Facebook Sins

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.

Personal Update and Everyday Banter

Mike Abendroth here. It was pretty sunny earlier in the day. In real time, it is about the 10th of April here in beautiful downtown Burbank, right off Buena Vista Street, in my dreams. No, I'm in Massachusetts, central Massachusetts, and I'm happy to be here because you are to bloom where you're planted, right?

It doesn't really seem like my home in the sense that I'd like to retire here, but it is my home, and I've been here for over 16 years, and I don't have an accent for the most part regarding, at least in terms of New England accents, although sometimes I say I dear, or what else do I like to say sometimes?

I don't know. There's an R that slips into the word there occasionally, but I try not to make it so. I try to root for the San Francisco Giants against the Red Sox, and the Giants have made it easy the last few years to do that.

So have the Red Sox. So haven't the Red Sox. So don't I. And I root for the Lakers. I only go to one basketball game a year here, and I go to the Celtics-Lakers game. I have great seats, and they're really close up to the guys, and you know, I mean, he doesn't play basketball pro anymore.

He's a coach, but my family used to watch Duke basketball when they were younger, and they would know Christian Laettner, and they would know Bobby Hurley, and I like to say to my kids, I'm shorter than Bobby Hurley, even though I'm, well, I used to be 6 '1 1 -1 -1.

He's probably 6 '1 or something like that, and he looked like a midget out on the court compared to these other guys. So anyway, my cape and draughts here. I'm not in Southern California, and I prefer Northern California to Southern California, but to each his own, right?

You probably like Dunkin' Donuts coffee, and I like Pete's coffee. I pretty much like anything now as I'm on the MyFitnessPal, starving. Everything looks good. I typed in the other day on MyFitnessPal, Dairy Queen vanilla cone dipped in chocolate, and it came up.

I think it was close to 500 calories for a medium, three-something for a small. So if you've got 500 calories to burn, just think, why don't you just have one of those every day? In seven days, you'd gain a pound.

Just a pound a week, it's the Dairy Queen diet. All right, we've been talking about federal headship in Romans chapter five, but before I do, I just got off the phone with my friend who's a pastor, and he was telling me about some of the church problems that he was having and how people are using Facebook to slander.

Facebook Sins and Sowing Discord

Now, just let me give you a generic comment, just a pastoral help. Just don't say so much stuff on Facebook. Be careful what you say. I'm not anti-Facebook. You know, it's sin if you have it. Pretty close, but not quite.

But it is so easy to sin on Facebook, isn't it? Now, when I went through a big church split here in the year 2000, if there would have been Facebook, I'm sure I would have been slandered on that because every other podcast possible way was used to slander and to hurt and to try to destroy.

The bad news was the people who tried to do it forgot that they were trying to mess with God's church. That's always the bad thing. Even though we want to do things, we want to strike out and lash out, and people upset us in various ways, shapes, and forms, there's a righteous way to go about things.

And so, just after talking to my friend on the phone for a little bit, in the middle of the church split and church chaos and all that stuff, I guess people think that it's Kings X if you want to speak down, as James Ford would call it, or slander or gossip that it's somehow okay to do on Facebook.

When really, later, when you have to repent, you're going to need to do the same thing on Facebook. But how many people do that? You know, the extent of your sin should be the extent of your repentance, and so if you tell 50 people that the pastor's sinful and demonic, and then you come to your senses, you repent, then you're going to need to tell those 50 people, right?

So then why would you ever get on Facebook? You have 2 ,000 friends, and you're going to say all these things because it's just what's inside of a person that has to flare up against God's ordained leadership.

You have to read about Korah in the Old Testament and see what God thinks about rebellion against God-ordained leadership. Am I saying leadership is always perfect and without sin? I'm not saying that.

But submission is a biblical truth, and when you don't get your way, and then you get on Facebook and just launch—I mean, we've all done the same thing on email, too, right? We send an email, and we just shouldn't have sent that email.

Well, lots of times that email is just to one person, but when it goes out to everybody in the world—I know people who've lost their jobs from Facebook and have gotten called on the carpet on Facebook, can't get jobs because they just—can I just say it in a no-compromise way ?—because they run their mouths on Facebook.

Now I know something about you if you run your mouth on Facebook. You run your mouth in life, too. So aren't you glad there's the gospel for you? Aren't you glad that you don't have to have sin reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions?

