Nate Pickowicz Interview

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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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

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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.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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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

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry.

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My name's Mike Abendroth and I'm your host. Don't forget you can pick us up on Twitter, at NoCoRadio.

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You can go to the YouTube channel if you'd like to watch some videos. We've got some new James White and Carl Truman and Phil Johnson videos there.

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Or you can just pick us up on iTunes or wherever you're doing that. Today is Wednesday, so I like to have authors, preachers, theologians,

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Bible students on and interview them so that you might understand more about their ministry, how the

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Lord is using them in all states across the Union. Today, it's my pleasure to have

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Nate Pickowitz in our, not our studio, but on our phone today. Nate, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

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Hey, thanks, Mike. It's good to be here. Okay, say your name again so I make sure I get it straight. Sure, sure. My name is Nate Pickowitz.

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All right. So, tell us... Easier than it sounds or easier than it looks when you read it. And what was your wife's maiden name?

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Did she have to go from, like, Smith to Pickowitz? Something like that. Her maiden name was Tripp.

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So, she went from Tripp to Pickowitz, and so I apologized for about the first six months we were married and here we go, you know?

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Well, I first met you over Twitter, and you have some interesting tweets I suggest to our listeners that they follow you.

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It's just at your name, at Nate Pickowitz, P -I -C -K -O -W -I -C -Z, or Zed.

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And the one you had on June 15th, I kind of like, you said, I've got moo. What's that all about?

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Yeah, right. So, it was one of the other people that are on Twitter, she was doing a book giveaway, and me and another guy got into kind of a meme war, making different pictures and just basically propaganda to get a free book.

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You know, we're pastors, and so we do everything we can to just get books on our shelves.

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So, this is the Festschrift for Douglas Moo, dealing with Pauline studies, so it was one

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I was excited about. So, I just kind of went ballistico over that, and then I ended up just by happenstance winning the book.

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And so, when it came in the mail, I was really excited, and so then I just proclaimed to the whole world,

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I've got moo. And that was exciting. Well, Nate, you're pastoring pretty close to Massachusetts.

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Tell us about the ministry there at Harvard, at Harvest Bible, and how long you've been there, and what's going on there in New Hampshire.

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Sure, yeah. So, we actually planted Harvest Bible Church in Gilmanton, which is a town that even most

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New Hampshire folks don't even know where it is. We planted that church in 2013, and that kind of came out of,

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I was looking to get into ministry. I was serving at the church that I came from, which is over in Loudon, near Concord, the capital of the state.

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And it was kind of, you know, like, what are we going to do with Nate? You know, am I going to try to pursue, you know, an associate pastorate, or am

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I going to go and try to candidate at another church? And the town I was from, which is

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Gilmanton, I knew that there was not a Bible -centered church there.

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It was not a region of territory that was known for gospel witness, and so it just seemed like the natural thing to want to go and plant a church right there.

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And Gilmanton's a small town. There's only about 4 ,000 people, but, you know, you're from Worcester, I think, but most towns in New England, you're used to traveling, you know, a half hour, 40 minutes to do anything.

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So we get a lot of folks, and we have a lot of influence in the surrounding towns, and so our sphere of influence is a little bit larger than that.

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But you know, the question was, you know, why plant in a small town, well, why not plant in a small town?

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You know, New England is just peppered with all these tiny towns that need gospel witness, need solid

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Bible teaching. So that was the impetus behind wanting to do that here. And so yeah,

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I've been pastoring there for coming up on three years, and the Lord's been really good to us, and it's just been a joy.

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Now, I've been reading your article, The Need for Revival in New England, and I thought it was interesting that you talked about 2 % of the population in New Hampshire are professing believers.

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So that yields, with the population of New Hampshire, only 26 ,000 Christians in an entire state.

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Yes. Yeah. So how do we begin, as we survey the landscape, to change that?

