Tozer Gems

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. My name is Mike Abendroth.

I hope I'm not too loud. I crank this up. People have been complaining that we're too soft. At first,

I thought that was a doctrinal issue, that we were too soft doctrinally. And then

I realized that that maybe is not the case. And so up the volume we go. I think what happened was when

I guest hosted for Todd Freakishly Tall Friel, we somehow turned down the volume.

So sorry about that. Nothing I can do. Crank it up. No Compromise Radio. Don't forget we have

No Compromise 90, NoCo 90. You go to YouTube and once a week,

I give about a 90 second partly funny, partly true blurb about Christianity in no compromise style.

You know, one of the side benefits of those NoCo 90 YouTubes is you get to see how fat you look.

Especially during non biking season. I don't know why I didn't start that show in about August after I've put a few thousand miles on the bike.

But anyway, it's time to get the calorie counting app out, set for 1200 calories a day, net.

So today's day two. Oh, all thanks to NoCo 90.

Trying to figure out a better background and better camera angle. So hold your horses. This is just a small time operation here.

If you give a one time love gift of any amount, we'll rechange the camera angle. I was listening the other day on the radio.

What is it with these people just begging for money? It's just a beg -a -thon constantly. We're hurting, it's that time of the year again.

Everyone I think pretty much knows it costs money to be on radio. There are production costs for even a behemoth, a hegemonic production like No Compromise Radio.

There are costs, so anyway. It's like that lady that wrote in, if your show is from Yahweh, ordained by Adonai, then your show will stay on.

A .W. Tozer, in the spirit of being nice to our minions, we're gonna talk about Tozer today.

Christian Missionary Alliance pastor for many years, A .W. Tozer, not to be confused with A .W.

Pink. And Tozer, he wrote a lot of good stuff. I think the first thing

I ever read by Tozer was The Knowledge of the Holy. It's a book on the attributes of God.

One of the very first books I ever read as a Christian, and it is a brilliant book. It's a wonderful book.

You ought to read that book. His chapter on self -sufficiency of God, self -existence of God, maybe it's called.

I mean, it just doesn't get any better to sit and just ponder who God is and how great he is.

That is a book that's good for you. And so in the flavor of we love other

Christians, we don't have to only love five -point Calvinists.

I want you to know that there are some Arminians that I love. Only some.

Well, that's not a loving thing to say. Hey, it's radio. You have heard, if you've listened to this show for any length of time, there's been a little de -evolution.

And so I started off pretty seriously engaging with biblical text, teaching passages, going over things.

I mean, I tried to do some noco style once in a while on the shack book and stuff, but I think it's turned into more, there's some laughter and you probably don't know this, but as I talked to Pastor Chuck at Church of the

Cross in Pine Grove just this last weekend, I want to be known for a lot of things. And so, of course, at the top of the list,

I want to be known as someone who exalts Christ Jesus, the only Savior who's been raised from the dead after his representative and substitutionary work in his life and then at Calvary.

I want to do that. I want to be faithful to the word. I want to be faithful to my wife and kids.

I have a lot of priorities. But see what some of you maybe don't realize, this is just a hobby of mine.

I want to think it's a ministry. I think people learn and grow if they apply themselves.

But my main ministry is the local church and I preach verse by verse, not always in no compromise style, sometimes.

And I'm also a father and I'm a husband and I'm a friend and those kinds of things.

But when I sit down here in the studio, which is my study, waiting for the funds to come in for the soundproof booth, you should hear,

I can't, see I have to plan strategically when to come to the church and record shows. So if it snows, I like to come in because then it's quiet.

I can't do this on a Wednesday night when a bunch of O 'Wanner people are around and I can't do it on Monday because the homeschool co -op people are flying around.

So there's strategic times. That's why I don't do this show live at 3 .30 like I used to because it's, to use the words of the musical band,

The Specials, it's too much pressure. So no compromise radio is kind of a hobby and it's certainly hopefully a ministry to our

Lord. But I like to have some fun. So as I was talking to Pastor Chuck, it's fun to laugh and to enjoy ourselves and the joy of the

Lord is our strength. I want to be known as lots of things. Now see, we're finally coming back to the point.

