Legalism in the Church (Part 3)

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.

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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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This is Mike Abendroth, and I'm your host today with Pastor Steve Cooley in the studio as well for his normal Tuesday offering.

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What is this world coming to? Well, it's just a multitude of communicativeness,

I guess you could say. Is that King James translation? Is that the Texas Receptus, kind of like in James 1 with the superfluity of naughtiness?

No, it's Babelfish. Okay. All right, let's talk today about our typical fare for Tuesday.

Mondays, the sermon is taped from Bethlehem Bible Church. Tuesdays, we have Issues in the Church. And so today we're sitting in the studio at the church and we're doing part three on legalism, and Steve's got a catchy title for that.

A Baker's Dozen of Legalisms. Do people go to Baker's anymore? Yes. I think they just go to Costco.

No, we have a bunch of bakeries here. Okay, good. All right, give us the quick review. Quick review, we have talked about alcoholism.

In fact, I think our entire first show was devoted to, not alcoholism, but drinking. Drunkenness.

And whether it's a sin to be drunk. Yeah, that's right. And then we talked about - Just one drink away. Just one drink. You know, I'll never forget it.

I went to a, I talked to an AA guy, and he said that alcohol was like some kind of allergy.

And if you were exposed to alcohol, your whole allergy system would all come back. And I said, well,

I have a better name for drunkenness, and that is sin. And if you call it sin, there's a remedy. Jesus Christ is a forgiver for all kinds of sin.

Well, and that's the issue, you know, with each one of these, people want to protect themselves against, well, against,

I guess, excess and against sin, but to do so, they set excessive standards, standards above and beyond anything

God commands in the Bible. And certainly we want to call sin sin when it is sin, but we don't want to call it sin when it's not.

That sounds like that could be a whole show. I think it is. Okay. All right,

I like to laugh and have fun, and Steve's my friend, and so we just are going for it. All right, ready?

Yeah. Okay, well, let's just go to number five. Number five is, it is a sin to have cable

TV. A sin to have cable TV. Well, I guess I'm righteous. Blessed art thou among men.

I only watch my shows on the internet, live streaming or 24 hours later.

I think we've talked a lot about TV before. A box full of electrodes and wires and wood or whatever's inside of those

TVs. I think they used to be cathode ray tubes or something. I don't think in and of itself a

TV's bad, do you? No, television can have many good uses. Certainly we want to stay in touch with what the

Red Sox are doing. I was going to say, who's winning the amazing race?

By the way, when our family watches the amazing race, the way we try to root for the person who we'd like to have win, is we just look at all their lifestyles and whichever person has the most sinful lifestyle, we want those voted out first.

Or we like to vote out the kind of faux Christian who says, oh yes, I'm a Christian. And then they live like the

Dickens. And so we root for the unrighteous to lose.

Is that a godly principle? I don't know. It kind of seems like legalism. But now we've gone from 14.

What does Jesus say about the real issue when it comes to sin? Where does sin come from?

From the heart in Mark chapter seven. Now, there are probably some shows that are sinful or contributing to sin when you watch them.

Absolutely. I mean, not to name any show by name, but a show that I've never seen, like Desperate Housewives.

I mean, I just read the description of it and I know it is not a show that I ought to watch or be interested in in any way.

Why? Well, because it's all about things that Christians ought not be focused on.

And the trouble is, Pastor Steve, and I know you'll agree, you can't even watch the commercials when you want to watch the

Patriots game or a college football game, because what's sold in a commercial is the exact same thing that's being sold by Desperate Housewives, except in miniature form.

That is absolutely correct. And it's why it's become one of my favorite things to do is to record whatever I'm watching and watch it delayed so that I can just fast forward through all the commercials.

People will say, have you seen this commercial or that commercial? And I can honestly say no, and I'm thankful I haven't seen it.

Good for you. Well, ESPN 360, you can watch live football games on Saturday and I think there are no commercials. Mark said this,

Mark 7 records this, these words of Jesus, that which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man.

For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, by the way, so far all plurals, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness.

All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man. And so we want to stay away from things on a

TV that would stoke those coals that are already in. Certainly there's nothing wrong with watching a certain kind of show and people want to watch

Sound of Music or something else. It's not by nature sin, just like it's not, it's always sin to listen to secular music.

