Dave Kopper Interview

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.

My name is Mike Abendroth, and I think I have kind of a deeper voice this morning because when you don't talk very often or very much in the morning, this is how you sound.

So as you know, we have different shows for different days, and on Wednesdays, I like to have pastors, theologians, co -Bible ministers, members, and today

I have the privilege of having Dave Copper in the studio. Dave, I don't even know. What are you? You're a theologian, you're a member.

What else are you? Dave – Uh, financial secretary. Mike – That's right. But you count the money coming in.

You don't write my check, so I forgot that you did that. Dave – That's it. I just count it coming in. Mike – So Dave, tell our listeners a little bit about how you got to Bethlehem Bible Church.

I'm guessing 10, 12 years ago. Dave – Yeah, it was about 12 years ago. We were at New Hope Chapel in Westboro, and Maureen and I were looking for a different church.

We were looking for a different church at the time, and Maureen happened to call and Pastor Steve answered the phone.

It was during the week, so it was, I think, a little unusual. And so he answered some of our good questions, and for a couple of Sundays after that, her and a friend of ours,

Cindy Newt, came and listened, and it happened to be that Pradeep came and was preaching those couple of nights.

And she was exceptionally impressed. She saw expositional preaching, and she said, this is the place for us to go.

So it took us a little while to wrap things up at New Hope Chapel, and so yeah, we've been here ever since.

Mike – Now, one of the things that the listeners don't know about you is you're a bicyclist as well, so we're friendly in that regard.

Do you ride very often? Dave – I try to ride as much as I can. Mike – Now, it's like 20 degrees out.

This is no longer warm enough for me to ride. Would you ride in this weather? Dave – At around 30, 35, it's possible to ride still.

Yeah, I have a nice winter suit so I can ride some, but yeah, this is a little too cold. Mike –

What our listeners can't see is that Dave is sitting here. It's outside. It's about 23 degrees, and do you have

Birkenstocks on without socks? Dave – Yep. Mike – Yeah, okay. Well, Dave and I have been ministering and worshipping the

Lord, ministering together and worshipping the Lord Jesus here for about the last 12 years, and I wanted to have you in particularly,

Dave, as you know, because we've gone through similar experiences, but you to a greater degree. So give us what happened a few years ago, what you were feeling like.

You went to the doctor. Give us the synopsis. Dave – Sure. I was walking into work one day, and I happened to look down, and I noticed

I was walking really strangely, and I was like, that's weird. Why am I walking strangely? And that led me to call my doctor, and I kind of figured

I probably had Lyme disease. He did some blood tests, and everything came back negative, and so we did some more blood tests, and then he called me when

I was on my way home. I think it was a Wednesday night, and he said, I think you have multiple myeloma.

I was like, okay, those are two words. I have no idea what they are, but doesn't sound so horrible.

And multiple didn't sound good though. That was like a bad idea, but okay, great. The more scary thing that you didn't quite grasp then was,

I need you to go see other doctors at the oncology group at UMass, eight o 'clock Friday morning.

I was like, okay, this isn't what you expect. And so you go, and you show up there, and you're looking around, and you have no idea what the word oncology means because if you've never been anywhere near it you wouldn't know that they actually treat and help people with cancer.

And so they confirmed the diagnosis, did a couple other things, and the doctor there basically whenever he was confirming it said beforehand, well at this point people usually break down crying.

At which point I just looked at him and said, my God's sovereign. I trust him. And so while we got the diagnosis that was just the beginning of a trial and so a friend of mine heard about our my diagnosis.

I had called Dana -Farber on Monday morning that following Monday and I wanted to see what do you got to do to get a second opinion and it takes a while to be able to get anywhere.

Well Holly, my friend, mailed in my diagnosis. An hour later the multiple myeloma group was calling me asking, when can you possibly come in?

We'd like to see you right away. So yeah, all these little kind of, you know, Dave often typifies his life with words like luck and chance and serendipity.

Sorry. Sorry. And you've been in my preaching class too so you know we're not allowed to say those words except in jest.

That's it. By the way, I know I'm interrupting you. What if that's the only hope you had?

What if you were not a believer, you were not trusting the Lord, and you're thinking, well you know what, let's just play the chance game.

How do you think you would have responded? Because you knew the old Dave pre -salvation. What would the old Dave trust in through this process?

Well I just would have panicked. It would have been self. They're relying on doctors and technology and hoping for the best and you have no idea and you'd be completely baffled what to do, where to go, what would it mean, and you'd get lost in your panic.

I mean it would be easy because if it's random, well how far does random go? Right, that's so true.

