Family Identity

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Ebendroth with my son, Luke Ebendroth.

We're glad you're watching. Make sure you tell your friends. I don't know if you know, about a year ago, we lost our

YouTube channel. And not that numbers mean really anything, but I think we had something like 5 ,000 subscribers.

And so now we're back down to 250. Somebody made a comment, Mario, on one of the YouTube videos we did for NOCO.

And they said, thanks for the message. Glad we liked it. You know, we can't believe, you know, you've only got 250 followers or whatever, something like that.

And they kind of were dissing me. So, hey, we lost our channel. What are we going to do?

I want to recommend a book, The Chosen, The Beauty of God's Eternal Love.

Three short chapters on unconditional election, kind of a play off the thing that you shouldn't be watching. Whether you are grappling with questions like why me,

Lord, or seeking to deepen your joy and salvation, The Chosen invites you to embrace the marvelous truth that God's election is rooted in His boundless love and unchanging purpose.

I'm trying to make some of these books a little smaller. I do have a praise and a prayer. I have a friend,

Joel, and he's got a friend who's got cancer, stage four cancer, prostate cancer. And so Joel wanted to go minister to this man with cancer.

And this man with cancer, I think he'd say he was a believer or believed in God, but seemed like he's not regenerate.

And Joel brought over the Jesus and cancer booklet because it's smaller and this man has cancer and Jesus and cancer.

And so the man read it two times. And I said to Joel, give me his number. And so I called him up.

We talked for a long time about the gospel and how God is in control and faithful, how to have sins forgiven, who

Jesus was. And I thought, you know, here's a suffering that I had went through, just wrote a little booklet on it, given it to someone else.

And I thought to myself, Lord, thank you for using me. What a privilege is that the Lord would use anybody for preachers, authors.

And so today with that lead in, I want to talk about the privilege that Luke has of being one of the pastors at Redemption Church, North County in the state of California.

And so today we're just going to talk a little bit about the church and maybe you'll learn some insight on what's a liturgy, what's law gospel preaching.

One of the questions I'm going to ask Luke is this, do you think this is an important book, the use of the

Bible in preaching? It sounds good. I think it would be a very good thing to use the

Bible in preaching. So anyway, that's important.

So today, Redemption Church, North County, before we talk about the pastoral aspects to you and the team there,

Luke, tell us about seminary. You're at seminary now. Why'd you choose the seminary? Who are some of your favorite profs that will lead us into some of your theology and philosophy of ministry at Redemption?

Yeah, so I am a, well, I was supposed to be, it was supposed to be my last year this year at Westminster Seminary, California, which is in Escondido.

It's about 30 minutes away from the church and where I live, 35 minutes from where I live. So I've been a student there.

This is my, I think this is my third year. I always forget these things when I start to think about it, but I was going to be finishing this year and I'm finishing most of it this next semester, but I have two or three classes to take next year.

I'm just slowed down a little bit because of the church and family and other responsibilities. Scott Clark told me he had to hold you back a semester.

Yeah, yeah, I failed the class. No, I think, yeah, I've enjoyed all the professors,

Dr. Van Drunen, Dr. Clark. I've especially enjoyed my New Testament classes with Dr.

Brad Bittner. So a wide variety of professors. I think I've enjoyed pretty much every class that I've taken there at the school.

So it's been great. Even if I don't always agree on every point, it's been helpful for me, especially the emphasis on the languages.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to go is the way they have the language program set up. So you have every student has to take, in the

MDiv and some of the other programs, you have to take all of your

Greek and Hebrew classes. So Greek one through four, Hebrew one through four. You'd take all those classes before you take a

New Testament or an Old Testament class because you're gonna be in the original languages the whole time. So it's a big emphasis there, a lot of credits.

So that was one of the things that I wanted to understand. And then just also coming at things from a confessional reform perspective.

It's a school that primarily has students from the PCA and the OPC and some students from the

United Reformed Churches as well. I'm one of the few Baptists there, but it's been helpful to be somewhere where you're gonna understand and learn the importance of the reformed confessions, of creeds, of church history.

So that was something else besides the obvious emphasis that's needed for the use of the Bible in preaching.

I also think it's important to understand we're not the first people to interpret scripture and we're not the only people who have had the

Holy Spirit. In fact, we are a part of a broader tradition of Christians who've been interpreting the

Bible for thousands of years. And so we need to have a respectful posture towards the past.

