order, and I like to try to teach the Bible. Well, I like to teach the

Bible. Sometimes maybe people think I try to teach the Bible. Good try. You know, hold up a score, you know, number 4 or 4 .5.

I went to a swim meet a while ago and there were some threes and some fours on some of those belly flops, dives.

And today I'd like to continue a series that I've been doing. I started off only one or two weeks, but I like it so much that we will do part four today on pet peeves.

Pet peeves, you may say to yourself, that comes across negatively, but what

I like to do is have an idea for a show, try to do a radio show that I would like to listen to, and then

I teach the negative thing in order to teach the positive. And so for those of you who don't like that and you have a pet peeve when

I go negative, quote unquote, then let me give you my next pet peeve. My next pet peeve is, on No Compromise Radio, is when people say this, we as a church or we as a pastor, pastoral team, or we as an elder board, or we as individual members, we as Christians, we want to be known for what we're for more than what we're against.

We want to be known for positive things, not negative things. We want to be pro.

We don't want to be anti, but we don't want to go around saying negative things about people all the time.

We want to just teach the truth. And so I don't think we should criticize and blast individuals every single day, every single show, every single sermon.

I think you'll see my style of preaching is a little bit different than No Compromise Radio style, at least the

Tuesday through Friday shows. I think you'll see a similarity in the Monday shows of my preaching since Mondays are preaching.

But when people say, I want to be known for something positive and I don't want to be known for something that we're against, that is again at best naive because Jesus Christ has given us his word, he, the incarnate word, and then the apostles.

We have prophets, Moses, et cetera. In the canon of scripture, you have propositional truths, things that are true, and if they are true, then they are against something else.

And so you'll see Jesus, Paul, Peter, the beloved apostle John, you'll see

Isaiah, Ezekiel, all teaching things positively, but then against the backdrop of error, satanic error, fleshly error, you have to teach against something that is basically truth.

If this is true, that is false. If salvation is only through Jesus, it's not through everyone else.

If salvation is by grace alone, it's not through works. If you gauge a false teacher based on what he says and how he lives, these discerning things are not bad for your

Christian health, they're signs of maturity. And so when Paul writes to Titus and he talks about elders, as a matter of fact, if you can't be an elder because you're a woman or you've been disqualified somehow or you're too young, it is still good to imitate what the elders are supposed to do, that is, fidelity to family, fidelity to the gospel, fidelity financially, et cetera.

Those are still good things to want to imitate. And so what does Paul say to Titus in Titus 1, verse 9, as he's giving a list of qualifications for an elder?

He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, why? So that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and all the people who want to be known for what they're for say, hoorah, and also to rebuke those who contradict it.

I don't hear any hoorah in there. You have to be known for what you're for and you have to be known for what you're against.

We are for imputed righteousness, which means we're against infused righteousness.

We are for the right view of the Lord's Supper. We are against transubstantiation.

And the list goes on and on and on and on. We are for inerrancy and infallibility of the

Scripture. We are against the errancy, the errant view of Scripture, and the fallible view of Scripture.

And so when you're for something, you're against something else. That's just the way it goes. And so when you say to yourself, there's a way to solve this problem, what is the answer?

And if you come up with the answer, expository, sequential, verse -by -verse teaching through books of the

Bible, sure you can have a topical series here or there that's textually based. But if the major ministry that you have in the pulpit or your youth group or your

Bible study home group is just teaching through books of the Bible, you will have the exact proportion, the exact percentage of positive and negative in your teaching, because you'll just follow along Scripture.

And so when Paul says in the next verse to Titus, in chapter 1, verse 10, For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party.

They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain, what they ought not to teach.

One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true.

Therefore, rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith. And the word goes on from there.

But let me just stop. So see what happens. For the love of God, if you love me, you will keep my commandments.

For the love of the church, you don't want them to be upset. And I don't mean this as an emotional upsetting, although it later could include that, but upsetting families because there's wrong doctrine being taught about the resurrection, about substitution and atonement, about the deity of Christ, the virgin conception and birth of Christ, etc.

You have to teach the right thing. And if pastors have to do it, well, what pastors do, they are teaching their laypeople to do.

Show me a church and I'll show you the pastor and show me the pastor and I'll show you the church. And so when you say,

I want to be known for what we're for, we don't want to be against things. Well, just look back in history a little bit and think about the great men used by God.