A happy Calvinist, a joyful Calvinist. I don't want people to think, oh,

Calvinism breeds staidness, stoicness, bitterness.

So, I mean, sometimes I am staid, sometimes I am stoic, sometimes I am bitter, but I don't like that.

I don't like that part of me. And so I think we can have some fun. So I regularly want to laugh and here's the funniest thing.

There's nobody in here. I'm just laughing to an electronic box. I mean, now you're listening, of course, through the miracle of radio, iTunes,

Facebook, iPods, iCast, iTunes, tune in radio. But when I'm here, if Cooley's gone, then it's just me.

Where is Steve Cooley these days? Does he do that Saturday show anymore? Tuesday guy on Saturday? I think he's sloughing off.

I think he's only doing like two a month. What's he doing? Then he's going to run off and go on sabbatical or something. I don't know.

So anyway, we talk about some serious things, but we try to make it a little light as well. And if the lightness is me laughing,

I guess that that's just the way it goes. It's my show. And who knows where we'll be in three years? Can you imagine if Ad and I ordains it in three years, where will we be?

Will it just be all like comedy shtick or what will it be? When I flew the other day,

I just kept thinking about Brian Reagan's airplane comedy routine.

All right, so back to Tozer. I've got a sheet here in front of me. It says

Tozer Gems. I think if you type in T -O -Z -E -R Gems, G -E -M -S, you'll probably find some of these.

And I just want to read some Tozer quotes. Then I'll give my own opinion on some of these. And so the show will be entitled

Tozer Gems. We're all on a journey with Tozer. It's very authentic.

A .W. Tozer. Now this first section is on the church. I don't think we're going to make it through. So we'll just do our best.

The churches, even gospel churches, are worldly in spirit, morally anemic, on the defensive, imitating instead of initiating, and in a wretched state generally because for two full generations, they have been told that justification is no more than a not guilty verdict pronounced by the heavenly father.

Now here's when we get into Tozer -like writing. Upon a sinner who can present the magic coin faith with the wondrous open sesame engraved upon it.

Now I know Tozer would believe that justification is a gospel verdict pronounced not guilty, pronounced righteous.

But you just can't live in, at that moment, sanctification does begin, in other words.

The gradual disappearance of the idea and feeling of majesty from the church,

Tozer goes on to say, is a sign and a portent. The revolt of the modern mind has had a heavy price.

How heavy is becoming more apparent as the years go by? Our God has now become our servant to wait on our will.

The Lord is my shepherd, we say, instead of the Lord is my shepherd.

And the difference is as wide as the world. That's amazing to me, Tozer insightfully gleans that you can say the same

Bible verse, the Lord is my shepherd, and the way you say it with your life and with your emphasis, even verbally, it can change it from a

God -centered view of the world to a man -centered view. The Lord is the shepherd who, you know,

Lord is my shepherd. Well, we're glad that he's my particular shepherd, but like he does things for me.

Crazy. Tozer, those overtones of religious delight which accompany truth when the spirit illuminates it are all but missing from the church today.

Religious delight, and see, if it's just religious delight, well, that's probably easy to store up and to serve up on a platter for people.

But religious delight which accompanies truth, where is that today? Because so few churches teach the truth because they don't say what would honor

God in our service today, what would people like? Tozer, a church that is soundly rooted cannot be destroyed, but nothing can save a church whose root is dried up.

No stimulation, no advertising campaigns, no gifts of money, and no beautiful edifice can bring back to life the rootless tree.

So I wonder what would happen if we took away all the programs at the church you attend, every meeting, every

Bible study, every women's group, every Oprah Book Club meeting, every

Pinochle gathering, every hot sauce wings eating contest, and we said, all right, we're going to have the worship service on Sunday morning.

Let's just even get rid of music, too. It's going to be all acapella, and there's going to be an hour sermon, and some prayer time,

Lord's Supper, communion, of course, and prayer meeting in the week.

I wonder what would happen. I wonder if the

Holy Spirit left your church, would everything continue as it is right now?

In other words, so man -centered, so program -driven, business -like, you don't even need the

Holy Spirit because the thing's a machine. You got guys like Ed Young Jr.

at that so -called church. It's a machine is what it is, a money -making machine.