Talking to Dave Copper today at Bethlehem Bible Church, No Compromise Radio. This, by the way, is my first Sunday morning recording ever in the history of 2 ,000 shows, so you're blazing the trail.

So you get the diagnosis and you find out it's pretty bad. Yeah. How bad is it, was it?

Well when we heard the diagnosis they said you have stage 3 multiple myeloma and there is no stage 4.

Basically it means you have bone involvement, so lytic holes, holes in your bones basically have developed and so pain and other aspects really follow real quickly and so your bones get softer and your immune system shuts down because what happens is the bone marrow, instead of generating healthy immune system cells,

T -cells and white cells and other good things to help fight disease, instead they generate blobby cells that fill up your bones and the immune cells don't actually get out.

And so what happens is when your immune system shuts down, now you're susceptible to anything and so a cold could kill you potentially.

So in the old days if someone got this before the technology they have now at, and for the listeners who are not from Boston, when we say

Dana -Farber you could be thinking MD Anderson or John Hopkins or Mayo or something like that, right?

Cedars -Sinai. It's the premier cancer hospital here in Boston. In the old days people were to just die, how fast would they have died do you think?

Within five months? It would take probably a year or so for the disease to actually get settled pretty well.

But once your immune system starts to shut down, it's just a matter of when a disease, something else would kill you and it would be influenza or something else and it would appear that would be the only thing.

But if you look back time -wise, timeline -wise in someone, they would have colds that would last longer periods of time.

So the year before I got diagnosed, we had a cold. I had a cold from February, from the beginning of February all the way to the end of March, which is really unusual.

Right. Dave, as you were going through this, and how long ago did you get the diagnosis? Is that two years ago?

Just two, two and a half years ago. So when I met with you a while ago, I asked you did you think you were going to be alive then?

What did you think two years ago? Did you think, okay, the goal of my life isn't long life, but I sure would like to stay alive and, you know, enjoy my wife and life and bicycling and all that.

How do you process all this? It's hard to process. It's a huge thing.

But when you're relying totally on God, you know,

He gets all the glory. And when He gets all the glory, no matter what happens, all of a sudden, it's easy. So while I would prefer to be alive for a long time,

I'm hopeful. How old are you? 57. Okay. So I'm very hopeful. If God would decide that it's time for me to go home, it would actually be a blessing, because I'd be home.

There'd be no pain. There'd be no sin. There'd be nothing else. We'd be in God's glory. So a lot of people look at it, look at death as a, hey, this is a really bad thing.

And they want to delay it and put it off as long as possible. Where, well, if you're Christian, you go home.

And if you're going home, it's like going nowhere else. Yeah. Dave, I'm glad you brought that up because I, of course, everybody can decide on their own.

That's fine. But for the unbeliever and the person who is not trusting in the Lord Jesus, when they get sick, we pretty much just try to encourage them to make decisions for long life, right?

Whatever we do, let's extend life. But tell me the philosophy that you have for, okay, if it gets really bad one day with pain, are you gonna do everything you can to prolong your life?

Or is there a time you can just say, you know what, my times are in his hands, and I'm just gonna have to trust in him, and I'm just not gonna do the next surgery, the next test, the next diet, the next whatever.

Does that make sense? Yep. I think that there comes a time when it would be hard to continue to live here, where you look so forward to being home that you want to just stop.

That makes sense because, you know, when things are going well, it's hard to think about heaven. But when the pain is so bad,

I'm sure there's that desire for relief. Now, when I got prostate cancer, there's there's no pain except, you know, the day after the radiation and six months with the radiation kind of thing.

But for you, tell me your pain levels, because you don't come across as I'm hurting. You don't come across as I'm struggling.

You come across as happy, kind of chipper Dave. Most of the time, that's pretty much the way it is.

But slowly, progressively, you get different pains in different places, right?

My ribs have a couple of spots that just hurt. Lower back, it just hurts.

And joints lately, for the last three or four months, it's actually been getting worse. And that led to another test, which is gonna change our treatment.

But realistically, I can't focus on it. I try to hope that I get some pain management that'll help a little bit, right?

Right now, I'm on OxyContin five milligrams every six hours. And the hope is that the treatment, the next treatment that's gonna start sometime in the next month, will take the disease, put it under better control, and also my pain levels go down a lot.

But I try not to focus on it. And it's all about keeping my mind on the right subject.

How do I express my heart? How do I serve? How do I do well for others?

Keep the focus, keep the main thing on the main thing. And my pain, and what

I'm going through, is just something that's part of the journey.

We're talking to Dave Copper today on No Compromise Radio. Dave, you and I have been around the world together, haven't we?

Tell our listeners some of the places that we've been together. Well, we've been to Israel a couple of times.