Let's just pick, for instance, Martin Luther. Let's pick, for instance, Calvin.

Let's pick, for instance, we'll just pick a missionary for that matter. Go back to Cranmer. Go back to William Tyndale.

Go back to some of the great heroes of the faith. And they had to stand up for truth. And inevitably, when you teach the

Bible, always when you teach the Bible, when truth is proclaimed, then the naysayers, then the satanically energized people will come and say, no, that isn't true.

You preach too exclusive in your call to salvation. You're too exclusive when it comes to the nature of Christ.

You better be a little more inclusive. And, you know, the whole Rob Bell about Gandhi and hell, etc.

And the list goes on and on and on. And so I have a pet peeve. And that pet peeve is people that just have these slogans.

It's a nice slogan. It catches people. It makes them feel good. We don't go negative.

We don't say things about Mother Teresa. And we don't say things about Joyce Meyer. And we don't say things about Benny Hinn.

We're just up there teaching verse by verse by verse. Well, the second you get to one of those negative verses, perceived quote unquote negative verses, what are you going to do?

Just hop around and just pick all the good stuff? No. So just teach the Bible.

And if you have to stand up and teach truth, then that's the call of the pastor. And if you have to be a century standing at the fortress gates and saying, watch out, then that's what you have to do.

We are to contend earnestly for the once delivered faith. That's Jude, isn't it? And you can just see,

I think it's 22 out of 27 New Testament books deal with false teachers. So how are we going to have that slogan?

We want to be known what we're for, not what we're against. Well, I'm against false teachers. I'm against Mormons who come and Jehovah's Witnesses who come.

I'm against those. Why? Because I'm better? Obviously not. I probably worse in my morality before I was saved.

But then once God has saved me and he said, you know what? You're going to be a herald and you're going to say, here's the good stuff to eat.

Enjoy this. Devour this. And also don't do that. How about parents?

Would you parent that way? Is that how you parent? We want to be known for what we're for, not what we're against.

So that's another one of my pet peeves when people just take the slogan and they don't think through the ramifications.

They think it's good for church growth. They think it's nice for people who are brand new to the church or people just who want, you know, feeling good kind of messages.

But we are called as Christians. Ask yourself, you want to be like Jesus? Jesus was known for what he was for and what he was against, especially when he had a whip in his hand.

The next one, I think this one probably kind of relates. And my name is Mike Abendroth. This is No Compromise Radio Ministry, and I'm trying to just put a few things in a category and the category is pet peeves.

And here's another one of my pet peeves when the church and its leadership and her leadership stoops to trying to be culturally relevant to get people in the door.

James Boyce was right when he said, this is not exact quote, but the meaning is true.

If you do something at your church to get people, to attract them, to get them in your church, and whether that's free car washes or whether that's watered down sappy messages or marriage seminars or extreme makeover kind of series, whatever you do, how do you keep people there?

If you have some way to get people into your church and then now they're there and you want to keep them, you have to keep giving them what got them there.

And so when people are culturally relevant, then they, A, quickly fade out of relevance because you can't be culturally relevant your whole life.

And B, you better sip with a long spoon because this is a thing that's never going to stop.

Once you drink in this stuff, it never ever ends. And so I found a couple of illustrations.

I don't know how old they are, but they're not that old. One was the Country Rock Church and the subtitle here, it looks like kind of burnt paper back in the

Jesse James days. It's getting ready to ride a new kind of church.

See, once you do the new thing, once you say we want to think creatively about church and worship and everything else, it's all sinful after that.

Ask Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10 about their creative worship and God killed them with fire.

We don't do creative worship. We are people who are slaves, as MacArthur would say. We have been bought with a price and we're to glorify

God with our bodies and our minds and our wills and our emotions and our souls and our spirit. Everything.

I think soul and spirit are interchangeable. I'm not a trichotomist, but here's what we do.

We don't stoop to say we have to be relevant now and somehow get people in.

No, not relevant, not popular, not innovative, not creative, but faithful.

Isn't that so much better? It's so much easier. What if I had to be relevant as a pastor? I don't know cultural relevance.

I have my own little culture that I live in with my family and the music that I like and biking that I like and friends that I like and, you know, the ocean that I like.

But how am I relevant to people that come even to Bethlehem Bible Church?

We have males, females, young, old, white, black, Puerto Rican, Indian, and the list goes on and on and on.

How can I be relevant to all them? Some in the urban setting, some in the suburbs. I can't be.