Aren't you glad that you don't have to present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life and your members to God as instruments for righteousness?

Romans 6 goes on to say, "...for sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.". And so, there's a way that we can make things right. But sadly, then pride gets involved, and then we can't go back and do the right thing.

So today on No Compromise Radio, before we get into Federal Headship, I just want to remind you, be careful what you say. Oh, be careful, little ears, what you hear, right, and be careful, little mouth, what you say, for the Lord above is looking down in love, or with a chagrin face, as it were, when we say things that we ought not to.

Isn't it Proverbs 6? Since I'm just on the topic, I might as well talk about it a little bit. I guess I have thick skin these days, and it still hurts in a sense, but it's a different kind of hurt because it happens so often, and if you're a public figure, not like I'm a famous public figure on No Compromise Radio, but the ministry has expanded beyond the walls of the West Boylston building, so you've got to take your shots, and if you're going to be No Compromise style, you better not be broken and wounded when people come after you.

The Bible says in Proverbs 6, there are six things that the Lord, Yahweh, hates, seven that are an abomination to Him. So how do you use language, Hebrew language, and emphasize different parts of the sentence or of your thought?

Well, you could do it a few different ways, right? We've learned this today, or we learned this on No Compromise Radio. You could say, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. The whole earth is full of His glory, Isaiah chapter 6.

Saying something three times would emphasize it, wouldn't it, and emphasize it in English as well. It is not talking about the Father's holy, the Son's holy, the Spirit's holy, see the Trinity in Isaiah 6.

I believe the triune God is spoken of in Isaiah 6, but it's not an overt, explicit teaching that this means the Trinity. No, it just means emphasis. It's bold, it's highlighted. I prepare my messages on the computer, and then I highlight them in yellow, make them bold.

I started off with font 11 when I was younger, then it went to 12, and then it quickly went to 13. So quickly going to 14 is right up there too. My Microsoft Word for Mac, though, doesn't have the 13 preset built in, so I have to type it in every single time, 13, 13.

So I might as well just go to 14. Sometimes I make it 16 or 18, a little sentence or a phrase, so I see that, and there's emphatic description designation for me. Well, what else could you do? You could say three things the same way, but different words.

In other words, you could say sanctified, set apart, and holy. I'm trying to think of a biblical illustration of that. Can't think of it at the moment, but then you can do this. Six things the Lord hates, yes, even seven, emphasizing the seventh.

It doesn't mean there's six, oops, oh, you know what? Now that I think about it, there's seven. There's two members of the Trinity, yes, even three. That's not what he's saying. It is a way to write poetry, Proverbs, you can tell is poetry for lots of reasons, why?

Because the ESV indents it, and see, there you go. There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him, and so the last one, the seventh one, gets the emphasis. Oh, they're all an abomination to the Lord, but the last one is an extra, an abomination, a double abomination.

It is an emphatic abomination. Haughty eyes, don't you kind of hate that? I hated it myself. Haughty eyes. A lying tongue, Lord hates that too. Hands that shed innocent blood, we would all say, yes, the Lord hates that.

Abortion doctors, abortion, abortion mills, and other kinds of murder. A heart that devises wicked plans, can you imagine God gave us creativity as we are image bearers and we are to create wonderful things and good things and tremendous things?

Feet that make haste to run to evil, we are given feet and hands and a body, instrument of righteousness, so we can do God's work and God's will. A false witness who breathes out lies, and then finally, there are six things the Lord hates, seven that are abomination to Him.

And the one, here's number seven, and the one who sows discord among brothers. Sowing discord among brothers, that's at the bottom of the list technically, but poetically, in a literary fashion, that's at the top of the list.

If you had to say something about this list, you could say in descending order, in ascending order, the one who sows discord among brothers. You don't want to do that, do you? If you've been saved by grace alone, and if you've been justified by Christ's work, you realize you have no righteousness to give to God, and He gave you freely to you, expensively for Him and the Son, then you want to respond properly.

The church isn't yours, the church isn't the pastor's, the church is the Lord's. And there are ways to do things. Oh, if the pastor's in sin, 1 Timothy chapter 5 makes it clear how you ought to take care of that issue.

We shouldn't show any partiality to those in sin who are elders and leaders and pastors, and they should be rebuked in the presence of all, so people are afraid. That's what the text clearly teaches. But what we do when we're not thinking properly, and we get the mob mentality, the herd mentality, the lynch them mentality, is we just forget ourselves, and we just get caught up in the things.