So that's one of the reasons why I wanted to go there as well, just to make sure that I was rounding out my perspective and of course, understanding the

Bible, but understanding the Bible along with tradition, not in an authoritative way like, or a magisterial way like the

Roman Catholic Church, but still in a small authoritative way as this is something the church has taught and we need to understand what they thought about scripture.

It takes a village, doesn't it? I don't like that phrase, but yeah, I think that's a communist phrase, pretty sure.

In the old days, if I was studying the Bible and I had to address a problem that I had an understanding, right?

There's no problem in the text, but my understanding, it was problematic. Do I take it this way or that way? I probably read a bunch of commentaries.

And then if I still couldn't decide Luke, I'd say, who's my favorite commentary? Who's my favorite commentator on that book?

And so if it was James, I'd say, D. Edmund Hebert's my favorite, I'll go with him.

Christian man, he's right on so many other things. And then I realized as I would study some of church history, confessions and creeds and seeing how the

Holy Spirit had worked throughout the centuries, I could still say, what did D. Edmund Hebert say?

But what did Augustine say? What did Luther say? What did the Princeton theologian say?

What did others say? And so it really helped me think kind of big picture and not just what does the latest scholar who's alive say?

And then now what do I do? I say to myself, yes, look at D. Edmund Hebert, look at some of these people, but what does the church think over the centuries?

Could be England, could be Netherlands, could be Princeton, could be New Hampshire and then try to, that helps me so much.

So let's talk a little bit about the church now that we've talked a little bit about Westminster Seminary. If someone said to you while you were surfing,

I know you're one of the pastors and I'd like to go to church, but I've never really been to a

Protestant church. What do I expect? You know, on all the websites, what to expect? What to wear?

All are welcome. What does a Sunday look like? Well, usually we encourage people to wear togas.

So that's kind of a - You know what? Check at the door. I think that's good. Make sure. I mean,

I think if there's somebody coming from what's really common in our area, Calvary Chapel perspective, there's definitely gonna be some differences is gonna be

Calvary Chapel has been upholding the inerrancy of scripture, the importance of the

Bible. They do use the Bible in preaching. So people are going to be expecting the

Bible to be taught, especially in conservative Calvary Chapels. Exclusivity of Christ.

Yeah, absolutely. So there's lots of - Literal resurrection, soon return. Lots of positives there. I like just the way

Chuck Smith carried himself as a manly guy, wanted to, wasn't afraid of going against the culture.

But I think a difference would definitely be in our church that we're more liturgical. So what that means is not that we're more liturgical in a

Roman Catholic sense, but traditionally the church, and every church really is built on this, even evangelical churches.

But we want to honor what's called the dialogical principle of worship. So what you see in the

Old Testament is God speaks and then the people respond. The people speak back to God with often

God's words that he's given to his people, his covenant people. And so what we see is, well, we have the call to worship.

And ultimately, because we know God speaks through the scriptures and as Hebrews says in chapters 10, 11, and 12, he speaks in a special and unique way in the

Lord's day service. When the call to worship is read, it's not the elders calling the church to worship.

It's not a pastor. It is God calling his people to worship. It's God inviting his people with all their sins into his presence.

So God speaks, and then we respond with a song of praise, of biblical worship.

So God speaks, we speak back to him. Then in our church, part of this liturgy and this dialogue, a dialogical principle of worship, we then have a reading of the law.

So the law that says do, often the 10 commandments is the moral law of God.

We read that to the church. And then we have a time of silent confession where we pray privately and confess our sins.

And then we have another reading by the same person, the assurance of pardon, where we read a gospel passage, something that's been done for us in Christ.

And then we respond with worship to that word from God. So there's this dialogue all the way to the benediction where God has the final word, blessing his people.

So I think that's something that's gonna be foreign. It's under the wrapping in all churches.

Any church has announcements and singing and then scripture reading. But I think it's gonna be more explicit in our church.

And there's even been some folks who have said, well, it feels a little bit too Catholic for me, especially confessing my sins.

So some things like that, I think, are definitely gonna be differences at our church. Well, even at Calvary Chapel, they have a liturgy.

Every church does, right? It might be 40 minutes of announcements, greeting, 40 minutes of singing, and a 35 minute exposition or something like that.