Much classical music is secular and it's not always sin. The issue is motives and we want to make sure we don't add extra rules to people.

That's right. But you know, just as one more aside, cause I am taking a couple of asides here. I remember, you know, many decades ago when

I was in college, there were a few soap operas that were all the rage. Well, I just recently via some connections, you know, not in my own home, found out that they've actually got homosexual marriages now going on in soap operas.

All manner of just rank sin being portrayed as if it's normal and good behavior.

And so we, you know, television can have positive beneficial uses, but it really is a way for the world to kind of infiltrate your home if you're not careful.

And so that's what we're saying is just be cautious. Come a long way from Luke and Laura, I guess. Yes, we have.

And that was one of the shows I was talking about. Yep. All right. I hate to be a purveyor of pop culture, but I am who

I am because of all the things that have happened to me before I got saved. And so let's keep moving on the baker's dozen.

Okay. Number six, it is a sin to send your children to public schools or it's the reformation principle of sola homeschula.

That is the sixth, the reformation, the sixth slogan, the unknown slogan, isn't it?

Sola homeschula. Well, this is a very interesting topic and one we could probably spend the whole 24 minutes and 12 seconds on, but I guess we should just make a few comments.

Comment number one, especially speaking as two pastors, whether it's homeschool, public school or private school,

I will pull a Rodney King. Why can't we just all get along? You preach it and I'll turn the pages.

Romans chapter 14, we see that even though there are differences in the local church, that in spite of differences in the local church body, we are to be remaining united.

We are united in Christ Jesus positionally and therefore practically we ought to live in a life, live a lifestyle that accepts other people.

And so whether you're homeschool, public school or private school, my challenge to you is make sure you love the other people who aren't in your group.

Don't hunker down with your group and kind of us four shut the door no more mentality.

That's not what a Christian does. If you're right and public schoolers are emissaries of Satan and sending their kids to be taught by women who are under the control of demons or something, we need to make sure that if you're a private schooler or a homeschooler that we love those other people.

That's right. I mean, the overarching concept is, you know what, what anybody teaches your child is going to have some kind of influence on them but the main influence in their lives is gonna be mom and dad.

Well, you know, Jesus was homeschooled. I was not aware of that. Someone said that to me once for a reason why homeschooling should be the standard.

I also hear Deuteronomy 6 quoted out of context all the time that that's the reason why people homeschool.

Friends, I have public school, homeschooled and private school. Right now I have three in public, one who's homeschooled.

So I'm an equal opportunity blaster when it comes to foolish notions that some of these people all have.

I understand that society is against homeschooling for the most part. I understand that they kind of have a desire to hunker down and do things the way that God has convicted them to do or their own convictions.

But I don't want to have the church a spot where we separate. Do I want homeschool co -op groups?

Yes, we have one here on Mondays. But I don't want this. These people are public schoolers, therefore they're ungodly because that turns

Romans 14 wrong side up. Yeah, on its head. I mean, the issue, wherever you educate your child, there's going to be a battle.

You know, if it's homeschooling, then maybe it's just difficult having the child in the home all the time.

I've heard that complaint from some parents. If private school, you know, there might be a tendency to just think that a

Christian school is going to teach sound doctrine. That may not be the case. And in public school, you know, certainly they're going to be exposed to things that you probably would like them not to believe.

But regardless of that, your job as a parent, and that's the issue, your job as a parent is to instruct your child from the word of God and to correct whatever wrong thinking they may get from any source.

Well, I give that a hearty amen. Let me read Romans 14 verse one. Now, except the one who is weak in faith.

So let's just assume that that is a public school parent, according to some of the homeschoolers, that these people are weak in faith because they're not obeying

God. They're not doing what Jesus did. By the way, lots of people, if you want to homeschool, fine, just don't use the

Bible out of context to support your personal convictions because you won't see that in the Bible.

Thou shall homeschool. Some of the same homeschoolers that do that somehow say, well, we don't go for arranged marriages.

Well, that was the biblical marriage. That's what they did. Don't turn a description in the Bible to prescription.