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I mean, it's a leading question regarding the sovereignty of God and proclamation and just fidelity. But when you look at New Hampshire, and you say, well, we're going to plant a church here, and it doesn't matter if there's 500 people, 1 ,000, or 10 ,000, everyone here, rural or not, needs the gospel, and so we'll just preach the word and let the

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Lord take care of the rest? Is that your approach? Yeah, that's right, Mike. You know, when you look at it, you know, the best estimates are about 2%, even though that could be really generous,

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I think there might actually be even less than 2%, but it's hard to tell. And so in a state that used to be so heavily populated with believers, you know, a couple hundred years ago,

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I mean, it's just vast. And the thing about it is, is that, you know, you go to other regions of the country, and there is at least a sense of cultural

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Christianity, where, you know, people at least know the Bible stories, and maybe they grew up going to church, and it's kind of expected that you're churchy, but up here,

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I mean, there's no expectation of that. There are people who literally don't know anything about the

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Bible, Jesus is a curse word, and they know nothing, and so for these people, it's not a matter of getting over their cultural, you know,

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Christianity and, you know, having them say, I already know that stuff, they don't know anything. So I think step one is just to give

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God his pulpits back. Just start to preach the word, and just let the word divide, it's the gospel that has the power to salvation, it's

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God's truth that sanctifies, John 17, you know? So I think step one is just to get the word back up here, and preach faithfully, stop relying on other techniques, you know, to try to manipulate numbers and manipulate people, and, you know, whatever the trends are,

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I think we just need to not do that, and bring the word back, and then that's going to have natural implications, you know, into the fellowship and into discipleship, and so on and so forth.

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But I think the primacy of the word of God needs to be the center focus of everything we do up here.

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Every single pastor and minister in New England has got to have a laser -aligned focus on the scriptures, otherwise

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I think we're just missing the boat, you know? Nate, I'm thankful for men like you that the

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Lord has placed all across the country, and lots of times we don't know about these men who are in small cities preaching the word, but we have so many young men coming out of seminary, and maybe they've got a favorite preacher who's very famous, and they've got a large pulpit, multi -services, multi -campuses, and I think there is not a long line of men who want to sign up for behind -the -scenes trench work that I think the gospel so often calls for.

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Why do you think that is? Well, I think part of it is the culture that we live in.

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I mean, we really do chase celebrity, and I remember reading something, there was an article online a few months back that was talking about why only big -name pastors get invited to conferences, and the short answer was, well, that's because that's what people will go to see.

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You know, so we'll pay money, and we'll go to a conference, and it's exciting, and there's a sense of noteworthiness.

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And I've got to tell you, I'm a fanboy like anybody else. I got to meet John MacArthur a couple of years ago, and I was a little bit giddy and nervy and all that fun stuff, but in the end, we're all doing the same job, we're still all servants.

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But I think there's just a desire for notoriety and celebrity, and I think that even for Christians, I think it plays into our own pride and a sinfulness that we want to get some credit, we want to get some glory, but in truth, you know,

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God has called us to something different, and there's going to be a whole slew of pastors that never, ever make the fame here on earth, but Jesus said in John 12 that it's the

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Father who gives them honor and glory, the Father will recognize those people. So we really have to do this job for an audience of one, and if the

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Lord decides to give us some kind of influence beyond that, well then praise be to His name, you know, and that's just a bonus for us, you know.

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But I think we're just fighting the flesh, I think it's hard, I think you really want to know that you're doing the right things and people recognize you, and I think we just want the slaps on the back to encourage us, but I think that doesn't always come, you know?

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Nate, as you were talking, I was thinking of Isaiah chapter 6, and it took a vision of Isaiah seeing the

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Lord who is holy, holy, holy, then Isaiah knows his sinfulness, he is receiving grace from the

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Lord sovereignly, and then there's the commission, and God sends Isaiah to this people, he didn't call them my people, he called them this people, and his message was to keep on hearing and do not understand, keep on seeing, but do not perceive.

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And I wanted to write a book on, you know, ministry like Isaiah, and here we get called to some of these places, but then

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I thought it probably wouldn't sell very much. I hate to be pragmatic.