And then a close or an altar call. Every church has them. It seems like we use words for high liturgy with the

Roman Catholic Church, with Eastern Orthodox. And I don't know why we would call it that. Maybe it's because of incense and smells and bells and other things.

But I like Luke with the dialogical approach. I often just even use my hand, revelation and response.

You'll see a sunset and you think, wow, God's natural revelation. You hear from God and you wanna respond.

I mean, can you imagine when God says to you in the Bible, in Christ, your sins are forgiven?

When God says to you, by the way, you didn't know this. Maybe when you first got saved, but I chose you in eternity past.

And you just respond with, wow. So it's the same thing in corporate worship. Would you say,

Luke, that when it comes to Sunday, there's something unique with Lord's day, means of grace, something special, something most important.

We live in a day and age, I'll tell you where I'm going with this, where Bible reading is important. Read through the Bible in the year is important, which is, it is important to read your

Bible. What's the uniqueness of a Sunday morning Lord's day?

Well, I think what you see in the book of Hebrews, I sort of alluded to it earlier, but in Hebrews chapter 12, you see all of this plural language about the congregation going into the presence of God.

Of course, we have access to the heavenly Mount Zion individually in our prayers because of the work of Christ that's already inaugurated and to be consummated one day.

But you also see in the context, Hebrews 10, this is a sermon to a church and there's a command not to neglect the assembling together of the body.

And then as the author goes on, whoever the author of Hebrews was, he elevates what's going on in new covenant worship, that it's this coming together into the presence of God.

And so I think absolutely we have to say there's something unique and special about the

Lord's day. And there's a confidence that I can have going to church on a Sunday that I know

God is gonna speak to me. We have a culture, not just where I live, but all over in America where we wanna hear a word from God.

And we wanna hear a special and unique word from God. Oftentimes outside of scripture, in my thoughts, in my prayers, in a dream or in a vision, but God has promised that in his word, but especially in his word, in the context of the local church,

God has promised to speak to his people every Sunday. So I can go to church knowing

God is promised to speak to me here. He's promised to meet me here and he's promised to give me all that I need to be faithful.

He's promised to give me all the spiritual resources that I need, all of those things in Christ.

He gives me Christ as I confess my sins and I receive the assurance of pardon.

He gives me Christ as I, Lord willing, hear a sermon that points me to the Lord Jesus and all of his glory and majesty and grace and courage and all of his character.

He gives me Christ in the Lord's supper, not just in a mere memorial way, but as an actual communion, as Paul talks about in 1

Corinthians 10. It's a fellowship within the body and the blood of Christ. So in all those ways,

I think there's a special emphasis on the Lord's day, for all of us, especially as Protestants, that we should have.

We should come to church and know this is the place that God speaks to me. And of course he speaks in his word whenever I open it, but there is a uniqueness about Sunday, about the

Lord's day, which is why we're not to neglect it. We're not to neglect it and just do our own Bible reading plans.

We're not to neglect it and just listen to the preachers that we wanna listen to. There's something unique and special as the saints who we are committed to in our local body as we come together and we receive

Christ together and in the word and in the sacraments. So I think that would be my short answer. You should maybe preach sometime.

I haven't preached in a few weeks, so. I was reading somewhere, Luke, recently that the average evangelical church member attends once every, misses one every four weeks.

So they attend three out of four. And then the survey talked about how often people are sick and they're not sick that often.

And of course they're senile, grandparents home, somebody has to stay with and babies and other things.

So there's some exceptions, but just generally, I mean, that's a good question to ask the viewers. I mean, you know me,

I never wanted you guys to say as little children or adult children, are we going today to church?

No, we're going. And because I'd like to hear from God, to use your language. I'd like to hear from God. When I became a new

Christian, I couldn't wait for Sunday. So I went on Wednesday night as well.

And I went on Sunday night as well. That some person, sinful, frail human being that God had saved and gifted stands up from the pulpit and says, let me explain to you this about God.

This is what he says, this is who he is. Some of the mysteries, some of the secrets, some of the revealed things that people in the

Old Testament didn't get to know, but you get to know about. I mean, angels would have liked to know and now you get to know.

I thought this is the most wonderful thing in all the world to hear from God. And so that is so important.

What's a typical sermon do you think in North County? 30 minutes, 25 minutes.

And not only that, do you think it's pretty much like normal evangelicalism and that is kind of a

TED talk, how to practical application? Is that rampant in your area? I'm sure

I don't survey all the churches in the area. I don't do survey at all. But I think that is common, but there's also,

I mean, I think there's seems to be a movement away from, in evangelicalism, away from those churches.

