Don Green February 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. My name is
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Mike Abendroth, and before we get to the show today, remember our tagline is Always Biblical, Always Provocative, Always in That Order.
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What we're after on No Compromise Radio is we want to talk about the Lord Jesus.
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He's the one that never compromised. When you just stop and think about that for a moment, that is amazing to consider.
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He said, Jesus said, I always do the things that are pleasing to the Father. And then we, in response to the
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Lord Jesus, we don't want to compromise either. And we do, and the good news is the
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Lord didn't, and we rest in Him. I like to interview guests on a regular basis, but only one particular guest on a regular basis, and that's
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Don Green. Don, welcome to No Compromise Radio. Hello, Mike. It's good to be back with you again at the start of the new year.
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Don, tell us a little bit about your ministry that the Lord has given you. I assume those that listen regularly know all about you already and probably listen to some sermons, but we probably have some new listeners.
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So tell us about the church there that you're at and what you're doing with your radio show, etc.
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Sure. I'm the founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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We started almost exactly five years ago. February 12th was our first official service in 2012, and so we've been at it for about five years.
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Along with that, I have a modest radio program that airs primarily in Ohio called
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The Truth Pulpit, which people can find at thetruthpulpit .com. We air different things, but it's primarily edited versions of my pulpit ministry from truth and also from the days when
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I was at Grace Community Church. So the Lord has given me far more than I deserve, and we're grateful for every opportunity
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He has, including, Mike, the opportunity to be a regular guest on No Compromise Radio.
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Your friendship has become quite sweet and valuable to me over the years. Don, I love to have you on once a month.
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Maybe we should do that more often, but I'm still waiting for the check to arrive, and maybe you got the
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P .O. Box wrongly written down or something. I'll check my records. I'm shocked that you haven't received it yet.
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Don, Cincinnati, Ohio. Well, I've been in Ohio. I haven't been to Cincinnati. Tell us and our listeners about the climate there, spiritually and religiously.
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We hear a lot of talk these days about city initiatives and urban environments, and of course I'd like the
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Gospel to go everywhere, but what are some of the unique challenges you see in a place like Cincinnati?
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Well, there's two things that stand out to me, Mike. Historically, Cincinnati is a city that has heavy
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Catholic influence, and that's still evidenced today.
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A lot of the primary high schools in the public school system are Catholic.
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I say they're public, but they're the ones where the sports teams are really good and things like that is what
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I mean by that. More recently, even since we came, there's been a rise of very heavy seeker -sensitive churches, whose names
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I won't dignify by announcing them on your radio, but there's a heavy seeker -sensitive influence that gets a lot of positive press coverage from different outlets in the
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Cincinnati media. So on the one hand, we're dealing with Catholics and lapsed
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Catholics in the general area. On the other hand, there's this new and superficially exciting development of large seeker churches with big attendance numbers and rock bands that can bust your eardrums when you attend a service, things like that.
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So in some respects, Mike, it's probably not all that different than a lot of other places in the country. Don, what
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I found fascinating over the years is to watch people who are truly Christians and they're learning and they're growing and the
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Lord is moving on their hearts and they become sponges. They want to learn everything they can about the
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Bible and they'd like to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. And now they're at a seeker -sensitive church.
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And so they think, you know what, I need to do more. I need to learn more. I need help.
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And so they go to their pastoral staff or maybe one of the leaders and basically they say, you know, if you want more learning, you probably need to go to a different church or go to seminary or something like that.
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And then I say to myself, they're losing their best people. So instead of saying, oh, maybe this is going to be a revolution in our church and we're going to have to change directions because we have real
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Christians here, they just say, well, you've got to go someplace else. So I've felt bad over the years because I personally haven't cherry -picked other wonderful people from other churches.
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Of course, I think that's wrong. But I've been a recipient of many, you know, neat, growing, young Christians, maturing
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Christians because their seeker -sensitive church simply won't provide nourishment for them.
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Do you see the same thing there in Cincinnati? Yeah, I often do. In fact, one young woman in our congregation comes immediately to mind who's gone through some family difficulties in recent months, and she reached out to leadership for help, kind of in the same way that you're describing, and they wouldn't even return her phone calls in her desire for biblical instruction and counsel.
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And so through a series of friendships, she came to our church and got connected with a woman who has cared for her and instructed her and met her, and she's also been faithful in attending, and she is flourishing through circumstances that would really destroy other people.
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And so I see the same dynamic, and it gives you a sense of confidence that even as these superficial ministries flourish, that the
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Lord still has a way of working in the hearts of individuals to bring them more deeply into His Word, and we're grateful to the power of the
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Holy Spirit for that. Talking to Don Green today, Pastor Don Green in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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Don, will you be at the Shepherds Conference this year? I'm afraid I won't be. I was just in California a week ago on January 15th.