Saw a lot of really wonderful places there. Places that just bring the Bible alive.

They've been BBC trips with just wonderful. I mean, we're looking at Scripture in places like that.

We went to Greece. We went to Ephesus. We've seen Petra. I forgot about Ephesus. Remember, we went to that little spot and they were trying to sell us rugs and all that stuff when we get out the boat.

Patmos. Yep, went to Patmos. Now when we went down into St. John's little cathedral there where they said that, you know,

John wrote the book of Revelation. Of course, he probably didn't, but it was interesting anyway. They said don't film anything, and so I had my iPhone in front of me filming.

Were you filming at all? I took pictures every once in a while in there. Just had to. I mean, come on, why not?

What's the worst that could happen? We get some, you know, we could buy an indulgence and we could get out of that. Absolutely.

We could go right to the church and be fine. See, a Sea of Galilee. We've hung out at the Sea of Galilee. Yeah, stop on a boat in the middle to be able to sing and praise the

Lord there. That's a place where when you worship, it's just different because you're in the middle where Jesus was and you can see all around.

It's an amazing place. Now, when I had my diagnosis, I said on the radio that if you, a listener, or if you know someone who's listening that has a prostate cancer diagnosis and wants to talk to somebody, that I would love to talk with them, whether they're a believer or unbeliever.

Dave, are you open and welcoming anybody who has a terminal diagnosis, a multiple myeloma diagnosis, something like that, where they just would like to talk to somebody?

Yeah, I'm glad to talk to anybody because to me, what are we told scripturally?

We're told we go through trials to be able to share and help others when they come to their trials.

Now, do you have a, like a, I don't want to say Facebook, but is there some kind of cancer link or something like that where you express your thoughts and people can chime in and back and forth?

What do they call that? Well, what I have is a blog. Well, I know that, but I thought there's some kind of like cancer thing or something.

There are a bunch of different forums, right? There's something called Smart Patients, which a lot of patients involved in different diseases get together and it's a very supportive forum, really helpful for a lot of people.

When they hear things, they can ask a lot of really good questions there. So that's one more part of it.

Do you want to give us the blog, the H -T -T -P? Yeah, if you go to Kopriha, K -O -P -R -I -H -A dot com, you'll see my stories, the things that I've written about.

So that, well, let me explain that, right? A lot of times people will send an email asking for a particular prayer request, right?

We have this BBC announced mailing list and you'll see that one prayer request and you never hear what happened.

And you just see that one question and it's, you know, like one sentence and they stop. And, well, I just couldn't do that.

I believe you gotta explain because our church body is family and our family has to know the stories of what's really going on.

So I want to include all the stories, the hard things, the easy things, the instances where I keep seeing

God over and over and over again and explain them. Now, my words are really weak. People keep telling me on occasion that, hey, they're inspired by what

I write. And I don't get it because my words are really weak. I'm just taking what

I experience and how I see God and walking through these trials and just simply explaining it the best

I can for anybody to approach so that they can understand where I'm coming from and how often

God is present everywhere at all times. Dave, as we go to the scriptures after having certain trials, they seem to, they're not more inspired or more

God -breathed, but they just, they touch our hearts in a different way because, let's say, we're reading the

Psalms and there's some kind of trial and you just can identify more with the psalmist. I mean, if you didn't have the trial, you still would like it and you'd think it would be good and encouraging.

But once you have that trial, similarly, let me read you a couple verses from 2

Corinthians 4 and then tell me what you kind of used to think about them and how they now go through your mind.

2 Corinthians 4, 16. So we do not lose heart, though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.

For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. To me,

I saw that verse some time ago and I actually held on to it a lot.

To me, a lot of prayers, even a good decade ago, I was praying, we have light and momentary troubles.

And they really are, because when we look in the terms of eternity versus our time, gee, everything is really light, but it really changes your heart, right?

What transforms you, right? When Christ, when God changes your heart, people don't see, hey, all of a sudden there's light and all of a sudden, boom, you're different.

No, there's this internal change. Your heart's different. And so our bodies, they break.

We get older, we fall apart, diseases come. Come on, prosperity gospel. You just don't have enough faith, brother.

I'm never gonna have enough faith for a prosperity gospel, man. I just can't. It's just way too hard.

Sorry to interrupt you. It's just a rough, I could, I, it's hard to see so many people going to rules and guidelines and being told, here's the things you must believe so that you'll be prosperous.

And it just doesn't work because God doesn't do that. He has eternal plans that He made far beyond our imaginations, where He knew every atom in complete control for all of eternity.

He learns nothing. And through our trials, we are transformed.

It changes our prayer, changes our heart. And so over time, I've slowed down more.

