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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 ministry. Mike Abendroth is my name, and Bible trivia is my game. Now, what we're going to do today on No Compromise Radio ministry is we're going to talk about a variety of things that will help me clean my No Compromise studio desk.
And I have two microphones on this desk. I have a couple headphones. I have a caller, a box, our digital box. I have a recorder. I have a mixing board. I have a little gray box to send the feed live to the radio station if I'd like.
I don't usually use that. And then I have some other things, like a little timer. I have some cords. I have some Holy Land oil. And holy water. Actually, the time is getting close. No Compromise Radio ministry and Bethlehem Bible Church are off to the Holy Land in Egypt coming up in not even two months.
So already sold out. So maybe next time in two years you can go with us. So I've got all kinds of things sitting here. And you know, it's the end of the year and I want to clean things up. And so we're just going to see what happens today.
I like to just come to do the show to see what I'll say. Remember MacArthur said, sometimes I just show up on Sunday night to see what I'll say. I do have some emails. And you know, we don't take live calls because I only have 24 and a half minutes.
And if the show's going to be bad, I'd like to take responsibility for that. Lots of call-in shows turn out to be bad because the callers are bad. Now, some callers are excellent. Some callers maybe have better stuff to say than the host does.
But I'd rather be responsible for the show if it's bad. Or I guess I take responsibility for if it's good too. And so I've got some emails here. We lost several shows recording the shows. We had the demon of erase buttons show up in the studio.
And so maybe I've done some of these emails, maybe I haven't. So if I've done them, I'll try to do them in a different way. This is from John and he said, I'm struggling with the whole idea of Sunday worship services for church.
John said, my church engages us or encourages us rather to invite unsaved folks to church, but I don't see any precedent for that in the Bible. In fact, I think that inviting the unsaved to church gives them occasion to blaspheme.
I know because I was one of them. People who don't think they're sick don't hang out in hospitals. That's a great email, John. You can now write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com and be like John and ask such a question.
Most churches today, or many churches today, have bought into this, let's use Sunday morning worship to get unbelievers to attend. Let's do no compromise style to start. You should never, ever, ever, ever invite one of your unsaved people to church with you, comma, unless you've already preached the gospel to them.
We're happy when unbelievers show up to church. We're trying to be kind to them. Well, along with every other visitor, we try to give them a little cookie bag. Pastor Mike's preaching is hot and fiery, but we're sweet, too, and so here's the cookie ministry.
By the way, we have a great cookie ministry. If you're at a church and you need to get a new ministry, some kind of Cookies for Christ ministry, and nice little bags, a little Bible verse, welcome to Bethlehem Bible Church, and then what you do is you tell the rest of the church, by the way, you see anybody carrying a bag of cookies, you know they're a visitor, and you go over there and say hello to them and be kind to them and be nice to them, and tolerate and affirm and celebrate them.
No, you just wanna go over and be nice to these folks. It could be believers or unbelievers. It could be visitors. It could be people moving in the area, but the issue happens to be with ecclesiology, and ecclesiology is the study of the church, and the church does, and John, you are exactly right.
The church gets together to worship. Unbelievers can't worship. Without faith in Christ, Hebrews 11, six says, it's impossible to please God. Romans chapter eight will talk about people in the flesh that is unredeemed, not born again, in the state of condemnation, cannot please God, because God is not pleased with, you know, I give, I sing, I worship, I show up on Christmas and Easter, but I don't revere your son.
It all starts off with worshiping the son. Psalm two, kissing the son lest you perish. You want to honor and worship and adore the one that the father sins, and it has been the father's great wisdom from eternity past that all the deity would dwell bodily in the form of Christ, and so you can't disregard Christ or disrespect Christ and then assume you're going to get the father's good pleasure.
So when unbelievers show up to church, and by the way, they're welcome to come. They're not welcome to take communion, but they're welcome to come and listen because people get saved by scripture reading.
J .C. Ryle heard Ephesians two, one to 10 read in a church and God saved him through the reading of scripture, and so they're able to come and hear the word, and they should hear a good gospel-centered, Bible-centered message that should convict them of sin, talk about sin, death, hell, resurrection, Christ's perfections, and the list goes on.
Whatever the verses are, that's what God wanted them to hear, and they should say to themselves, I've never seen anything like this in the world. Don't make your services so worldly that they go, oh, I fit right in here.
Don't lose the transcendent aspects of worship and God and his holiness and his justice and his righteousness and his omnipotence. We somehow want God so close to us that the only thing we like are his eminent perfections or attributes.
He walks with me and he talks with me along life's narrow way. He does do that, but he is not just close to you, but he is above you, he is transcendent. So the unbeliever walks in, and listen to what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14.