If you want to homeschool, I want to help you do that. But I also want to help you not accept,

I want you to help you accept the one who's weak in faith. And basically what Paul says is this, you take the red carpet and roll it out for other people who you think are weaker in the faith.

But then it's interesting, Steve, I think you'll laugh because it's almost laughable as Paul writes the rest of verse one.

Now you roll out the red carpet, you give them a welcome mat to your life in the church for what reason?

But not for the purpose of passing judgment on his opinions. We welcome you because we need to have entertainment.

Pastor Steve and Mike said, we can't watch TV now. We can't smoke cigarettes. We can't drink. We can't get tattoos. So let's have this new fun game.

Let's invite weak Christians over and blast them. Paul says, that's not why you have them over.

Don't be a stickler on things that doesn't even matter. You can homeschool your kids and they can still go to hell.

Catholics homeschool, Mormons homeschool, unbelievers homeschool. Homeschooling in and of itself is not the panacea for all the problems of the world.

And why is that? Well, it goes right back to Mark. It's an issue of the heart. It is an issue of the heart.

Whether it's homeschooling, wherever they are, you need to be shepherding. Oh gee, shepherding a child's heart.

Wow, that's a book I think. Nice catchy title for a book. It's actually a good book. I was gonna say

Paul Trip, but it's Ted Trip. Romans 14 two, one man has faith that he may eat all things, but he who is weak eats only vegetables.

And so if you're the strong Christian and you happen to be a private schooler, but you want everybody else to be private school, so you look down on those who public and who homeschool.

If you're really the strong Christian, you need to act like the strong Christian and welcome these dear

Christians for whom Christ died. And I don't wanna be an apologist for public schools, but I also think if your child is a

Christian, let's say you have a young person in your home who is a Christian and they're out there in the world, proselytizing at school and that kind of thing, great.

Isn't that a good thing to do? Well, there's pros and cons on both. For me and my house and this church,

I want everybody to get along. And if I had to somehow critique people and to try to help them, we'll get to birth control maybe in a minute, but we need to have harmony in a local church in spite of differences.

I challenge anyone who's listening, are all your friends at your local church the same kind of people?

If you're a homeschooler, are all your friends at the church only the homeschool group? If you're a public schooler, are all your other friends at the church only for public school?

That ought not to be the case. Romans 14, three, "'Let not him who eats regard with contempt "'him who does not eat, "'and let not him who does not eat judge him who eats, "'for

God has accepted him.'" If you're a private schooler and you don't like the public and the homeschoolers,

God has rolled out the red carpet and given the welcome mat to them in the person of Christ Jesus and his death and his life and his resurrection.

Why won't you? Yeah, there ought not be cliques of any kind within the body of Christ.

I mean, if we were to study systematically what the New Testament teaches about the church, it is to be a unified body, overlooking our differences and really focused on what unites us, which is faith in Christ.

Good, and if you look down your nose at those other folks who you think are weaker and you don't accept them and love them and serve them and fellowship with them, then, friends, the

Bible says you're not the strong one. You're the one weak in the faith.

And we all want to grow up. There's nothing wrong with immaturity. Immaturity's fine for those who are immature, but if you should be mature and teaching by now, then shame on you if you're immature.

Preach it. I feel like it. I feel sick, but I feel like I'm beginning to preach here, and I like that.

That's what people want. We want truth told. We want boldness. We want nocompromiseradio .com.

By the way, soon enough in the church we'll be able to take phone calls. I want to be able to take phone calls, but I'd like to have them good phone calls and not just kind of dopey ones.

So we're gonna have an extra large hang up button. And so if you call the church, we'll be nice to you and pastoral and kind.

But if you call No Compromise Radio Ministry and you're gonna be trying to mess around and go off topic, I think you're pretty much gonna get slammed.

Yeah, and I think we need to have one of those old school end of quarter buzzers, you know, like they used to have when we were in high school.

You know, scraping. Well, we've got a lot of things planned for this show. I've talked to Josh and Bob and others.

We want to go start to interview people out in front of Christian places like Morningstar Bookstore and other places and ask them theological questions, kind of like Jay Leno, jaywalking type of thing.

Lots of fun things set up and we want to make sure we offer a wide variety of stimulating things.

