Cancer

Striving for Eternity and the Bible Thumping Wingnut are happy to announce the Judge Not Conference August 11 and 12 in Olmstead Falls, Ohio at Olmstead Falls Baptist Church. Speakers include Phil Johnson, Mike Abendroth, Justin Peters, J .D. Hall and Chris Roseborough.

Also included is a debate at 7pm on Friday on the topic of the Charismatic Gifts. Continuationism versus cessationism. You can register for the Judge Not Conference at judgenotconference .org. Don't miss this awesome opportunity and fellowship on the topic of apologetics and evangelism.

Judge Not Conference, judgenotconference .org. Register today.

Health Update, Cancer Diagnosis, and the Initial Shock

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth and it is a, what is it? It's a Tuesday today as I'm recording shows, but I'm recording them by myself. As you know, we've had kind of a sabbatical the last, really the last year.

About a year ago, I thought I might just pack it in. No co-radio. It's been about, I don't know, seven years daily radio. I don't record them daily, but there's always the knock on the door. That means tomorrow there's another day and another show and uploading the shows and downloading the shows and everything else.

I mean, haven't I said enough? I mean, what else can I say? Anyway, we're still going. We had some health issues and personal things going on and travel, sabbatical, and this is my first new show by myself since I think the end of March.

So at the moment, we're going to still continue with the show. Maybe we do once a week in the future for a couple hours or I don't know exactly how we'll work that. But right now, today, it is in real time, September 5th, 2017.

And we are back doing, well, it's live for me right now. You're going to listen to this recording probably later this week. It was December, I don't know, 12th or 13th of 2016. I was doing a wretched radio show live.

My kids were in town for Christmas and it was an exciting time, you know, Christmas time, everybody's there and food and everything like that. Joyous time. And so I did the radio show and I was thinking to myself, you know, this is essentially national radio.

And here I am on wretched radio talking about the Lord and his word and how privileged I felt and how I thought I was privileged. See what I just did there? Somebody just gave me a book, 40 Days Through the Prayers of Jesus by Cameron.

Who's this? Why is this on my desk? This is from Charisma House. Okay, this is going to have to be another show. And then I checked my phone and there was a voicemail there and it was the doctor. And the second I received that, I knew it was going to be the biopsy came back positive because 10 days earlier, a week earlier, I had biopsy, prostate biopsy because my PSA numbers have gone up over the years.

I'm a bicyclist so that sometimes gives false positives, et cetera. But anyway, I knew because if I'm a doctor and there's no cancer in the biopsy, here's what I say on the voicemail. Happy Merry Christmas.

I don't say Happy Merry Christmas, but Happy New Year and Merry Christmas. Your biopsy results have come back negative. That's good news. If you'd like to call me to talk about it, please do. If not, have a good holiday.

That's what I would do. That's what I suspect they would do. I don't know what the law is or anything like that. Well, he said, this is Dr. So-and-so, please call me. So I knew, I mean, I can just, I was right here in this room at this microphone and then a few minutes later calling.

And so he said, out of the 12 biopsies we took, the core samples, and see, the bad news is I used to sell prostate biopsy guns and equipment. And I know about this stuff. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Yes. And I called him and he said, eight out of 12 have Gleason 6 cancer, which is the best out of the scale. And what we didn't know yet because I had another biopsy later in New York, I won't bore you with all those details.

It was Gleason 7. And so since there's more than just a couple cores and then they give you the percentage of the core that has the cancer. So it could be one core has 15 cancer, another core has 40 cancer.

And there's a book that I read years ago called Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. And it essentially says you have a high PSA if you're a man, you go to the urologist, he does a biopsy, and then they take your prostate out because they are surgeons.

Surgeons do surgery. And it was just warning, making sure you have, you know, not the first PSA to go get biopsies. Anyway, I thought, okay, jumping through all the machinations mentally and what this might mean.

And I got to tell my wife and kids and when and everything else. So that was quite the day. And let me just fast forward a little bit. Now seeing what's happened throughout the different providential experiences and times that I've been comforted and times that I've been able to comfort other people, I now can say wholeheartedly, 2 Corinthians 1 .3, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, plural, and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

Do you understand that? Here's the praise from Paul. Paul's getting attacked. I don't know what it'd ever be like to get attacked, but Paul's getting attacked. And he praises God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, for who he is and what he's done, right?

That's the essence of praise. God, I praise you for who you are and what you've done or what you are doing and what you will do. And then to respond with thanks as well. I don't know why I don't have a good voice today, radio voice.