I look more at things around me. I see transformations all fall along. I'm taking pictures of the same tree, seeing the color changes.

I'm paying close attention to a lot of stuff because God's there. And we often forget to stop and look.

And so the things of the world try to accelerate and hurry you and distract and dissuade and get you all off track.

So you're all wrapped up in things and stuff and you go move in the news and politics and all and guess what? Stop. Seek God and watch

Him and see His glory and pay attention and live for Him, for His glory.

And that's that indwelling. That's that transformation. That's that renewing that continues always.

Dave, when you were saying those things, it reminded me that we all get super busy in life and then all of a sudden the doctor comes in with that white coat or they call you and they give you the diagnosis.

In one sense, I wish everybody could experience that in terms of the results of it, right?

I don't want them to be sick. I don't want them to go through pain. That's not my point. But I know the

Lord has worked in my life and has chipped off a lot of edges because I have a lot of rough edges through that trial.

And I know He has done the same with you if you had to pick one thing that you think the Lord has really done a work in your life and you could say well here this is what these are one of the this is one of the things at the top of the list that He did for me what would that that be?

Slowed me down. It made me a lot more gentle. It made me notice and look because you see the pain and the trials around you.

It's the people at work where you look and you see the look on their face which wasn't there before and now you spend the while to talk, to help, to pray, to do what you can.

And before it really just gets busy and it's easy to be busy because what you're trying to be successful you're doing things that need to be done and you know what the things need to be done mean you have to look and see.

Yeah I think of Psalm 46 be still and know that I am the Lord. I think

Dave sometimes when people ask us how are you? It's like a badge of honor. We're busy. We're busy.

When people ask me now when I am busy I'm thinking I don't want to say busy anymore. That's just too busy for what?

And you think of the Lord Jesus and he's gonna go heal someone and some lady comes and you know there's these divine interruptions that the

Lord obviously knew were gonna happen and he wasn't all perplexed about them.

Time is running short so Dave let me ask you this. Since you were in my preaching class and by the way you did a great job and graduated that was very manly.

That'll do it twice. What happened with that? I just couldn't continue.

My pain level went up and I was having headaches that were just really intolerable and so I ended up at a headache clinic and getting on the right medication and my headaches, it was something called new daily persistent headache, got under control but it was just not possible.

So I actually was nice to you when you dropped out for a medical reason right? Yeah. But this was not cancer -related?

No. This was just pure headaches. We were learning Bible verses and we were memorizing 1st

Peter and we kind of had this ongoing thing between the two of us what do you do when you're in a

CAT scan? Well that's a bigger orifice right to lay in so it's no big deal but the MRIs sometimes the older ones and you're all jammed in there and you're a pretty tall guy.

How tall are you? 6 '2 now. Used to be 6 '4. 6 '4 because part of the multiple myeloma makes your bones shrink.

T9 got crushed for me. They took out all your bone marrow and you had to live like in a bubble or something for a while is that true?

What they did is they took out stem cells and so for a couple of weeks I had to actually got my stem cells back after they killed my immune system and then it had to be regrown.

It took like a whole year for me to completely recover. Okay so it's almost like a reboot or something. Really some people consider it a new birthday.

Really? Yeah because it's a brand new immune system. Wow okay well we can talk about this for so long but I have to get to this because when

I think of you often this goes through my mind. One, would you please put some socks on it's winter.

Two, you know what I'm gonna say 1st

Peter chapter 1 verse 3. Yeah that's the one you just go there.

Can you give it to us or do you have you forgotten? Oh you can't forget it. Blessed be the God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It's just I stopped there and I go wow. See that's part of the new you. You just stop and think about that.

Yeah but then my mind's just blank now. Okay according to his according to his great mercy he has caused us to be born again through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

There you go. Well those are good words to think about when you go through trials. Dave I've been encouraged as a friend and as your pastor you're a good model.

We have other people here who are going through trials and even though I know you're hurting you're on a bunch of pain medicine you want to go serve the

Larry's. You want to come alongside of folks and help them with their finances as that's part of your ministry here and so I really appreciate that about you.

It's not all well what about me what about me you're here to serve other people so thanks for that. Gotta serve that's the way it is.

Yeah so if you'd like to get a hold of Dave you can email me Mike at no compromise radio dot com and if you email me

I'll make sure you can get his email or you go to the website that's how do you spell it again?

K -O -P -R -I -A -J dot com. Okay and you can get a hold of Dave that way. Dave thanks for being on No Compromise Radio.

You said I said the other day something about life and you said well the radio and I thought oh yeah

I've got to get you on the radio so if you think about it listeners pray for Dave Copper did he have lots of years to serve his wife and the

Lord here on earth. 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.