That's why pastors who are at churches where people get caught up in trying to lynch them, maybe sometimes more than figuratively, still they have to, I think, act properly before the Lord, because some of those people one day will come to their senses and say, I don't know what I was doing.

I don't know what came over me. Do you think you could forgive me, please? Because what I did was wrong. And so you just want to be careful. If you're at a church and you don't like the leadership, well, then let's give you a few different options.

I can tell we're not going to get into federal headship today. Let me give you a few options. Number one, would you pray for the leadership? I don't have a list here. This is just off the top of my head.

Pray for the leadership. Why don't you pray something wild like this? Lord, would you make this person so popular? Would you hone their gifts and skills and preaching and leadership, discipleship to such a level where another church, maybe it's a larger church, maybe it's a more godly church.

Large and godly don't necessarily mean that they're the same, but that they would come and take him off our hands. Instead of let's fire the guy and let's get rid of the guy and let's take away the guy's house if he's got a parsonage, his insurance, his medical stuff.

Let's lock him out of the church. Instead of that. Now, of course, if the pastor runs off with some other lady that's not his wife, there's a way to deal with that kind of sin. If the pastor denies the triune nature of God, one God subsisting in three persons, well, there's a way to deal with that.

I'm saying, if you've got a heretic for a pastor, you should fire him. If you have a pastor who falls into moral sin, I think you should fire him too. But remember, he's got a family. There's a way to deal with sin, and it's called Matthew chapter 18.

It's called Titus chapter 3. It's called 1 Timothy chapter 5. And the second you don't do what those passages say, you're wrong. The way you're going about it in this mentality, let's fire people like they fire them at work, like unions fire people, like Steinbrenner fired people.

Let's go. Let's join together. And by the way, the more people we can get on our side as we spread slander and gossip and defame people, then it must be right because might makes right and numbers make majority and moral majority is right here.

So let's get the person. Let's get them. But here the Bible says God hates this sowing of discord. So why don't you just pray for your pastor? Probably before you go talk to anybody else, if you think your pastor's not loving, you think your pastor's in some sin and he's self-righteous and he's this, that, and the other, why don't you pray for him?

Pray for another church that might take him away from you. And why don't you just pray that he would have victory over those sins and he would realize he's in union with Christ and he doesn't have to do those sins anymore and sins not domineering over him anymore, and that he would grow in grace.

Wouldn't that be good? Wouldn't that, what would you want? That's a good question. If you were the pastor, what would you want? Everybody on Facebook and everybody going down to the sanctuary for the big meeting to slay the pastor, call all the people who used to be members who aren't anymore.

Do you have any dirt on the guy? And let's come down for a good old lynching and we can all publicly sin by slander and gossip and backbiting and unbiblical confrontation together. Would you want that for you?

Now think about it. Is that what you would want for you? I don't think you would. I think you'd say, well, I'd rather have somebody just come to me and say, pastor, I noticed this, I've been praying for that, and how could I help you?

How could I help you with this sin of self-righteousness or the sin of whatever the sin the pastor has? That would be the way to go about it. Then if you see the pastor continuing to do these things, and you've already examined your own heart and you see how you personally, in Matthew 7, with righteous judgment realize that you fall so short too, and everybody's learning, and the only sinless one is Christ Jesus, the chief shepherd, the great shepherd, the good shepherd, the New Testament calls Christ, focusing on Him, Christ Jesus, the Lord, looking past your pastor, looking to the passages that your pastor teaches about Christ Jesus, having Christ be your all in all, being happy that you get to know the Lord rather that you are known by Him, versus the pastor is to be the need meter of every person in the church, what would you like to have done to you?

Facebook comments, comments about your wife, comments about your children, personal comments? Is that what pleases the Lord? Friends, it happens all the time, and the second I hear about it, I always side with the pastor.

Now, that hasn't always proved me true, but the default is when someone does—let me make it even more clear—I side with the pastor when the other elders and or with the congregation, when they do unbiblical things to try to oust the guy.

If you've got to oust the guy, then use biblical ways. But often, biblical ways aren't enough to get rid of someone. When you can't prosecute someone based on the evidence, mob rules work pretty good.