So I have to be faithful to God. He's the one I answer to. He's the one that called me into this ministry. And so once new, creative, authentic, real, all that stuff comes in, it's over.

And it's a pet peeve of mine. Here at Country Rock Church, it's got a picture of a guitar, of course. Starting Sunday, doors open at 6 .30,

show at 7. Yeah, that'll be a real show. That's for sure. Entertaining. For real, top regional bands, pizza, wings, rowdy fun.

And of course, what do we do here with cultural relevance? A short message.

And I don't really mind where it's being held because I'm not a big sacred space guy, although, you know,

I could probably talk about that a little bit at another time, but it's held at The Pub in Sydney.

And then it's got some names of the bands that play.

The Don Fisher Band, Uphill Saints, Timmy G. And then of course, you know, they're off for Mother's Day.

Well, that's culturally relevant too. Country Rock Church, TV station advertised it, you know,

Wings and Beer. I prefer Christ Crucified. I prefer

Christ Alone for Salvation. I prefer expository preaching. I prefer God telling me what to do.

And then by the Spirit's power, I try to do that. Like sing, pray, baptism, Lord's Supper, preach, give, et cetera.

Light has come into the world, but men love darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil, John 3 .19.

I found another one. If you don't really want to have a church that's normal, that's biblical, that's mainstream, and you want to go cool, here's another one on No Compromise Radio Ministry.

By the way, you can get our podcast on iTunes. You can get our podcast on Facebook. You can get our podcast on nocompromiseradio .com.

And you can tune in at WVNE 760. There's lots of ways you can get the information or if you somehow listened and you need a

CD, we'll bring you a CD if we have to. Here is a pet peeve series again, and my second pet peeve is talking about the cultural relevant church.

And I picked a couple of wild examples because they're easy to dissect. And then you can ask yourself the question, is that what we do?

Is that how we go to promote it? How do we promote our church? Short sermons? If you had to say to someone, to an unbeliever or another unbeliever, and you were trying to get them to come to your church, you were trying to persuade them to say,

I'd like you to come to Bethlehem Bible Church, I'd like you to come to Baptist Church, such and such, I'd like to come to such and such

Presbyterian Church. This is why we would suggest you come to the church, to our church, our fellowship, our meeting.

What would you say? Good coffee, lots of parking. I'm not sure we have good coffee and certainly we don't have good parking.

Actually, we try to do the opposite. If you can get through the marshland in our parking lot, so -called parking lot, then you're going to stay.

What do you, how do you advertise? What's the shingle? And if the shingle isn't the exaltation of Jesus Christ, the

God -man, a substitutionary death and resurrection proclaimed in verse by verse, sequential expository preaching with a high view of God and songs that match, et cetera.

Well, then maybe you are culturally relevant or maybe your leaders are culturally relevant.

How about here? I found a hot rod church. Hot rod church. First, it says hot rod.

It's got flames instead of, you know, quotation marks. So hot rod. And then it says church for sinners, church for sinners, redeemed by grace through Christ.

Well, at least it's got that with some fire on it too. And there's a cross. And I don't know if that's a butane lighter there or what it is.

What's happening at a hot rod church. It's got a really kind of a dopey drawing here.

Thin mints for wheels, a guy watching some TV, peddling something. I don't really get that hot rod deal, but here's what it says.

Hot rod church for sinners is a place where all are welcome to rejoice in the victory of Christ Jesus.

Well, at least they've got the victory right. I again, don't really like when people say everybody's welcome.

So you mean to tell me you're a church, but not everybody's welcome? That just goes without saying that's back to the casual church thing.

Join us for breakfast, et cetera. Rockabilly music, fun, owner's manual for life, life tips, et cetera.

Once these things come into vogue, they're irrelevant before they become relevant.

So watch out for cultural relevance. Let's talk about the next thing for pet peeves and no compromise radio.

I think we could do maybe two more or maybe just one more. That is ministries that have the name of the main person as the

URL in your www .jackarmstrong

.com. Why do people do that? You might say, well,

Mike, you're never going to amount to much. And so it'd never be a mikeabendroth .com because nobody would ever want to listen to you, or you could say a lot of different things and probably most of them are true.

