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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 ministry.

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Pastor Mike Abendroth, pastor, executive pastor, Steve Cooley. Executive director of Everything Ministries here.

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Mm hmm. Yeah. It's a big title. Mm hmm. Those new business cards. Remember business cards?

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Yeah. Well, I've kind of gone to business brochures myself because, you know, when you have as many responsibilities as I do, it's -

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Remember PowerPoint? I just always think,

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Steve, when the study came out, I don't know, six months ago, that PowerPoint really doesn't make people memorize and remember the data as much as the original

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PowerPoint purveyors told us that it would. And I just thought all those pastors that spend all that time, you know, putting

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PowerPoint up. I'm not talking about Sunday school or, you know, it has its uses, but on Sunday morning, give me a pastor, give me a

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Bible. And I think, you know, and the notes, that's all you need. Well, the best illustrations are from TV shows and movie clips.

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Those are the ones. I'm telling you, I about hurl. You can just think of an invasion of the body snatchers, throw up scenes or something.

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When I watch a pastor and then they have a little break to show the little Braveheart clip or something, or, you know,

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Ms. Small, Aim Small, Miss Small, or something from - Would you trade every day?

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Gladiator stuff. And I'm just like - I'm not entertained. I mean, can't you just describe that, right?

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When you think about media, there are some scenes because they're either brilliantly done or they're a gruesome or all of the above that you can't get out of your mind.

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I mean, they are impactful. They are emotional, they're heart -wrenching, they draw you in, of course, and they're great at it and good for them.

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But to put that in a sermon? What about the parallels between Satan and the alien, you know, from the -

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That's Gospel Coalition's job. Didn't they just say something about, you know, Christians out of all people need to stand against, you know, alien

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AI stuff or something? Who knows what - they've written all they need to about the gospel and it's just time to now close, except I'm sure the payroll is large.

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The post -Gospel Coalition. The new - you know, here's a good question. What is the

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Gospel Coalition doing with their - do you see the gospel in this movie series when there's no movies?

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What do you do then? Whatever streaming, you know?

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Indian matchmaking. The gospel in Indian matchmaking. See, you have the matchmaker, the

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Holy Spirit, and then you have the father who's like the father who then sends the son to go rescue - see, we can do that.

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Indian matchmaking. You know, right on the same line. I posted this yesterday. Can you tell me what you think? I said, I said, if your gospel causes you to lock arms with those who hate

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Christ and oppose those who preach the gospel, you have another gospel.

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Does that have anything to do with Democrats? It has something to do with Gospel Coalition. And I'm just like, if you're, if you want to say you're for the gospel, and then you spend,

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I don't know, let's say, I'll just pick a date out of a hat, a Sunday afternoon marching down the street with people who hate the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Oh yeah, absolutely. And you criticize those who proclaim the gospel, you know, like they're heretics, like they're the, like they're the enemy.

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I don't know what that says about, about your gospel. So to B .D. Enewaly, he, he, he marched, didn't he?

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Did Jonathan Lehman march? Yes, he did. Yeah. Jonathan Lehman, did he march? I believe so.

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Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I watched a little video yesterday. Today is August 20th in real time, but this will probably play in early

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September. I watched a video of Dever and Lehman, and Lehman was basically telling everybody why, you know, they, you don't want to divide over abortion.

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And, and given in my mind the reasons why a Christian could vote for a

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Democrat. And then it was weird because Dever was leaning way away from him.

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I don't think he realized he was doing it. And I know Dever's the one who's given platforms to all these people and has lots of Democrats at the church there at Capitol Hill, et cetera.

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But it was weird. Watches his movements and he's like backing up. I'm not, I'm not going for this so much.

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Pretty, pretty weird, weird times when, you know, men, I mean, we used to like sit and listen to these guys and think, oh, that's good.

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Oh, that's good. Oh, that's good. And now to watch what they're doing, it's, it's, it's hard to take.

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I know. Steve, let's, let's talk about that for a second. So if you listen to men preach and teach and you think, okay, they're faithful to the text, they're

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Christ exalting. They have a little bit of a different eschatology or maybe their view of ecclesiology, i .e.