They work pretty well. And so if there's evidence that you can use, biblical evidence, to prosecute because you've been so long-suffering, you've been so patient, you've prayed for the person so much, you've come alongside of them to try to help them, you've put together a team to try to really support this person because they're a sinner like everyone else, and then eventually you realize, oh, you know what, it's just not going to work.

See, we just need to think through these things a little bit with clearer heads. So the next passage I want to go to is James chapter 4. So much for federal headship today, see? See how this phone call from a friend just turns everything into this?

James 4 on Speaking Evil and the Law

Typically, by the way, what happens many times with these kind of church splits, the pastor just preaching the Word, in season and out of season, he's reproving, he's rebuking, he's exhorting with great patience and doctrine, he's talking about Christ Jesus all the time, and people don't like that because they want to be authentic, they want to have relevancy, they want to have community, they want to have a tax write-off and just be a good old boys' club, but when the Word of God starts dividing and starts coming from the pulpit with authority and power and clarity and precision, carnal people don't like it.

They either repent or they rebel. If there's a ringleader, they'll rebel. If there's no ringleader, they might just saunter off to another church that is good at entertaining goats. They'll find a church that they want, a non-lordship church, a church that you don't know is charismatic or not charismatic.

Let's just not have any dividing lines because we just want the amorphous, we're evangelical, we've accepted Jesus into our heart, we've got spirit, yes we do, we've got spirit, how about you mentality?

But there are ringleaders, positions of power, it's not true elder rule, then let's start foaming and fomenting and rounding up the troops because might is right. Phone calls buzzing and what got me going on this whole thing is the whole Facebook comment.

I mean, how mature is Facebook sin? You've got to think through that and you've got to type it and you want other people to realize, hi, I'm going to sow discord, I'm going to sow sin, I'm not going to do things the biblical way.

There's a biblical way to handle things, but too often people realize if I do the biblical thing I'm going to get shot down because I don't have enough evidence to prosecute so I'll go do it my way. That's a sad deal.

That's just like Korah, rebellion of Korah that you should read in Numbers. Now James says this, James 4 .11, do not speak evil against one another, brothers, brothers, the one who speaks against or speaks down, speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law.

See they think they're just sinning against that pastor that's got enough nerve to preach the word and stand on the Bible, frail and fallible as he might be, we're going to get him. But when you speak evil against him, against the law, you speak evil against the law and judge the law.

But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. What does he say in chapter 1? Be doers of the word, not hearers only, people who just delude themselves. You want to be a doer of the word.

You don't do the word to get saved, but since you are saved, you want to respond with, I want to do the word, I want to obey the Lord, I want to please my master. As the Son pleased the Father and now has granted me the Spirit so I can obey, I want to obey.

Yes, I like to do things these other ways, but I'm not going to do it anymore, I'm going to obey. And now if you just speak evil against other people, you're not a doer of the word, but you're a judge over the word.

There's only one lawgiver and judge, James 4 .12, he who is able to save and destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor? So today on No Compromise Radio, we started talking about federal headship and never made it.

If you've sinned on Facebook, aren't you glad you have a Savior? And why don't you repent on Facebook as well? That would take a lot of courage. If you can't control yourself on Facebook, then you need to delete the account.

That would be simple. I guarantee you, you'll never sin on Facebook if you don't have Facebook. It's simple. And if you're a church where the masses are rising up and attacking your pastor in an unbiblical fashion, then you rally.

You get behind. You pray for. You take a bullet proverbially. You go there. When you see Facebook comments and it's part of your thing, you snap back with a biblical verse and then you unfriend. See how silly is all this?

There are people that need to stand up and say, we are going to do things biblically no matter what. And the pastor, even though he's not perfect, he does teach the Word. He loves the Lord. He loves us.

And we're going to do things according to the Bible because we're not judges. We're acting like judges of the law, but that's sin. There's a sinful way to remove a pastor and there's a biblical way. Yeah, but if we don't have enough evidence, we've got to default to the other, make up a bunch of other stuff.

Oh, he's not loving enough. And off we go. Well, my name is Mike Abendroth. This is No Compromise Radio Ministry. No Compromise 90 is a YouTube production of No Compromise Radio. You can go there and pull down some downloads and you want to make sure you pray for your pastors.

It's difficult and it is hard and you want to pray for your churches and pray for your pastors. Mike Abendroth, NoCompromiseRadio .com.

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.