He goes on to say in this passage, for as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation. And if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you endure the same sufferings that we suffer.

Our hope for you is unshaken for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort. What a great praise. And when you do go through trials, this is probably not original with me.

I know it's not because I've heard other people say it, but if the response is, why me? That would be a bad response to any trial you're in. Medical trial, why me? Well, why not me? God is sovereign over all these things and short of the Lord's return.

An Enoch moment or an Elijah moment, I'm going to get older and die. You read Ecclesiastes 12 and you realize it's hard to see. It's hard to hear. You don't want to be up at a high place because you're going to fall down.

This is all getting older. The old, why didn't God, you know, anybody ever tell me I'm getting older? The answer is look in the mirror every morning or remember how hard it is to get out of the bed or out of a chair or even lose your voice on No Compromise Radio.

By the way, you can write us info at nocompromiseradio .com. I would say most of the emails we've received over the years have been positive. There's a few negative. You can critique, you can do whatever you want.

If it's some dopey ad hominem thing or you've got to get the last word in edgewise, you know, I just usually delete those. It's amazing if you don't argue with people on social media, it dies out pretty quickly because what are they going to argue with?

Just, you know, argue with yourself. I think that's a Billy Idol song, really? Generation X, I'm arguing with myself. Whoa. I began to say to myself, you know, the world has fallen. Adam's sin was imputed to my account and then consequently I'm born a sinful person and there are struggles in life and my dad dies of cancer, my mother dies of cancer, my grandfather dies of cancer, my grandmother dies of cancer.

I mean, it's when I go ride the bicycle, Kim says, don't have a heart attack. And I say, I'm not going to have a heart attack. I'm going to die of cancer someday. Well, that's what I used to say. I don't say that anymore.

Although now maybe I have some aspartame if you've already got it. So what's the show all about? Well, maybe in the old days I wouldn't talk about it as much, but I think this is a good time to praise the Lord in the midst of all these things.

You can rejoice always. It doesn't mean it's not difficult. It doesn't mean there aren't sleepless nights. That doesn't mean that I have not struggled with anxiety and fear. Not that I'm going to die because this is a very treatable disease.

I remember when I interviewed Don Whitney one time, I think it was before NOCO radio when I was doing the local station fill-in here, WVNE. And I asked Don on the radio because he had colon cancer and survived.

I said, Don, what's the spiritual lesson that you've learned in the middle of all this? And he said, get a colonoscopy at age 50. Because if you do that, you're not going to die of colon cancer because it's preventable and treatable early on.

And it's the same thing with prostate cancer. I know lots of men. I've talked to them in the last year. And what do they end up doing? I don't go to the doctor. And I've never been, I mean, at 50, and if it's in your family, 40, you should have a PSA test.

It's a blood test. When they test your triglycerides and everything else, they can do the blood test. And if it's high, don't immediately go get a biopsy, work through the issues and you can get retest and other kinds of tests and other things and MRIs, et cetera.

I've had them all, but at least you can know. And if it's 0 .6 or something, you're good to go. And it's all about loving your spouse and loving the people you minister to and with at the church. I don't want to go do that.

That's basically means I'm selfish. And I don't care about you when, if your spouse said, all I have to do, all you have to do is go get this blood test and we'll know ahead of time. I mean, that seems like it's wanting the best for them, doesn't it?

If you think about what real love is. Well, anyway, back to the story. Can you rejoice? Can you praise God? I mean, so many blessings. I mean, when you have a trial, probably one of the first things you should do is recognize who's put you in this trial and who could excise you from this trial and realize that if you're a Christian, this trial is not going to end forever.

It's not going to last forever because heaven is real and you have to start training your mind because once you start running away with all the different cures for prostate cancer online and spend all your time on that versus thinking biblical truths.

I've looked at peach seed cures, ginger cures, vitamin D cures, saw palmetto. I mean, the list can go on and on and on and on. I tried to talk myself into it. I'm juicing every day and not having monster drinks.

And I don't know if I ever thought about giving up coffee, but however that all works, I've been there and you spend all your time consumed with the cancer and cures and insurance and doctors. And some of that has to be done.

I mean, I had to find, you know, who do I think is the best doctor? Do I have insurance to go get it and get the procedure done that I think out of the 10 prostate cancer, you know, cures, quote unquote, which one do I do?

Because every one of them has got downsides. As much as I might criticize Piper for certain things, his article came to my mind, don't waste your cancer. He had prostate cancer years ago. And how do you waste your cancer?