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I had the sweet opportunity to speak to my former flock at Grace Life, one of the adult fellowship groups at Grace Community Church.
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So that was my time to California. I don't have the luxury really of being able to go back again in just a few weeks after that.
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So I hope everyone out there has a great time. I'm grateful for John MacArthur and all of the ministry of Grace Community Church, and I'm sorry
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I'll miss my many, many friends who will be attending the conference. Tell them all I said hello, if you would.
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Don, I cannot believe you went all the way to Grace Life just to promote your monthly gig on No Compromise Radio.
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That is kind of you, and all the brochures and business cards and flyers. Thank you for kind of watering the plant out there, the
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NoCo plant. I appreciate that. Mike, do you know the most common question that I got in the brief time that I was there was, is there any way that you can get me an audience with Mike Avendross?
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And, you know, I'm trying to protect your time, but it was quite shocking to me, the reach of your ministry into Grace Community Church.
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See, Don, what I do at the Shepherd's Conference is I go there. I want to be ministered to.
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That's the idea. But then I go and have to minister to so many people. Yeah, I appreciate the way you so faithfully bear your cross.
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Thank you. We're all in your debt. Don, I want to switch gears a little bit here regarding what we're talking about being pastors and dealing with folks, and I like this time when
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I talk to you because I think some of the listeners who aren't pastors can get a little insight into what it's like to be a pastor, our strengths and our trials and joys, that kind of thing.
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I'd like to talk a little bit about, we're just regular people. In light of the
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Reformation 500 coming up, or it is this year actually, 1517 to 2017, what is it about the priesthood of all believers?
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And what is it about we're not clergy in terms of above people and over people and better than people?
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We are simply another sinner saved by grace. We've been gifted by God, charged with leadership, yes, and preaching.
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But we are weak, frail people like everyone else, correct? Yeah, that's exactly right.
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And we have to, when we step into a pulpit, we try to put
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Christ on display and diminish ourselves so that we're not, as Paul said, we preach
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Jesus Christ as Lord and not ourselves. And so sometimes that might give a wrong impression as you're proclaiming the glory of Christ and diminishing yourself.
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It kind of leaves the real man behind it a little bit out of the picture, and that's the way it should be.
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But you and I both know from sad personal experience that we get discouraged, that we stumble from time to time, that we have to deal with our own fleshly passions and our fleshly anger and disappointments and all of that.
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And so we are there as an instrument of grace to the people, yes, but we're also recipients of grace.
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One man said, and I think it's well put, that the ministry is all about grace.
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There's no element of merit in the man, there's no element of ability in the man to produce certain spiritual results.
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We preach independence on Christ, we preach Christ's independence on Christ, and we're weak human vessels, as the
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Apostle Paul said repeatedly about himself, and we're no different today. Donovan, you were referring to 2
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Corinthians 4, where it says, "...for what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake."
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I thought just quickly about only one person who is allowed to proclaim themselves and to preach anything like that, and that is the person of the
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Lord Jesus. He proclaimed himself, but none of us get that privilege or get that honor, because that's only for the
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Lord. Sometimes I think to myself, I need this sermon, right? I'm up there to preach to other people, but I'm thinking it the whole time,
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I'm the one that's needed this sermon, and now the Lord has given me the luxury, if you will, of spending 30 hours with him in his
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Word all week to prepare, and so I just count it a real joy to be a pastor. Yeah, same here,
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Mike. So tell me, Don, a little bit about things that kind of get stuck in your craw.
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We have a monthly feature called, What's in Don's Craw? What's in Pastor Green's Craw? And I think in New England we still say craw, so I don't know what's in your craw today, but I'd love to know if there's anything in there.
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Well, maybe we could just build on what you were talking about with pulpit ministry and things like that.
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I'm in the middle of a series, a very brief series that I'm titling, God, Man, and the Gospel, talking about the effective and the general call of God to the
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Gospel, the effective call where he secretly works in a heart and powerfully brings a man to Christ, the general call that goes out in the broad proclamation of the
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Gospel to all people. And so thinking about the general call has kind of had me kind of reflecting, and maybe a little bit on the five -year anniversary of our church, had me thinking about pulpit ministry.
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And you know, Mike, when I look at my life, and I'm way too close to my own ministry to be able to evaluate it, and I'd like actually for you to interact with this first comment, it seems to me that I am learning a lot about preaching simply by preaching all of the time.