But I never want a ministry called Mike Abendroth Ministries. Mike Abendroth, you know,

Oral Roberts University, Bob Jones University. Why do people do that? Now, if the person's dead and gone for a long time, and then we want to say, do you know what, let's start a

Luther Rice seminary. And Luther's been dead for, Luther Rice has been dead for a couple of centuries. And let's just call it that because he stood for something, you know,

Calvin College, for instance. I guess I can understand that a little bit more. And, you know,

Geneva College, there's nothing wrong with that because it's not about a person. You know, John Calvin was even smart enough to know, bury me.

He knew he was gifted by God and he wanted to be buried in a common grave because he didn't want anybody to worship him.

He wanted all the worship on Christ Jesus. He wanted the worship, you know, directed towards God and not him.

You read Calvin and you'll see a man who is jealous for the glory of God and he wants

God to receive the glory. So why are we going to have, you know, I know there's a couple of people that I really respect and they have that in their, you know, so -and -so .org

and it has their name on there, but I just wish they would change it. And you say, well, yeah, but it'll help people remember and they can tune in more and everything else.

It just doesn't need to be done. I don't think it's a case here, so I'll just use his name.

If there's a JohnStott .org, I just find it just grates on me. And you say, well, I don't have any problem with it.

Well, this is my show and I just find it sad. I don't want this to be a

Mike Ebendroth ministry. God is using me. I'm the host. I'm the spokesperson. I'm the pastor.

I get all that, but I don't want the ministries to turn into, you know, it's

Nine Marks ministry. It's not a Mark Dever ministry. I hope the day Mark Dever dies that the ministry goes forward and goes on because of his faithful ministry to the people there and pouring his life into the life of others.

It just doesn't need to be that. So in his case, it's not markdever .com, it's Nine Marks and I applaud that.

And so when we think about our life and when we think about our ministry, this is a place in my ministry.

This is a local church where Christ Jesus is to be king. Now we all want to forward ourselves and push to the front.

And the Bible speaks much about pride and arrogance. And let's let Jesus be the one who says to those in the back, here, come up to the front.

That's a lot better than going to the front and then having Jesus say, why don't you go to the back? And we have to be cognizant of the fact that we have sinful hearts and that we do compromise in this area.

And that's why we have one person that we look to, Jesus Christ, who never compromised in any way, shape, or form.

And actually, even in the economy of the Trinity, how he related to the Father with wonderful 1

Corinthians 11 submission. And so I just wish that people, when they had a ministry, they didn't call it after their own name.

I know that's probably how you get more money. It's more recognizable. If God, you know, grants fame and celebrity status to people, then they use their name to kind of sell it.

But as long as I'm alive and have my right mind, we will never have mikeabendroth .com.

I guess I could type it in to see if it exists. But this is not going to be,

I don't want to do that. You know, my flesh probably does want to do that, but I know better.

And you have to say no to self and yes to Christ Jesus. Well, what else do we have here today for no compromise radio?

Lastly, I think for my last pet peeve for the day is people that just tell you to say no to your sicknesses.

If you're cold, you got a cold, say no to it. If you're sick, say no to it. I don't like it when people are basically saying you should be healed today.

I think we're seeing a trend of certain kinds of diseases. And I talked to Jonathan Nadeau a while ago with him being blind and how people would say that to him.

I even was listening to Eric Lutie the other day, and he was saying some very inappropriate things and sad things about sickness and healing and saying no to that and just wishing all those kind of things away.

And it's easy for a young man like him to say that. But sadly, we're seeing a trend going back to this hyper charismatic movement somehow under the umbrella that God still heals today and God can do whatever he wants.

Of course, God heals today. But does God have people who have the gift of healing today? Is that part of a spiritual gift that's given today?

The answer is obviously no, because if you have it, then you better get to Children's Hospital in Boston or LA or else you're complete fraud.

Just go walk around Children's Hospital in Boston and ask yourself the question, if someone had the gift of healing today, they are the most unloving, hateful person on this planet because they have not gone there to heal those people.

God does heal and he heals through medicine. He heals through prayer.

He heals all kinds of ways providentially. But he does not heal through people anymore.

And there's not healing in the atonement for everything on this earth now. And you don't have to say to yourself, you know,

I'm getting sick and I'm just not going to believe that. I'm going to rebuke it. I'm going to deny it. That is not good theology.

So that's a pet peeve of mine. Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry. I'm your host. And you can write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com.

Get lots of emailers. You can feel free to write us. And if you've got a subject you'd like to have us talk about, we'd love to address that as well.

God bless you. 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 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.