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baptism is different. A lot of those things we don't even, I don't bat an eye when

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I listen to Sinclair Ferguson and I don't even know if he's historic premial or amial.

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My guess is he's amial. And I don't care that he's Pato Baptist and not a Credo Baptist.

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And those kinds of things, I just go, hmm, and maybe he's a little more union than just solo than justification by faith in terms of importance or priority in Calvin's view or whatever.

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I never think of that when I listen to him and it's never a, I got to stop listening to this guy.

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But when it comes to critical race theory, woke stuff, white privilege stuff, black lives matter stuff, let's make sure you don't have any conscience so you can vote for Democrats and sleep at night.

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I go, you know what? I'm done. Yeah. I can't, I can't respect them anymore and I can't listen to them.

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I mean, even if what they were preaching out of the Bible were true and right, I can't bifurcate, you know,

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I can't divide myself from everything else that's going on. I can't do that.

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Yeah. If they wanted to say, listen, voting is a conscience issue.

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If you want to vote for Trump, President Trump, you can.

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If you want to abstain because you can't, you don't like the man and you think he's immoral or whatever, then that's an option.

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But this whole abortion issue, I responded, but I had to delete it because I misspelled something.

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Then I couldn't find the original tweet. And I wrote to nine marks and to Tom, Tom Buck, who is criticizing or critiquing the nine marks deal.

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I said, yeah, abortion does divide a baby up into a hundred little pieces. Yeah. It's very divisive.

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And so to have that as the platform, uh, it's just crazy to me. So as I've watched the evangelical landscape,

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I've seen so many people who have bought into this, uh, ideology.

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And I don't know if they know it's from, uh, uh, people that they ought not to be listening to and it's a hermeneutical issue and other things, but I just go, you know what?

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I mean, my Greg Gilbert book on what is a gospel, that's excellent to give to people. I'm not going to criticize those who say, well, you know what?

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We can never promote nine marks again, or this, that, or the other, uh, in terms of their old stuff.

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But in terms of me listening and wanting to know what they say and hear, I just turned the channel. It's just, there is such,

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I mean, abortion is such an issue for me, um, as I even just think about it.

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Or, or if I hear a politician say something like, well, you know, it's a woman's right to choose and all these kinds of things.

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I mean, I, I showed you a picture earlier of a sign that was out in front of a church, you know, that a woman should have, uh, was, you know, dominion over her body.

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Okay. I have no problem with that. The problem is that's not her body that she's putting to death that, and you know, that's if it was, if it was her body, we'd have a whole separate discussion, right?

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Totally. And if she has a boy in her womb, that boy has male genitalia. And so now that woman has male genitalia, that's her body?

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No. A separate DNA, you know, I mean, I, the, the whole idea of it being her body is, um, it's scientifically wrong.

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It's theologically wrong. It's just wrong on every level, but it appeals to a certain emotion within us.

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That being that we like to sin, what is what I would say. And so, um, Right.

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And you, and you know what, Steve? How clever are people, even fallen people, when you say black lives matter?

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Okay. If I didn't think of an organization, a terrorist organization, then I, I wouldn't say to myself,

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Oh, that's a bad slogan. Uh, but it means something. So when you have the slogan, you know, it's my body, my choice.

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Well, okay. If I want to decide to have a radiation for my prostate cancer or to have it cut out or to do proton or photon therapy, our long blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah therapy.

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That's my body. My choice. That's true. Right. But the slogan is tricky. You have to be careful.

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This is, this is language of, you know, what's the Orwellian, um, animal farm thing.

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You know, all pigs are, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal. Well, I mean, there are a lot of slogans going around.

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I mean, I, I have, you know, this is obviously not a Christian, but a Mormon relative of mine who says, you know, some political parties only care about babies after they're born or, you know, they only, well, before they're born,

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I should say. In other words, they only care about stopping abortion. Once the baby's born, they don't care about them.