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When I was at Grace Church, I preached periodically, and the Lord gave me a lot of opportunity, but this is different, preaching twice a week to the same people again and again.
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And I'm learning things, I think, about being a better man in the pulpit. And I'm just curious as to whether you've found over your many more years of ministry that preaching week by week by week to the same people increased your understanding of what preaching should be like?
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Don, when I was in seminary, there was a man that you know as well, his name's Jim George.
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And Jim said to me one time, I can't even remember where it was, maybe in one of those aluminum trailers that they put up, and there were, you know, 80 students at the
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Master Seminary. He said to me, Mike, you don't know how to preach until you've preached 100 sermons.
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And I thought, wow, well, how am I going to get an opportunity to be a good preacher until I just start preaching?
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And boy, those first 100 must be rough on congregations. And I came to Massachusetts and I began to preach
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Sunday morning, Sunday night. So, of course, within a year, 52 weeks, I had preached 100 sermons. And Don, I have to tell you that I was kind of flummoxed a little bit because the people who were in charge of the tape ministry, cassette recording tape ministry,
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I think they fumbled a couple times and didn't get my sermons up on the website. And I mean, after all, they're my sermons.
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I spent all those time, all that time working on those, and they did not get them posted or they weren't recorded.
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And now I look back and I think, praise God from whom all blessings flow, which is a long answer, a big introduction answer to your question.
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And I think you really do learn and you begin to say things like, I'm now looking at the people's faces and they're tired moms and tired dads and tired kids and they've gone through ups and downs in life.
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And instead of me just giving them all this data, I began to look at their faces. And Don, I'm not saying
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I exegete the people before I exegete the text or anything like that. I've just exegeted the text and I've worked on my sermon and I'm looking at these people and I'm thinking, they need to hear a good word from God.
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And I think that has really, I know it's subjective, but I think that has really changed the way I preach when I think about the people over 20 years with births and deaths and everything else.
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Does that seem to make sense? Mike, that's exactly what
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I have in mind and what I see going on in my own heart in ministry.
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You know, when I was a young man, fresh out of seminary, even still in seminary,
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I think I was attracted toward a style that wanted to emphasize authority and, you know, you're the man of God and you're preaching the authoritative word of God.
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And, you know, there's an element that undergirds all true preaching of authority for sure.
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But as a young man, Mike, as I look back on it, look back at some of the things that I did maybe in funerals and in nursing home ministry, there was a sad strain of severity in the way that I dealt with people that I really look back and, in one sense, regret, and in another sense,
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I'm glad that I see it now and hopefully can avoid it. Because you're exactly right. When a pastor is preaching to the same people week after week in a congregation of a few hundred, couple hundred, where you see a lot of faces that you know,
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I can't help when I'm in the pulpit, but as I'm preaching a point, I look into the face of someone and I said, they're having a miserable time with their son, or she's dealing with cancer, or, you know, he's got aspirations for ministry.
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And there's a personal dynamic that comes in that makes it so the preaching isn't simply about conveying exegetical data, as you put it, but you're actually trying to minister to people and bring the word of God in a way that's helpful to them.
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And I'd like to think, I don't, I can't, I'm not the one to say this, but I would like to think that the tone of my preaching maybe has softened a bit as I've preached more to the same people week after week for exactly the reasons that you stated so much better just a couple of moments ago.
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Don, I think it's probably mirrored in your ministry as well. I used to preach a lot of law, if we want to use the law gospel bifurcation.
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And now I'm thinking a lot about the grace of God and the gospel and who the
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Lord Jesus is, and I think then that also softens the message.
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If I'm, you know, when there's a passage with imperatives and law, okay, we'll preach it and that's good and right and we're certainly not antinomians.
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You know, we do church discipline, that kind of thing. But still, the emphasis on grace. I think if I analyze myself in ministry here over the years,
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I would think, you know, like a Keswick person, like a perfectionist, like a Wesleyan perfectionist,
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I probably had externally, I was externally conformed to the law of God and what he required in being a pastor.
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But on the inside, lacking. And then now I see my lack, therefore I have to see my need for the
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Lord Jesus to fill that. And so I want and I need more of a gaze and a faith in the
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Lord Jesus Christ. And so then if I need that, then the people need that as well. So instead of getting up and whacking people all the time,
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I want to get up there and show them, yes, of course, here's where we fall short. But the Lord Jesus Christ and his grace is greater than all our sins.
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Which brings us right back to preaching not ourselves, but Christ Jesus is Lord. You know, another aspect of that, to build on what you said,
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Mike, is just to remember how often
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Scripture talks about the gospel in the context of the love of God. That in John 3, 16,
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God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son. In 1 John 4, 10, in this is love that God sent his son to be the propitiation.