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We're talking to Nate Pickowitz today on No Compromise Radio Ministry. Nate, tell us your philosophy of preaching,

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I'm on your website, and by the way, people can access that at HarvestBibleGilmanton .org,

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or they can just type in your name or go to your Twitter account. I notice that there's sequential exposition in the

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Gospel of Jesus Christ according to John. Why do you do that? Well, I've got to back up and just say that I follow the ministry of men like John MacArthur, John Piper, and Steve Lawson, and all these guys, you know,

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Dr. Martin Lloyd -Jones, and the list goes on, and one thing that I've learned, especially from Dr.

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MacArthur, is that, you know, you really just want to give people the Word, and there's a certain responsibility to giving them, you know, like Paul said in Acts 20, the whole counsel of God, and so there's a certain responsibility,

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I think, that the pastor has to have to do that, and expositional preaching or expository preaching, there's so many benefits to it, and, you know, recently there's been a buzz online about how, you know, expository preaching is cheating, or somehow you're not assessing the needs of your congregation by just going sequentially through, but I beg to differ, because, you know, you encounter so many things in the text that God places there that you might not get on your own, you know, if you're going to just go topical all the time, and you're going to hobby -horse your own ideas, and you're going to prop yourself up on what you think your congregation needs, and I'm not saying we don't be discerning, but we've encountered, just going through the

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Gospel of John, so many topics and so many doctrines and so much nuance that we just wouldn't have seen otherwise, and the

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Lord has sovereignly used all those things to bless our church, and by God's grace, people keep on coming back, and people are getting excited, and even our young children are getting excited about the

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Word of God, because they finally get to understand pieces of what this means, and another thing, too, is

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I think it also, expository preaching, it also models for people how to do their own personal

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Bible study. You know, it's not just for the pastor to get up there and talk and, you know, have his thing, but it teaches people how to do word studies, how to be consistent, how to really slow down, tap the brakes when you're reading your

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Bible, and get in and mind what's there, and really try to understand the mind of God, so I think how you preach in the pulpit is how people are going to respond, and they're going to study on their own.

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They're following your example as a pastor, so I just think, I mean, there's, I've heard

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Dr. MacArthur give, I think it was 25 or 30 specific reasons why to do this, but I'm sold this is the way they

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God really blesses His Church, so that's what we're committed to doing. Nate, when I think of family worship and dads leading their family in a study of the

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Scripture and who the Lord Jesus is, I often say to the dads, well, how do you hear the sermons preached?

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Oh, verse by verse and all that, and so I said, well, why don't you just take the same philosophy, read

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Exodus 1, talk about sin and the need of a Savior, and talk about who the Lord is, and then the next day, read

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Exodus 2, you know, and just walk through the Bible chapter by chapter, and I think you hit the nail on the head where we are learning how to study our

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Bibles as we listen to the pastor. I mean, he's setting the model. This is how you do Bible study, and maybe when we see a congregation full of people who are a mile wide and an inch deep, that may reflect on the pastor's approach or philosophy.

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Sure, very well, it could. You know, I think it also reflects, you know, I'm not opposed to, you know, topical preaching when it's necessary.

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It certainly needs to be done exegetically, but you know, when you do have just spot preaching and topical preaching and you're bouncing around all the time, it does contribute to people just bouncing around their

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Bibles and never being anchored to a place or to a text, and that's what we see happening throughout the entire country, is all these people that have this cursory knowledge of basically what the scripture says, but it's never developed, and they're used to just pulling verses out of context and camping on the verse, and they don't even know what it means, because there's no context, there's no grounding.

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So, I think you're right, I think we are seeing the blowback from just a lack of faithful biblical preaching in the pulpits.