Therefore, if the whole church assembles together and all speak in tongues, and the ungifted men or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are all mad? There's all kinds of stuff going on. He doesn't know, he doesn't understand it, but you know what happens if there's preaching, a proclamation of the truth?
1 Corinthians 14 .24. But if all prophesy and an unbeliever or an unconvicted man enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all. The secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so he will fall on his face and worship God, declaring that God is certainly among you.
That is exactly what we want the unbeliever to do. We want the unbeliever to fall down on his face and say, God is in this place. If this is true about God and his holiness and his transcendence and his majesty and his excellence, I'm undone and I'm afraid, and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Isn't it? And so we want them to be afraid. We don't do them any good by saying, God loves you just as you are. If I was an unbeliever and somebody said, God loves you just the way you are, I'd think, hey, I can still go on living with my girlfriend and God just loves me, right on.
No, God is a God who loves his creation enough to tell them repent and live. Look to the cross or perish. Repent, trust, believe. Think differently about your sin. Think differently about the resurrected Savior.
Think differently about the substitutionary atonement. And so churches that have said, maybe with good motives, we want to grow, let's appeal to the unbelievers, have indirectly said, God, I could care less about what you tell us to do.
The Bible says that believers get together to worship and then they go scatter to evangelize. Call together fredification through worship, Christians only worship, and then they leave and then they go interact with unbelievers and love them.
They don't go to Montana or monasteries or go to Lancaster or Pennsylvania to be in the Amish group. They live among the world. Jesus prayed for his disciples and all of us that he said, you know, I don't want them taken out of the world.
Where are you gonna go? And so you have to deal with people who are in the world. And how do you deal with the unbeliever? You preach the gospel to them. It's not the pastor's job to preach the gospel to the unbeliever.
Matter of fact, if you say, you know, last time I brought my unbelieving friend, the pastor talked about money or the pastor talked about prayer or the pastor talked about some kind of spiritual discipline.
I wanted him to preach the gospel. Why didn't he preach the gospel? Well, the gospel should be proclaimed at a worship service, no doubt. And between scripture reading, songs about the resurrected Christ, preaching about the resurrected Christ, I always try to talk about the gospel and the resurrected Christ from one vantage point or from another.
I don't mean at the end of the service you give the same old boring, unbiblical, non-biblical altar call kind of thing. I don't mean that. Of course, you can call people to salvation at the beginning of the sermon, at the end, in the middle.
I'm not after invitations or calling people to repentance by the preaching of the word. I like that. But if the gospel's proclaimed during the service and the pastor's preaching sequentially through a Bible book, and he's coming up on a topic that you think is not relevant to this unbeliever, that may in fact be true.
There are some things in the Bible that the Christian church needs to hear that are not relevant, that are not pragmatic, that are not felt needs for the unbeliever. And that is fine because this is a different society.
This is a Christian group. This is the bride of Christ. And the bride of Christ acts differently towards her husband, Christ the groom. And so for the unbeliever to come in and say, you know, what was that all about?
I didn't go for that. Or, you know, they're always after money or this, that, or the other. You, if you're going to invite an unbelieving friend, should preach the gospel to that friend and say, by the way, I don't know what the pastor's going to preach, but he's probably going to be preaching to Christians.
But this is a Christian society. And so therefore our biblical ecclesiology, that is to say our biblical mandate on what the church should do, is not dumb everything down, take a survey of the neighbors and try to make it palatable for unbelievers so they might like it.
Not at all. I actually probably do the opposite. Unbelievers should feel loved by other people. But the word from the pulpit should convict them, should make them uncomfortable. And just as John says from Idaho, when they hear these things, they should say to themselves, you know, this is a very tough truth.
This is very difficult. This is something that I've never heard of before. Now, if you're going to have a Christmas day, Sunday service, and you know a bunch of unbelievers are going to be there, so you preach a specific message for unbelievers on Easter Sunday and on Christmas Sunday, fine, but beyond that, Christians get together to worship.
Unbelievers get together to blaspheme. And so we don't want to have messages and programs and songs and skits and everything else designed with the goats in mind. One guy called it the goat-driven church.
Everything you do is, how will the goats consider this, that, or the other? I've known even people in my own life who said, well, be careful what you say in the bulletin, because you said something about invite your unbelieving friends.
And maybe unbelievers read that and get offended. What do I care? I'm not trying to say, how can I not offend the unbeliever with my words? Now, I don't mean, I don't call them a slob. All unbelievers are dirty, filthy, antisocial crazies.
I don't mean that. But I've got a bulletin, and it's not saying unbelievers are rancid. It just says, invite your unbelieving friends. If I'm an unbeliever and somebody says, you know what? The Bible says you're an unbeliever.