Typically when I see a church that has smoke machines and lights and all those things,

I think they're kind of behind the trend now. Not that that matters, but it seems like there's a reclaiming of something that seems ancient.

So I think there is an impulse right now in evangelicalism of we want to go back. We want to return to something with more roots.

I think in our area specifically, at least the churches that I'm familiar with, they tend to just skip the

Reformation and they go straight to Roman Catholic mystical practices. So we're going to do the

Jesus Prayer. We're going to do Lent. We're going to have these special fasts all the time.

We're going to read all these monks and reclaim their practices. Somebody like John Mark Comer is very popular in a lot of churches there.

And yeah, so I think that it's interesting. Some of the churches in the area, they preach for 55 minutes, 50 to 55 minutes, and they have hundreds of people, but it's primarily the focus is being like Jesus, being with Jesus, practicing the things that Jesus did.

It's Christ primarily as example, not as object of faith.

So I think that's, to me, probably the more concerning trend. I think there is a desire for something more rooted, which is positive, but unfortunately, there's also skipping of the

Reformation. And you have a lot of people converting to Rome, going down to Greek Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy.

So I don't know. I'm sure there's those TED Talk churches too, but there's also some other faithful churches that are preaching the gospel and preaching the

Bible, and there's a wide spectrum. It seems like a lot of young people, and you know better than I would because you're younger, it's a desire to move away from casual, right?

There's this whole casual thing. Come as you are, dress however you want. And then they realize, well, wait a second, casual's fine.

I mean, people can come to church here dressed in about anything they want. If you're a leader, you're an usher or a pastor, you'll see them dressed up some, but there's something that is not casual about God.

I think it was Herman Lutzer who said, you just don't trapeze into the presence of God. Come as you are, with clothes certainly, but come draped in the righteous robes of Christ or don't come at all because you don't realize how dangerous this is.

This is back to R .C. Sproul, where people wanna know what the natural enemy of a fox would be or a natural enemy of a goat.

Left to our own sins, we're God's natural enemy. And then when you get saved, He still is transcendent.

He still is holy. And Isaiah, who could have been the most holy man in the universe, still shuddered when he stood before the

Lord God Almighty and the angels with an antiphonal refrain were singing, holy, holy, holy. Absolutely. And so I think sometimes

Luke, and maybe you can address this, some Catholic buildings, churches, they draw your eyes up.

I like that by the way, churches. Yeah. There's a transcendence where you think, you know what?

I walk into this building, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and I just wanna look up. How can there be a sense of transcendence of God in a church that's renting out a

Gold's Gym? How can that happen? Because here's where I'm going. People want the building and the smells and bells, but then they're not going to get a transcendent

God proclaimed in the homily, in the sermon. So what if we proclaim a transcendent

God from the pulpit, even though we might be in a cave or a dungeon or a rec hall or a school?

What are your thoughts? Well, I think going back to Hebrews 12, we've come not to Mount Sinai, not to something that can be represented on earth that we can see and touch with our five senses, not to the thunder, not to the fire, all of these things that,

I mean, there's almost nothing more transcendent than the description of, or the transcendent description of Mount Sinai and Moses approaching and the fear of the people of Israel.

Don't have God speak to us, but have him speak to you. And there's this awe at the presence of God.

And I almost said Paul, as I always do, but the author of Hebrews says, you haven't come to that, but you've come to the heavenly

Mount Sinai. You've come to the substance, all of what that was pointing to. That ultimately was the copy of the true heavenly reality that we have now in Christ, even in a building that looks like a

Pizza Hut corporate, or I'm referring to this building that we're in now, or any other building or any strip mall at the end of the day.

Of course, I would prefer to have a beautiful building. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But at the end of the day, we have the substance of all that the saints have hoped and longed for.

We have it now. Even now we are seated in the heavenly places in Christ.

Now, not something that we're waiting for. So I think we already have all of that. It's inaugurated.

We're waiting, of course, for Christ to return. But I think if you preach the word and you preach the word incarnate, then

I think people will have all the transcendence they need in the glory of Christ. Amen. Mike Abendroth with Luke Abendroth today on No Compromise Radio Ministry.