Will you waste your cancer? I think one of them is just spending all that time online, figuring out cures and possible remedies instead of fixing your hope on who the Lord is and truths. And today I'm reading Psalm 44 through 150 and thinking about God controlling the wind and the snow and how he controls the water.

And, you know, there's a hurricane coming up the Florida coast now. And just thinking how God's in charge of all these things and God's in charge of cancer and God is faithful and he won't leave me and I may suffer and I may have, and I'll tell you about the procedure in just a little bit, you know, it's uncomfortable, but there's a lot of other people and they're in pain.

They have other issues going on and you can always find reasons to thank God, even if it's terminal cancer, right? Because you think God will never leave me nor forsake me. Faithful as he, and he will bring it to pass.

And these verses, you know, your mercies are new every morning and your faithfulness is great. These verses start coming to your mind and you just have to stop, you know, this is going to sound really bad, but I can say it now because, you know, I've gone through it.

When I train dogs, when you train a dog, they become fixated. Even if you watch Caesar with the dog whisper and a dog will become fixated on something and he'll just kind of nudge the dog to kind of bring it back into reality to not get fixated.

And it's the same thing. We have to train ourselves and ask God to help us as we don't become fixated on these temporal things. And that's exactly what Paul was doing. And Paul, if you look at the list of the things he suffered and maybe his eye disease, if that's in fact what he had, that would be a physical thing, but a lot of the other things and they stoned him and he was shipwrecked and he, you know, was homeless.

And when you look at that, the list of things that he went through, Paul was having to fix his mind on who God is. And these were not minor things. It says in chapter one of 2 Corinthians verse eight, for we do not want you to be ignorant brothers.

By the way, you know, you have the Plymouth brethren, you have the separated brethren, you have the ignorant brethren. Dumb, I know. Of the affliction we experienced in Asia, for we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.

Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death, but that was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead. Well, I realize that if I don't have myself nudged by God and fixation stopped, that I'm just going to keep dwelling on all these temporal things and on all the cancer and everything else.

And again, there's nothing wrong with trying to figure out the right insurance and the right procedure. You have to do that. Somebody's got to do it for you. I mean, I had to do that. As my wife and I sit down and we talked to surgeons and we talked to radiation doctors and we talked to all these different people and get the MRI and get the extra test and do this, that, or the other.

Talk to physicians at John Hopkins and in Boston and then in New York City. And then I flew to Los Angeles to talk to a doctor there who was more on the conservative side of treatment. So talk to the radical, you know, procedures and remedies and then talk to the less.

Anyway, the focus, as you can see, so we don't rely on ourselves. These trials, what do they teach us? They teach us we're weak. They teach us we're frail. But then you realize Psalm 103, God is mindful that we're but dust, right?

That's Psalm 103. When I went home and told my wife, and then we've picked a strategic time to then sit down with the kids. And I read Psalm 103 and kind of broke up a little bit and told them I had cancer, but I wanted to try to tell them that it wasn't going to kill me.

I was going to die one day, but it's not going to kill me at the moment because they caught it early. How do you tell kids cancer? And then, you know, dad's not dead soon. But I can say it was one of those times, I mean, I'll never forget.

And I realized trying to anchor our minds and emotions to the word of God about God is sovereign and God is faithful and God is gracious and God is merciful and how we can still praise him, even though it's a bummer.

I got the greatest life and I have a wonderful ministry and a wonderful wife and kids. Wonderful, wonderful. Doesn't it sound like Ed Sullivan? Wonderful. And opportunities for ministry beyond my wildest dreams.

I can really say I never went looking, you know, to go speak and write and, you know, have radio shows and it was never on my radar. The highest honor is to be a pastor and to preach the word verse by verse.

And we've been here 20 years. And as I came back from California last week, I was glad to be back in this little town of 6 ,000 people with our little church where there's less than a little Savior here.

He's a great Savior. And I watch people's lives and see them change by the gospel and see them minister and serve. I go down the list of people. I've had many on this show who just serve the Lord in spite of their troubles and trials.

And that's been very good for me. It's been good for me to realize that I'm weak. It's been good for me to realize that I'm not going to live forever. I've studied Ecclesiastes a lot in the last couple months and without the Lord and recognizing his sovereign control of life and how he gives gifts and how he allows us to take pleasure in just daily things.

Without that, I mean, here's the message of Ecclesiastes, without God involved, dogs die, you die. That's the lesson. But see, there's so much more when you think about who the Lord is. And I mean, I've probably suffered before and there have been trials in my life.