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And I'm like, that's not true. That is absolutely not true. But you know, it makes for a nice slogan and it's a nice justification for somebody who claims to be a

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Christian to approve of abortion. You know, well, because that baby wasn't going to be cared for after he or she was born anyway, which is ultimately false.

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Crazy. Well, on the upside, the positive side, there are still men who have held their ground when it comes to all these crazy things in the last really five years, maybe 10 years, maybe dating back to 2010 with some

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Tim Keller stuff there, but there are men who have held the ground. And that's one other reason why, Steve, I think it's important for us to recommend people read older saints that have died, have been published, and while they've been certainly less than perfect men on earth, they were faithful to the end by the grace of God.

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I mean, we don't have to wonder about what, you know, John Owen's trajectory is going to be, right? His new book that's coming out, you know, is it going to devastate evangelicalism, you know?

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Well, you know what? He was invited to the Shepherd's Conference for 20 years, Al Mohler was, then he was disinvited or didn't want to show up.

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Owen has been there for 25 years. He wasn't invited back. Well, I've been reading a lot of John Owen, as some of the social media people know, and just telling

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Steve today, can you imagine being a pastor and a dad and losing, he was alive for all 10 of his children, 10 children died, and they weren't all in birth, childbirth.

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And then his wife died. And you think, you know what? Those are the kind of people who suffer, and yet still his focus was,

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I want the glory of Christ to be shown. And that's just something that I want to be, right?

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I want to say, you know what, Lord, only you could do that. I mean, how many people lose a child and their marriages break up and they say,

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I can't believe anymore. How about 10? It would be unbelievable. I'm just sitting here,

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I'm rubbing my forehead, I'm just thinking about, I've done a number of funerals lately.

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And just reflecting on funerals and the way that believers have responded to loss.

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I think of one woman who lost her husband, and, you know, indirectly, I blame myself for his death.

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And you know, the way she was right after it, she was like, Oh, no, you know, and then asking me to preach the gospel at the funeral, give me a great big hug, and a kiss on the cheek after I was done.

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And I just, and I just did her funeral seven, seven years after her husband's. And I just thought there was somebody who wasn't focused on the moment, but was focused on eternity, who understood what, you know, life ultimately meant.

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Or Mary Ellen, you know, here recently, losing Larry, and, you know, just so the very next

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Sunday, right there in church, you know, didn't miss a beat, and you just go, that's, that's how we should, and you know, that's

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John Owen, right? Loss after loss after loss. Why? Because you trust the Lord, and you don't just trust him in the here and now, you trust him in the long haul.

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You understand that whatever he's doing is right, and in the end, you're going to be, you know, your children, your wife are going to be in heaven, and you know, praise the

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Lord. So true. Think about Hebrews 13, when you have a leader, the writer of Hebrews says you're to imitate their faith.

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And of course, on this show, and I'm very attuned to the fact that faith and faithfulness are different, they're related, they're separate categories, but inseparable in terms of life, imitate their faith.

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These Hebrews 11 Hall of Faith people who had the right object, they suffered a lot.

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They were sinful a lot, but they had the right object of their faith. And so, imitate their faith. They kept, in other words, they kept trusting in their

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Savior, no matter what came to them in their life. It was cancer, it was death, it was

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COVID, it was this, it was that, whatever it is, and the world is a bad place, and it's fallen, and therefore, lots of bad things happen.

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I mean, I can't believe how many things I've had to fix around the house lately, and the car, and you know, the muffler falls off a couple nights ago, and then flies up into the brake line, and the brakes go out, and Haley pulls over, she's safe, and I go pick her up, and now it's the brake line, it's the brakes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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A lot of bad things happen. But there are people, think about Dave and Deb Jeffries, who used to be here at the church. How many children did they lose in childbirth?

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One after another, after another. Heartbroken? Yes. Cry themselves to sleep at night? Yes. But still trusting in the

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Lord? That's what you know what real saving faith is, the faith that God gives that you endure even though, even in spite of.

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And I think that's really what we're after. If we preach a to -do moralism all the time, what do these people do when the real bad things happen?