Every week when I get up to preach, when you get up to preach regularly and often, you don't discuss,

I don't discuss every theological category and every systematic theology and talk about biblical theology, but it's undergirding that.

I talk about rebar a lot and strengthening concrete, this spiritual rebar that's underneath it all.

What are some things, Luke, and I'll give you an example in a second, what are some things at Redemption Church that you might not talk about every single

Sunday, but are there every single Sunday, that you build your philosophy of preaching, worship, you build on that because it just has to be, it's part of the warp and woof of scripture.

And so I'll give you one, and then you can maybe think of others. You might not say law gospel every

Sunday, but how does that drive everything? And so if somebody just came and they said, well,

Luke Abendroth teaches the Bible. Andrew teaches the Bible, John teaches the Bible, but what about that rebar?

How conscientious are you of that? What are some other examples? You know where I'm going with this? Sure, if not,

I'll still just answer. I can just excuse myself, I come back and - That's like no compromise radio style.

I think, I mean, the obvious one is the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689.

I think that's something that, I mean, we wanna be a confessional church.

And so what that means is it doesn't mean that every single person in our church has to agree with every single detail.

There is a level of agreement that has to be there to be able to be a member. But the idea is this is what we believe the

Bible teaches. So we're not placing an authority over Scripture, capital A, that says this is equal with Scripture in the sense that it is breathed out by the

Holy Spirit. But we are saying as a church, this is what we believe the Bible teaches.

And because of that, this is what you as a church can hold us, the leadership, accountable to.

So as I've heard recently, Tom Hicks say, it's a truth in advertising.

So we're trying to represent, this is what we're gonna believe the Bible to teach. So definitely the first thing, in addition to the

Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the definition of Chalcedon, these ecumenical statements of Christian belief, we have a more specific, the 1689

Confession. So there's all kinds of things that I'm not going to teach because I believe that the 1689 represents

Scripture. So I'm not going to teach a final justification by works in the sense of that they are conditional in that sense.

So you might wanna take that out. I don't know what I'm saying. But hey, that's good. You might wanna, so things, so having a confession helps us to have these guardrails and it helps the people in our church to know what they're going to be receiving.

And if I change my mind on something and it's important to the confession, that means that I need to go and find a different place because I'm bound to uphold the teaching of this because I have stated, this is what

I believe the Bible teaches. So that would be one example. But I think day to day, there's constantly an emphasis on law gospel.

And by that, we know underlying that there is in a more concrete way, the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.

And so we wanna emphasize that the gospel, we're no longer underneath the law where as a covenant of works, we no longer relate to God through the law that I must do this to have eternal life.

Instead, we relate to God through the gospel that in what Christ has done, I have full and free forgiveness.

I have the righteousness of Christ, the obedience of the Lord Jesus imputed to my account. And now

I obey out of gratitude for what God has done. So I think a constant emphasis on the law and the gospel,

I think for me personally, a constant emphasis on even the person of the

Lord Jesus. I think one thing that we have not been taught well in evangelicalism in general is who the

Lord Jesus is and even things like the fact that he has a divine nature and a human nature as united in one person.

Things like the Trinity, I want people to come to our church and know that we are Trinitarian in the classical sense, that we believe that the father is eternally father and that he begets the son eternally and that the spirit proceeds from the father and the son.

So I think all those kinds of things are in the back of my mind, even if I'm not using that language every

Sunday, although I do use that language sometimes. I think those are excellent. I think duplex gratia, right?

Christ for pardon, Christ for power, underneath what we believe, kind of not behind the scenes, but it's just there every week that we realize

Christians will grow and they will learn how to say no to sin and yes to righteousness by the power of the spirit in them, that Jesus gave the

Holy Spirit for them to do that. And so it's not sheer law. It's not sheer motivation. It's not sola bootstraps.

You need Christ for pardon and Christ for power, right? It's those kinds of things, redemptive historical, one author.

A lot of those things are kind of behind the scenes. So Luke, thanks for being on the show today. I wanted to just open up the curtain a little bit and let them see

Redemption North County. If you're around there and you don't have a church, Redemption North County, you can pull it up.

It'll be in the link. See below where they point in all these different ways. I don't know how to do that.

And I'd encourage you to pull up some sermons by Luke and the men there to hear them go verse by verse.

That's such a nice thing to do now before you even enter a church building, you can know about everything you need to know before you even show up, right?

With websites and confessions and statements of faith. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time on No Compromise Radio.