And I think about losing my mother. That was very traumatic as she's dying of cancer. I've thought about church trouble where there's been splits and things like that. But then you think, all right, what about something like this?

Suffering, Weakness, and the Comfort of God

R .C. Sproul says in his book, Surprised by Suffering, the promise of God is not that he will never give us more weight than we want to carry. The promise of God is that he will never put more on us than we can bear.

Now I love R .C. Sproul, but sometimes it's more than we can bear. So we have to run to the Lord and it's like 2 Corinthians 1, we have to rely not on ourselves. Ultimately, the only answer God gave to Job was a revelation of himself.

Now that is the quote from R .C. that I like. Most of the quotes in the book I do like. It was as if God said to him, Job, I am your answer. Job was not asked to trust a plan, but a person, a personal God who is sovereign, wise, and good.

It was as if God said to Job, learn who I am. When you know me, you know enough to handle anything. R .C. Sproul, Surprised by Suffering. He goes on. It is precisely the presence and help of Christ in times of suffering that makes it possible for us to stand up under pressure.

Anyway, we have seen as a family, the hand of God in all this. Before I forget, if you'd like to go to Israel with us, that's February, the last two weeks of February, because it's fairly inexpensive and you only get about a day on average of rain, maybe a day and a half.

So it just cuts down on some of the cost. You can go to Pilgrim Tours, Bethlehem Bible Church, slash No Compromise Radio. That's what you want to look for. Or you can email me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com.

We've seen God's hand in the middle of all this. And so fast forward now, I'm about 81 days into the radiation, the seeds, the brachytherapy. They have 17 day half-life. And so they were inserted, 70 of these seeds in June 14th of this year in New York City, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital, Dr. Zalewski, Michael Zalewski.

And what else do I want to say? Every 17 days, the power goes down in half. So for 17 days, 100, then 50, then 25, then 12 and a half, then 6 .25, then 3 .125. And that's where I am right now. I think I got a couple more days of the 6 .25%.

And what the doctor said would happen has happened. There's been no surprises or anything like that. And there's a few extra things that they're having me try for a good recovery and full recovery. And then in the next couple months and year or two, we'll have some more PSA test.

And then, oh, I don't want to think about it. Maybe another biopsy just to check. And then they'll either bury me or I'll just keep preaching. So all that to say, thank you for your prayers. I fast forwarded to many opportunities.

And now when someone says they have cancer, I have more empathy and more sympathy. When I've told men that I know you need to sit down, you've been diagnosed with possible cancer, you need to sit down with your family and walk them through Psalm 103 and pray with them and talk with them and cry with them.

And then they say, easier said than done. I say that is true, but I've done it. That's actually happened. When people, my dentist says he's got prostate cancer and has surgery, we are having that common bond.

And again, mine is such a minor cancer. My friend Dave has bone cancer. It's so much more painful, so much more invasive, so much more of a bigger issue. So I have nothing to complain about except this voice of mine that needs maybe a shot of cortisone or something.

I don't know what's going on. Anyway, if you want to encourage us at No Compromise Radio, you can. If you want to critique us, you can, however you want to work it. This summer, I pretty much laid low in California, just resting.

And I did preach once at Trinity Bible Church in San Lorenzo Valley outside of Santa Cruz. I preached once at a community Bible in Valley Joe in Vallejo, California. So for Pastor Steve and for Pastor Phil, I preached.

And then I went to Ohio and I spoke at the Judge Not Conference. So that was pretty much it. I'm back now preaching. And in the old days, I'd have my wife just pray that the Word of God would run swiftly, that I'd be faithful to the text.

And then early on in your treatment, she's like, just pray that I don't have to say in the middle of the sermon, let's go to sing great as I faithfulness as I run down to the bathroom. But that's really the least of the problems that I have here.

Ministry, Ecclesiastes, and the Hope That God Is in Control

What else about No Compromise Radio? You always tell your friends, we don't ask for money. Giving down so much, I'm thinking about it. But we do ask that you tell your friends. I think in the old days, I said, tell your millionaire friends, we're just waiting for that one.

That's all you need is just the one who can underwrite the entire thing. I met somebody this summer and somebody told me this person gives houses to pastors. And they said, you need to go meet him. It's a crazy world.

It's a crazy evangelical world. But I want you to know that in spite of cancer, and in spite of all these things the last year, God is faithful. And he has comforted me. And if I could try to comfort you in any situation, I would like to be able to do that here with the staffer personally.

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.