Tozer, what's the point of the show today? The point is I'd like you to get that book, The Knowledge of the Holy by Tozer and read

A .W. Tozer. Churches and Christian organizations have shown a tendency to fall into the same error that destroyed

Israel. What was that error? Inability to receive admonition.

Tozer, don't defend your church or your organization against criticism.

If the criticism is false, it can do no harm. If it is true, you need to hear it and do something about it.

You know what I don't like on no -compromise radio? I don't like it that I get convicted at my own show.

That's no fun. I'm here to convict you. I'm here to make you squirm, make you feel small.

Why does it have to happen to me? In all honesty, that is convicting because I know

I want to defend myself. It wasn't that long ago someone said about our church, we were legalistic and no wonder people in the community thought we didn't have any grace.

And you know, my first response to that is, A, the person who wrote it doesn't understand what legalism is according to the

Bible. B, we're not legalistic because I've taught on it for a long time and legalism isn't a call for obedience.

Legalism in scripture is works righteousness, trying to get to heaven by law, but in modern vernacular, in modern evangelical nomenclature, legalism is you can't do this and you can't do that and you can't do this, you maybe get to do that.

And you know, can you celebrate Halloween? Can you drink a beer? Can you put tobacco in your mouth, light it on fire and suck in the smoke?

We're not legalistic in that area. And the reason why we're not is Romans 14 and 15 follows

Romans 3 .21 through chapter five. If you are justified by faith alone, through faith, and if God declares you perfectly righteous based on the work of Christ Jesus, and the son has all your sins credited to his account and all his righteousness credited to your account, if you smoke a pipe with cherry tobacco, or if you drink a bass ale or a caliber non -alcoholic except 0 .05

or whatever it is, 0 .05, how many of those did you have to drink before you'd get some kind of feeling? Well, if you drink 10, you'd get a feeling it'd be bloated stomach.

Not that I would ever have a 71 calorie caliber non -alcoholic made by Guinness, I don't know.

You can't become more righteous because you don't smoke or don't drink or don't play with the devil's deck.

Don't go to the passion pit. You can't become less if you do because you're justified by God's work and he sees you in Christ Jesus, a vital union with Christ Jesus.

Grace, I think we promote grace. I think compared to Arminian churches, semi -Pelagian churches, we know what grace is.

So all that to say, I'm convicted because I want to defend myself. When people say that's legalistic church, you hear it all the time.

No, it's just a high call for obedience. When you read Genesis chapter 22 and Abraham has to go slay

Isaac, that is a faith driven obedience.

James chapter two affirms that for us, doesn't it? You read that and you just say, well, it has legalism, what

God asked him to do. I'm not talking about adding extra laws.

Don't taste and don't touch. I'm not saying that at all. I even was saying to somebody the other day, my son said, well, somebody said that smoking cigarettes is a sin only if you're addicted to them.

And he said, dad, I don't have a Bible verse, but that doesn't seem right. Now, of course it's stupid to smoke cigarettes and inhale them.

It's bad stewardship for what is it, seven bucks a pack or something like that. But I said, did the person who is teaching that, do they go to McDonald's?

Do they have a double cheeseburger? Do they have caffeine in the morning? You know, we have to be careful on what we say.

But anyway, I know that if criticism is not true, it just falls to the ground.

And if it's true, then we have to take it. So convicting myself here, as I read the words of A .W.

Tozer. Tozer, how many hours of prayer are wasted beseeching God to bless projects that are geared to the glorification of little men?

Whew, Tozer on accepting Christ. Everything is made to center upon the initial act of accepting

Christ, a term Tozer said incidentally, which is not found in the Bible. And we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls.

In other words, just accept Christ and you're on your way, forget the rest. Same topic.

The trouble is that the whole accept Christ attitude is likely to be wrong.

It shows Christ applying to us rather than us to him. It makes him stand hat in hand, awaiting our verdict on him, instead of our kneeling with troubled hearts awaiting his verdict on us.

It may even permit us to accept Christ by an impulse of mind or emotions painlessly at no loss to our ego and no inconvenience to our usual way of life.