Okay, I might not like it, but that's just the way it is. Don't call these people pre-Christians. That's what one group of people wants to do, is they say, oh, invite your pre-Christian friends. You're either, as we used to say, a saint, or you're an ain't on No Compromise Radio Ministry, WVNE 760 here in Worcester, Massachusetts, or you can pick us up on our website, nocompromiseradio .com.
Go to the podcast. I think we're up to about 400 podcasts now. Or you can go to iTunes and type in No Compromise Radio, and you should be able to get us. Soon, we'll redo the Todd Friel interview. For those who are wondering where that interview is, it's off in cyberspace now.
And we're just taking a few different questions. Today, I've got one from Lucy, Would Jesus Eat Lime Jell-O? Remember that show we did a while ago? Thanks for the radio station, et cetera. I was just in the park with my dog, she's in London, listening to you talking about how there's no need for observing mosaic dietary laws.
Oh, by the way, I just got a new book in the mail today from a publisher, The Daniel Fast, The Daniel Fast. And when you see these diet books, Christian diet books, you know you should say to yourself, I've been taught on No Compromise Radio that these things are gonna try to take us back to Moses.
Show me a Seventh-day Adventist, and I'll show you somebody who's under mosaic law. And so I got that book, The Daniel Fast, and if it didn't cost so much money to send to London, I'd probably just send her the copy for free.
Here it says, I have no personal ax to grind. I don't care one way or the other, but my question is this. To show that we can eat meat without guilt, you cite the verse where God gives us animals to eat with the proviso that we don't eat of the life-giving blood.
But when you go on to wet our appetite at the thought of a burger dripping with blood, well, if not mine, certainly wet some people's. I've often wondered why Christians don't pay attention to the blood bit as Jews and Muslims do.
Is it because the Old Testament dietary longs no longer apply under the new covenant? Yes. Then how does meat eating apply? I'm not being nitpicky, it's just something I've often pondered, et cetera. So, Lucy, here's the issue.
We know from what Jesus said in Mark chapter seven that what goes out of a man's heart is what makes him unclean, not what goes in his mouth. So you eat something, and it goes into your stomach, and it comes out, and you're not defiled.
You're not dirty, there's no sin issue or anything like that. Of course, there are many reasons for the Old Testament law, Mosaic law, specifically food laws, but one of the reasons was to not primarily keep them healthy, but primarily to make sure that they are different than the pagans.
And so maybe it helped them not get trigonosis because they didn't eat pork, but that wasn't the main concern that God had. It was to separate them and make them distinct and different and other, and I cut above, make them holy and separated from the other pagan nations so that they would be different.
Even the way they ate was different because they worship the only God, the different God. And so why do we, as Christians, have the ability to eat whatever we want? So if you wanna have a juicy dog burger or a juicy cat cake, not like a birthday cake, but they have lobster cakes and clam cakes.
You can have a cat cake. We say to ourselves, we have been justified by the perfect work of Christ, declared righteous by the work of another, imputed righteousness into our account. That's Romans 3, 4, and 5.
Justification and its benefits and its effects. Therefore, in light of God's love towards us because he loves us as much as he loves his son because we are in Christ, we are mystically united with Christ, we are in him.
So God sees us, he sees Christ. He can't love us anymore, he can't love us any less because he loves us with the love of one member of the Trinity to another. That we, no matter what we put in our bodies or what we do, cannot affect our standing before God.
So therefore, Romans 14 and 15, talking about liberty and legalism, follow justification. Show me somebody who is too licentious or too legalistic, and I'll show you somebody that needs to go back to restudy the Protestant view, justification by faith alone.
Justification by Christ's perfect work, his active obedience, his life, his passive obedience, his death confirmed by the resurrection. Justification by Christ's life, death, resurrection alone mediated through the instrument, the non-saving instrument of faith.
Therefore, Paul says, you know, in the end times, there are going to be people that fall away from the faith. First Timothy chapter four, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons.
Now, these demons don't talk. They're not some kind of orb or something. These deceitful spirits don't primarily speak themselves. They have a secondary person that speaks for them by the means of hypocrisy of liars, seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron.
Men who forbid marriage, so men who do these things, these false teachers are hypocritical lie speakers, but they're also mouth pieces for demons. They're like the megaphones, or as we say in New England, the megaphones for these demons.
Men who forbid marriage and advocates abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. And so in these latter days, people go around saying what you can eat, what you can't eat, be careful.
And so we say, thank you, Lord, for the food. And then we eat it. Last night I went to a steakhouse, a very good steakhouse, probably the best steakhouse here in Worcester. And I ordered a filet. I ordered the 12 ounce filet.
And this is one of those restaurants where, you know, you don't really get anything with it, but you have to order a la carte. And I said, I'd like my steak rare, please. And I said, the minimal amount that you can cook it and serve me, that's what I want.