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Nate, it seems to me that if I think of Orwell in 1984, or Huxley, the

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Brave New World, it's not Orwellian in our churches, that is to say, we don't have people saying, you can't have the

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Bible. It's Huxleyan, where we have too many Bibles, too many apps, too many books, too many iPads, too many downloads, it's like we have so much information that it's hard for us to just sit down in the morning with our

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Bibles and read and contemplate who God is. Yeah, you're right. I think what we've also done is we've, you know, we're addicted to, you know, we have, like you said, we have so much information, and we're addicted to just getting the information now, and there's no sense of meditation, there's no sense of what the

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Bible says, say, la, just stopping and, you know, chewing the cud, you know, chewing through the text and meditating on the

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Word of God. You know, we want everything instantly. I want the application right now. I want to know how it's going to apply to my life right now, without ever having to do the heart work.

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And I think, you know, so often we place deeper understanding of the

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Scriptures on this high shelf that's only reserved for, you know, certain people, when in truth, you know,

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I think about the story where, you know, Tyndale says, you know, the plow boy in the field is going to know more Bible than you talking to the

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Pope, and there's a sense in which the Bible is written in a common language so people can understand and discern it, and I think if we don't do that, if we don't lend our ministries to that and actually serve the body by teaching them how to do that,

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I think we're robbing the churches, and I think we need to instruct people that, look, you know, you need to take your time.

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You know, don't just read the Bible a few times and think you're good. Like, this isn't going to be the rest of your life. Spend your time learning this book for the purpose of knowing it, not because you're going to take a test in a week, but because you're going to have to keep this for the rest of your life.

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This is a lifetime knowledge, lifetime meditation, lifetime work, you know?

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Nate, I know I liked you when I saw on your church website the verse, Colossians 128, we proclaim

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Him warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

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And that's exactly what we have on our bulletins, and I think probably on our homepage as well,

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Him we proclaim. And I think that's really the key for so many churches.

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Let's say just back to the New England category, how do we educate people in New England?

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I mean, you've probably had this happen to you like I've had it happen to me. I pray at a restaurant with my family, and the waiter or waitress doesn't even know what we're doing.

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She's never seen people, you know, she thinks maybe we're sleeping or looking at our iPhones or something, and she has no awareness that this could be a family praying.

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And so what do we do? Well, we just preach Him, Him we proclaim, to anyone who will listen, and we'll let the

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Lord see fit to do whatever He wants as He continues to build His church. I think there's no other way to go about it in New England, is there?

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No, I agree. I mean, it is totally foreign. You know, I mean, you tell stories like that that someone doesn't recognize prayer, doesn't know who

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Christ is, and they think it's exaggerated, but that's really how bad it is in New England. I mean, it's bad.

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And I was invited to come and preach a summer series.

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There was a local congregation who just did a, you know, just a regular, it was more kind of an exercise in keeping the building going.

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And they would just invite various preachers from various community churches in the area.

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And they invited me, they were kind enough to do that, and I just preached a very simple gospel message, you know, 20 -25 minutes just in the summertime.

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And I remember afterwards, a gentleman came up to me, and he shook my hand, and he told me, he says, you know, I said,

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I don't think anybody, or he told me, he doesn't think that anybody sitting in those pews had heard that in 30 years.

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He goes, I haven't heard preaching like that in 30 years. He wasn't referring to my preaching, he was referring to the gospel. And, you know,

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I acted kind of like, oh, wow, you know, like, a little bit shocked, but in my mind, I'm thinking, I know, like, this has not been preached or taught, certainly in my town for 30 years, but some regions of this space, for a whole generation, people just don't know.

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And so, you just have to expose them to it. You know, what does a Christian look like? You know, what is the gospel?

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You know, who is Jesus? You know, what does it mean to be a believer in this context? I think, you know, you just, you can't, you can't dance around it.

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You just have to be bearing a true witness, you know? Now, I was not raised in New England like you were, but I've been here for close to 20 years.

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And there's so much of New England that I love. I love the seasons. I love the dairies with the ice cream.

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I love riding my bicycle around in the fall. I love my street and my home where I live.