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In Romans chapter 5, God demonstrates his own love for us. And while we were yet sinners,
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Christ died for us. And so there's a loving motivation from God in the gospel that somehow needs to be reflected in a pulpit ministry.
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And I'm just in, I'm still learning my ABCs in that, I think. But the longer
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I preach, the more that that perspective is starting to dominate the way that I want my pulpit ministry to be, even if I'm still falling miserably short of the goal.
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Talking to Don Green today on No Compromise Radio. If you ever have questions for Don, you can email me, info at nocompromiseradio .com.
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I'll be glad to send them over to Don. Don, I think also in my ministry that the
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Lord has given me, I watch myself and I think, all right, am I talking more about faith that is in the person in Christ Jesus and his work, or faithfulness, how people respond to that?
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And of course, you can go extreme on either side. But I think for too many years, probably I focused on faithfulness.
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And of course, how faithful are we really? How are we doing in that versus Galatians chapter 2 type of ministry, where it says, we live by faith in the
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Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Don't we as Christians still have to walk by faith and have faith in the
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Lord Jesus? Yes, we exercise faith at the very beginning when God grants us that saving faith.
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But we keep walking by faith. Isn't that something we need to keep pointing our people to? Yeah, for sure.
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The word that I often also use alongside faith is the word trust.
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And to elevate the person of Christ, elevate the person and attributes of God, to elevate the wonders of the gift of salvation that all of our sins have been fully paid for by Christ, that perfect righteousness placed on our account, so that we can enter boldly into the presence of God.
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And as we go through the inevitable trials and difficulties of life, that those are the unchanging anchors that we rest on.
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And so we have to go back to what we know to be true about God, about Christ, about the cross, about our future in heaven, and let our heart rest there, and trust that the
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God who has given us all of those greater things will also carry us through the lesser things as we go through the tribulations of life.
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And just to call people back to what they already know to be true, and to help them so that their hearts rest in that.
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And those tired moms and the busy executives that come to our congregations have a common source of grace that they can drink from to keep their souls refreshed.
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Don, I like that. And I said believe, or belief, and you said trust. I've also been thinking a lot about Hebrews, the book of Hebrews, since I'm preaching through that.
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And he uses the word confidence regularly. Confidence, holding fast to confidence.
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And it just dawned on me a while ago, the root word, if I was going to pick a trilateral root in confidence,
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F -I -D with fide, and confidence to believe with, and confidence.
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So I thought, you know what, I just taught myself a word study. Confidence. Did you know that, Don? Well, I hope,
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Mike, that you'll produce a three -part series that we can all benefit from, based on this exegesis you did on the spot.
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Yeah, that'll torque me back to the days right out of Master's Seminary.
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And I'm not blaming the seminary, where I'd just get up and it was like law preaching. I said to myself when I got here,
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I'm going to preach James, because it's 52 imperatives, 104 verses. We can just whack them.
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And I should have preached John. That would have been better. What's the first book you preached at Truth there? The first book that I preached was 1
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John, and then we went into Titus, and we went into Ephesians after that. Now I am in the
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Sermon on the Mount and also going through the Psalms on our midweek study, and then doing some initial work, getting ready to go through Romans down the road.
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That's several months away, but that's kind of the general pattern. A lot of other stuff, of course, along the way, but in terms of general books, that's where we've gone.
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Well, there are a lot of commands and kind of tests and stuff like that in 1 John, but also in Chapter 2 we have
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Jesus Christ, the Advocate, the Righteous One. So see, you've got to preach a little bit of law and some gospel too, right?
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Well, you know, in 1 John, people think about it, about tests of eternal life, and that's certainly there.
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But John stated very clearly that he wrote to promote joy, 1 John 1 .4,
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promote holiness, 1 John 2 .1, and to promote assurance of salvation, 1 John 5 .13.
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And so I think a proper view of 1 John is to see that he was writing a very pastoral letter to Christians who were beleaguered under the attack of false teachers and giving them strength and confidence and trust and faith so that they would live a fruitful and joyful life.
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And so that's kind of the way we tried to start things off in our ministry here at Truth Community Church.
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See, that's why I like you. Instead of making 1 John into something it isn't, you actually try to show forth authorial intent and show the people that they could have joy and trust in the
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Lord. Don, thank you for being on. Yeah, well, you know, we're out of time. Yeah, we're out of time. That's okay, we'll pick it up next time.
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It'll seem like a month away, our conversation, but it'll just be in about five minutes. Don Green, No Compromise Radio, thanks for being our monthly guest.
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My pleasure, Mike. 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 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.
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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff, or management.