I don't want it kind of red in the middle. I want it as rare as possible. And he said, seared. I said, if seared means the least amount of cooking, the better, that's what I want. He said, actually, he said, I've served some people the filets here uncooked.
We just, I guess, wash them off and serve them. Would you like that? And I thought, I'm tempted, but I should probably just have some of the bacteria seared off the sides before I eat it. So if someone were to come along to me and say, do you know what?
We're just one couple towns over from Lancaster, Massachusetts, with the Atlantic Union College and home of the New England headquarters of the Seventh Adventist. Let me quote to you Ellen G. White. And she said, let not any of our ministers set an evil example in the eating of flesh meat.
What if she were to say that as she did on page 399? What if she were to say, the waiter comes up to me and said, let me quote you Ellen G. White from the Seventh Adventist, page 410. God did not provide for the flesh of dead animals to compose the diet of man.
What would I say? What would I say if any of these things were said to me? How about this? Ellen G. White, page 380. Among those who are awaiting for the coming of the Lord, meat eating will eventually be done away with.
Well, meat eating will be done away with when we are glorified in heaven. But friends, Ellen G. White was a hypocritical lie speaker and a megaphone for deceitful spirits and demons. And she was giving you a doctrine of demons.
She was trying to put you under the Old Testament law, mosaic food laws for right standing with God, for sanctification with God, for holiness with God. And she was confusing Israel with the church. And she was confusing the ceremonial laws that were given under Moses.
And she was trying to put you back under those things. I wonder how many times the New Testament says you're not under law. I wonder what that means. Anyway, I would have said, rebuke you. No, I wouldn't have said that.
I wouldn't have said pass the ketchup either because I would not defile such a wonderful piece of dead cow, dead cattle with anything. Maybe a little salt. They gave me some kind of little sauce, some kind of white sauce, some kind of, maybe that was from my asparagus.
But I would not put anything on there to defile it because it was so good. Can you imagine taking a bite of that and say to the glory of God, He's given me a palate. He's given me taste buds. Part of my tongue tastes salt, part sweet, part sour.
He's given me the ability to just chew this and say, this tastes so good. There's nothing better in the world. That might be my favorite all time thing to eat is a filet. To just think cut so perfectly, cut so well, tastes so good.
You don't need anything else. You don't need any of the fat that goes with it. You just say, this tenderloin is wonderful. And so whether that has blood in it or not, it's irrelevant because we are not trying to wander around today saying, that's got too much blood, you can't eat it.
We are able to eat whatever we want and we're no longer under that. And you cannot change your standing before God based on what you eat. I mean, can you imagine? I have four kids and I say, you know what?
You're born into my family and you're an Ebendroth or maybe I adopt a couple. Say you're now an Ebendroth, you have that last name, you're an Ebendroth. And in our family, we don't really eat shrimp and we don't really eat some kind of parasitical things that wander around the bottom of oceans.
We don't eat lobster. We don't eat shellfish because it's defaming to the name Ebendroth. And you know what we stand for here and we don't stand for that at all. And then one of my kids said, you know what?
I'm gonna try it anyway and ate some lobster. What'd I say? You're no longer an Ebendroth. Well, I might have all kinds of feelings but I'm not gonna kick him out of my family. And so too with God, we aren't changed.
I know the analogy doesn't fit perfectly but we are not changed in our status before God based on what we eat, what we put on our mouths. So Ellen G. White, when she said, eggs should not be placed in your table, they're an injury to your children, page 400.
Cheese is wholly unfit for food, page 368. The more largely flesh composes the diet of teachers and pupils, bad English I think, the less susceptible will be the mind to comprehend spiritual things, 395.
Well, this is just all wrong. This is doctrines of demons through hypocritical lie speakers. You're justified by the work of Christ alone. By the triune God's great plan of redemption to go send a son to uphold the holy justice of God while showing grace and mercy to some of his creation.
So the elect that is. And so I guess we only got through two today. I didn't clean my desk very well on No Compromise Radio. We want to make sure that you have a year full of, if you'd like to be tofu eater, eat as much tofu as you like to the glory of God.
But don't eat tofu because you think God is going to be more pleased with you. Don't do that because he's not going to be more pleased with you. He'll be pleased with you that if you go to a missionary's house and they put something before your plate and it's dog, it's cat, it's Geico, it's anything else, you just say to the glory of God and you eat it.
You don't even have to ask what it is. You just pray, God help me not to get sick. Then you eat it. And if you're looking for a good church, what do you do? Go to No Compromise, go to BethlehemBibleChurch .com, BBCChurch .org, go to FAQs and you can get the Nine Marks site there.
You can get Founders Friendly site there, Master Seminary Alumni there. And if you're looking for a good church in your area, go to BBCChurch .org and pull it up. It's NoCompromiseRadio .com. Have a steak today.
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 six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at BBCChurch .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.