I get that, you know, it's the picture of Jesus outside the door as a gentleman knocking, but he's not gonna barge down the door and he's a gentleman

Jesus. You have to let him in. Tozer. The formula accept

Christ has become a panacea, okay, for the new Englanders, has become a panacea of universal application.

And I believe it has been fatal to many. Why? Because you say you accept Jesus and then you live like hell.

You live like you did before. You mean to tell me that God of the universe makes you born again, gives you a new nature, regenerates you, makes you a new creation in Christ Jesus, and you're not any different at all?

If you're not any different at all, notice I'm not saying are you perfectly different in a sanctification way, but I'm saying if you're not different than you were before, you're not a

Christian. Well, I'm the same as I used to be. I had initial received the word with joy and studied some, liked to go to church, but now

I'm just like I used to be. Well, then you are like you used to be. You were unregenerate underneath the wrath of God and you still are.

That's the point. And so you can't just say I accept him. I got my little fire insurance thing, sign the check here and then move on your merry way.

The God who's powerfully, omnipotently powerful, almighty

God, if he changes somebody, they are what? Changed. If there's no change, there's no change.

That's a very good slogan. What do I mean by that? I remember I'd be in downtown LA and walk in some bad parts of the town to go to get to certain toy wholesaler accounts and people would yell at me, you got some change.

So what do I mean here by change? If there's no change, there's no change. If there's no change in your behavior, there's no change in your salvation because at justification, at regeneration, you walk in a different fashion.

You don't walk perfectly, but you are to walk worthy of your calling, Ephesians chapter four, verse one.

And you walk in a different way and you might struggle with sin and you might fall in sin and you might do things to not please the

Lord and you might actually think you're sinning more, but you're really sinning less because you're recognizing more of what

God requires because you recognize more of who God is and therefore you see sin now as what it is and how often it appears versus what it wasn't and how it didn't appear before.

You get that right? If there's no change, there's no change. You got some change?

Tozer, to accept Christ is, it is necessary that we reject whatever is contrary to Him.

That is a fact often overlooked by eager evangelist, bent on getting results.

To accept Christ is to know the meaning of the words, as He is, so are we in this world. We accept

His friends as our friends, His enemies as our enemies, His ways as our ways,

His rejection as our rejection, His cross as our cross, His life as our life,

His future as our future. If this is what we mean when we advise the seeker to accept

Christ, we had better explain it to him. He may get into deep spiritual trouble unless we do.

I watched Creflo Dalla the other day on Larry King YouTube and he was talking about spiritual prosperity.

Amazing. That's the way of the world. We want the triumph before the cross.

We want the glory before the shame. We want the crown before the cross and it's always the other way around.

Tozer, we're telling people that the easiest thing in the world is to accept Jesus Christ. And I wonder what has happened to our

Christian theology, which no longer contains any hint of what it should mean to be completely and utterly abandoned to Jesus Christ, our

Lord and Savior. So today, Mike Evendroth here on No Compromise Radio.

We only have 24 and one half minutes and today we're talking about A .W.

Tozer. If you have one book to read for Tozer, it should be The Knowledge of the Holy. I forgot who published that.

I wanna say maybe, if I had to guess, I'd say Eerdmans, but that's probably a bad guess. And if you want to read, call it heresy.

This particular book that I'm reading from is The Quotable Tozer, Wise Words with a

Prophetic Edge, compiled by Harry Verplew, V -E -R -P -L -O -E -G -H.

I don't know what kind of, Ted would know, but I wouldn't know. So if you wanna write us, info at nocompromiseradio .com.

By the time you hear this, NoCoEver, part two, should have been released. You can go to the website,

NoCoEver, and pull up episode two with Carl Truman, Phil Johnson, and James White and myself.

And we have a couple other episodes that are brewing, but we just are waiting for the love gift of any amount.

And then we can proceed. Oh, what will

I talk about next? I got this, the Game Church thing. I got the Game Church New Testament. We can do that next time.

If there's a topic you want me to talk about, I can't guarantee it, but I'll try my best. Info at nocompromiseradio .com,

or you can write Pastor Steve at Tuesdayguy, at nocompromiseradio .com.

My name's Mike Abendroth, always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. NoCo, night.

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 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.