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It works well if you're 25 and everything's going great, but when you're older or when there's a disaster, that's why they need to know who

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Jesus is. You said something to me earlier, Steve, today about preaching sermons.

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What did we learn about Jesus? What did we learn about what He's done? Something like that that you said, and I thought, that's right, that's a good test for a sermon.

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Did it tell me and inform me more about the triune God and how He deals with people? Well, did I learn, I guess what

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I was also saying was, you know, did I learn more about this passage? You know, yes,

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I want to learn more about Jesus and I want to learn more about this text and how it fits into the overall scheme of things, you know, like I'm preaching through John.

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I want to know, you know, I kind of want to stay in the mindset of what's

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John thinking? Why is he writing this? Why is he leaving these kinds of things out? And, you know, ask myself those kind of questions so that I can answer them when

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I give my sermon. And I know you would agree, those two focal points converge in the sense that as I learn more about this passage,

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I'll learn how it fits in either, you know, minutely or in a major way in the theme of redemption.

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There is one story to the Bible and we see that played out. So my name is Mike Abendroth.

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I'm here with Pastor Steve Cooley. It's kind of fun to do these shows, right? People would not be, they probably would find it odd that we don't have any scripts or anything, manuscripts.

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You ever read a manuscript on the radio or from the pulpit? Word for word, hand it out to the congregation? No, I don't do that.

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I mean, you dog me because I do manuscript out my sermons, but, you know,

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I think if I handed you a manuscript and encourage you to read along, you'd go, he's not really doing this. You know,

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I mean, some of it, some of it you go, yeah, I recognize that. I mean, sometimes I hit upon a little flourish, a little turn of a phrase and I'm like, oh boy, that's staying in my sermon, right?

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No matter what. You have to quick write that down for the second service. When you preach two times and then we're back to preaching two times again because of how many people we fit in this building, do you like your first sermons better, your second sermons better?

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What's better about each of them or why? Usually, well, I mean, usually I've liked the second one, but the last couple,

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I think the first one better. And it just seemed to me like, I mean, it was almost like I felt like I had, maybe

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I get a little too cocky after the first one, if I really liked the first one. And I'm not, I'm not as,

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I don't want to say tied to my outline or whatever, but I somehow I just kind of veer too far out,

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I think, I don't know. So, but usually what I think is, as I'm going through it the first time,

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I'll find little odds and ends that I don't like, even while I'm going through the sermon, I'll go, boy, that was dumb.

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I mean, like in my head. And so like, I'll make a mental note to do something different the second time, you know?

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So usually I like the second one better. Well, I didn't do it last week. I was too tired with jet lag, but often

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I come in here on Friday and Saturday and record a couple of shows talking about my sermon, but in a radio style, that's kind of good because I, I hear myself and I go, uh, it seemed good in the study, but it doesn't sound good now.

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I find that if I preach two times, my first sermon is usually more enthusiastic because it's earlier in the day.

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And then my second one's more polished, uh, in terms of articulation and stuff like that.

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But sometimes they switch around, uh, in the old days, Steve, when we had Sunday morning, Sunday night, if I, if I thought

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I homiletically did a pretty good job on Sunday morning, I usually dreaded Sunday night because I thought, uh,

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I'm exalted and I'm going to be humbled. Yeah. There's a, there's no way this one's going to be as good as that one. And so now without two services, it's interesting.

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I went to Sacramento to preach Steve Meister's up there. If you're in Sacramento, a manual Baptist church,

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I'd highly recommend it. We had about 300 people sitting outside for a service. It was, I don't know, 90 some degrees to Sacramento, although this was in Roseville.

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But anyway, Sunday morning and I hadn't preached for five weeks, Sunday morning, I thought, you know what?

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Faithful to the text, Christ was exalted. People came up and said, I'm encouraged. And I was encouraged.

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But then I thought, Oh, I've got a Sunday night too. And wouldn't you know, I know it's from the

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Bible and all that, but I just felt homiletically I bombed it. Well, I mean, it's almost like, you know, if you have a good

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Sunday morning, you need, you want to kind of go home and just, you want to relax or whatever. But on the other hand, you're like, okay, if I relax tonight's just not going to be.