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There's a lot of stuff I like with a background and Ivy League and close to the beach. And I could go on, but it is difficult when you've got 80 % of the people who, if they know anything about religion, it's

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Roman Catholicism. And then in your article, you put that Robert Frost line in there, good fences make good neighbors.

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We have tough, cold, hard New Englanders that if it wasn't for the power of the gospel, we could never get into their lives because they'll just slam the proverbial door in your face.

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Yeah, I mean, it's definitely in my blood. I was born and raised here.

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I moved away for a short season of time at my wife and came back. And, you know, it's in your blood.

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You know, I think people up here, there's a certain kind of folks, I think, you know, people up here, they work hard.

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The winters are cold. It's tough to make a buck. I think people can be very guarded, cautious, reserved, but at the same time, you know, like there's a sense of self -reliance and pride that goes along with that, that, you know, we're hard workers and we make our own way.

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And as soon as you tell someone that someone has to die for you and pay your way and you have to confess your sin and actually give over your pride, give over your depravity and confess that, you know, they have a hard time hearing that.

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You know, they cling too much on their own ability, their own ability to work.

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And, you know, if I'm a good enough person and, you know, I'll get to heaven. And, you know, we really have to, with kid gloves, smash that.

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And I think that's the ministry up here is just to be preaching faithfully, witnessing faithfully, and just, you know, you got to love these people first.

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You got to get inside their hearts and in their minds and just love them. But be honest and be truthful that, you know, there is no other way.

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You're not going to muscle your way into the kingdom of God by your hard work and good ethic and all that stuff.

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It's got to be through faith in Christ. Well, I've come to the point where I realize I'll never be accepted as a local, but the gospel is still powerful.

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So I will just continue to preach it like Paul did at the Areopagus. Nate, tell us, we've got about three minutes left.

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Give me about a minute testimony, two minute testimony of how the Lord saved you. And it's always encouraging for the listeners to hear.

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Yeah, I know. I was raised in a Christian home. I went to church as a child. I made a profession of faith when

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I was about 13. I was baptized. Then I had a period of time when things got very difficult for my family.

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And I sadly, I walked away from the Lord. And then sovereignly, He brought me back after I had just been through some trouble and brought me back, called me back to Him.

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And I was about maybe 20, 23, 24 years old, and I started to realize that everything else

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I was chasing was wrong. And that the confession I made when I was younger, that was indeed a true confession.

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I needed to submit. I need to obey the Lord and stop chasing everything else under the sun. So by His grace,

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He called me back, that my wife got married, got invested in the church, and we rededicated our lives.

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My wife was raised Catholic and was saved around that time, but rededicated myself to the Lord. And He's grown me since and then called me into ministry a little bit later.

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But it's really been, you know, there's always been a sense that I've known and believed, but it wasn't really until I apprehended the truth of the gospel that I fully understood and was able to commit myself to the

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Lord and thank Him for saving me by His grace. Now, are those the hounds of heaven behind you?

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Oh, you can hear those guys. Yeah, yeah. They can hear me messing around. They're one piece of the action.

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I see. Talking to Nate Pikowicz today. You can access his information on Twitter at Nate, P -I -C -K -O -W -I -C -Z.

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And you can go to his website to hear some good verse -by -verse preaching, HarvestBibleGilminton .org.

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Nate, thanks for being on No Compromise Radio. It's a privilege to have you as a co -laborer here in New England as we just preach the

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Bible verse -by -verse extolling Christ's excellencies and we let the fruit and, you know, the

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Lord will take care of the fruit, right? We take care of the depth of the ministry by the Spirit's power and the Lord will take care of the depth.

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That's right. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Mike. I really appreciate it. Oh, you're welcome. We love men who are faithfully serving the

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Lord behind the scenes and I look forward to seeing you face -to -face one of these days, maybe at the

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Shepherds Conference. Shepherds Conference, I plan to go, so we'll see, yeah. All right. Thank you very much, Nate.

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All right. Thank you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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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.

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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.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff, or management.