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I know. I know. I want to go home and have the pre -trib rapture be true. Well, I always say that before I preach,

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Lord, if you're coming today, I want right now. Right. I mean, I wouldn't get up and pray that right before I preached, but I think in my head.

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Yeah. Cause that'd be almost as bad as saying, you know what? I've been sick all week. Yeah. Or, or the classic, this was from seminary.

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Somebody actually did this. I don't really have anything new to say today. I'll never forget what the prophet said.

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He goes, well, then sit down. Unless you said, and to quote

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Charles Hodge, it was my desire after being at Princeton for 40 years, not to teach anything new in the

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Christian faith, there would be a way to go about it. He was like, I don't really have anything to say to you guys that you don't already know.

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And he's just like, well, then sit down. I've heard people get up and preach before. It's funny. A few

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Sundays ago, the guy that got up and preached, he was associate pastor in Santa Cruz and he was out in the sun and his iPad said too hot, you know, shutting off kind of thing.

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And then he just winged it. I don't know if everybody knew, but I knew. And I thought that's pretty good.

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So you see all these weird things that happen and, you know, you've and I have heard sermons and people get up and, you know, when you're nervous, they just, you know, tell you to just imagine everybody's without clothes and stuff.

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I'm probably the king of saying things that aren't on my, it's on my mind, but I maybe shouldn't say, but I didn't say that.

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Yeah, that would be bad. That would be really bad. I, you know, what do I do if I, well, first of all,

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I haven't gone to iPad preaching, but you know, if they all disappeared, I, in my mind, I think what

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I'd be thinking is, this was a bad week not to have an outline, you know, cause sometimes you have a really good outline and sometimes, especially when you're going through a narrative like I am right now, the outline doesn't really pop for you.

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And so you're like, well, you know what, I'm not going to have a formal outline. Well, if you got no notes,

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I know the formal, formal outline. I mean, like when I preached a couple of weeks ago with the, the four

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Fs, I could have done that almost without notes, you know? So it's like the better your outline is, the easier it is to not need any notes.

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And as our listeners who teach the Bible will, amen. Once you unlock the outline to your passage, it's, you're now going down the other side of the mountain.

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Climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, outline. Now it's fill it in. Yeah. I just, I always hate, cause we were talking about the next passage in John for me.

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And I'm like, I always hate when I, when I'm just like, oh man, I just really have no idea how to preach this.

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And, you know, and, and it's really terrible if you don't get to like, okay, I know what I'm doing until like Saturday afternoon.

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I know, I know, I used to, uh, regularly, uh, print out my sermons on Friday before I left the office.

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And I could look at them on Saturday and Sunday and make the notes on the paper. And then sometimes I would have to change things so much.

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I didn't need to reprint it and didn't really have the right printer at home. So I'd wait until Sunday morning printing, then everybody's here printing their

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Sunday school lessons. Anything else? And the one person said to me, well, pastor, you know, I'm standing here and I was going to copy something, but then this stuff just started shutting up as a spitting out papers.

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And so I just hit shut off, you know, I just hit delete. Thanks a lot.

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Which that is the nice part about iPad preaching because I never have to go, I've got to get the paper, the inks run out.

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What do I do? Yep. Yep. Big, big edge there. Of course I print them out at home, so I don't have that issue.

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So. Well, that's, that's good. Yeah. All right. Well, time has gone by.

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At the moment, by the way, we still are planning to go to Israel in 2021, February.

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I'm, you know, I used to think 80 % go, now 50%, then 50%. I don't know. It's probably 25%, but we don't have to decide till I think at the end of October.

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So if you're interested, you can always write me, Mike at NoCompromiseRadio .com, but I think people are probably shutting things up.

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Yeah. If I were you, I would decide like the day after the election, because that's, that's when the virus goes away.

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It's so crazy. And if they want to write you, Steve, are they able to?

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No. Okay. Well, that makes it super simple. What if they wanted to send money or something? Nope.

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Not interested. 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.