I thought you were gonna say entertainment. Well, maybe it is entertainment, but with a backdoor style of teaching the word of God.

You are not to be more restrictive in your fellowship than God is. That's what Romans chapter 14 is teaching.

If God has opened up his doors, as it were, to any kind of schooling, then you ought to as well.

I will say that if you and your husband have decided this is what we'd like to do, public, private, and homeschool, then we want to support you.

But when you start trying to make the other people feel bad for what they're doing, how could you send your kids to some ungodly place and what kind of parent are you?

There's all kinds of things that go on like that. I think you ought to stop that. And if anybody says that around me, kindly, if I'm in the church, or harshly, if I'm on the radio,

I'm going to correct them because it isn't conducive for wholly mature living. Very good.

All right, I think we should probably go, although this could be a whole show, but that's all right, let's just keep going.

Okay, our next legalism is, it is a sin to use birth control.

After all, don't you trust in the sovereignty of God that he'll give you exactly the number of children that you should have? I'll never forget the day

Kim had had a molar pregnancy. The doctor said we could not any longer have possibility of having her get pregnant because cancer and the growing baby would seem like the same thing.

And so you can't have her get pregnant for a year because she could get cancer as well. You couldn't detect it and she'd be dead in a year.

And I had a friend at Master's Seminary, no indictment on the seminary, that's just where I was and they're immature seminary students as well.

And I had a friend there at Master's Seminary say, well, aren't you trusting in the sovereignty of God? I am trusting the sovereignty of God and I have human responsibility.

And frankly, I'd like to keep my wife alive. Yeah, he gave me a brain. The sovereign God gave me some common sense.

Well, there are times when a woman in her monthly cycle, there's a time where she is fertile and there's a time when she is not.

And so we have brains to plan around when we would like to have children and when we wouldn't. I think when people think about birth control, the number one issue, like everything here in this legalism series, what are the motives of your heart?

Yeah, and the concept of birth control to just avoid the responsibility of being a parent,

I don't think that would be necessarily a good thing. If you're married, if you're married, then at some point you have to be prepared, whatever steps you want to take to have children in your life.

That's just the reality of it. There is no 100 % coverage against having a child and children are a blessing.

They are to be welcomed to be, you're to be thankful when you receive a child.

I think a lot of people, Steve, are selfish in this regard and they'll say, well, we want to get all our debts paid off. We want to travel the world.

We'd like to spend time with each other. We'll plan on having kids a little bit later. And we just want to enjoy each other and have some time.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but God has built in a time for you to enjoy each other alone. And that time period is nine months.

Friends, people say, well, I'm not going to have kids until we have enough money for kids. Why would God give you enough money for three people when there's only two of you?

So it's presuming that God won't be gracious to you in the future when in fact he will.

Well, and not to get too social or political here, but that mindset is exactly what is driving down the populations all across Europe.

And people are like, they're so focused on themselves and their own happiness and they don't have enough money.

Well, they don't have enough money for a child because they're not willing to sacrifice anything. That's right.

Well, time is fleeting, so let us say this. It is always wrong to kill a fertilized egg when the sperm and the egg unite and then you do some kind of birth control to stop that.

It's always taking a life and it's always sinful. And so any kind of, and we don't have to get into the different kinds of methods of birth control, but there are certain kinds of birth control methods that don't kill a fertilized egg.

And so we would say that that would be fine to do. We would say that a rhythm method, at least

I would, rhythm method isn't always good because there are times when the husband and wife need to be together, but then the wife says or the husband says we can't because this is a certain time of the month that we're not allowed to do it.

I'm not a big proponent of the rhythm method at all. Many children have been born as a result of the rhythm method, but the whole concept of, and I think you mentioned this before in a previous show about depriving one another, that's a problem because you're basically inviting

Satan into your marriage. So I wouldn't recommend the rhythm method. I wouldn't recommend letting

Satan into your marriage. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that either. Well, if you've got a birth control pill and without looking at all the different articles online and discussing everything,

I think it'd be fair if you go in and ask your doctor, can I see the paperwork, the small fine print paperwork?

Does this even have a 5 % chance of taking a fertilized egg and killing it? Then I think you should be on a different form of birth control.

I know why people take the pill. It's easy. There's more intimacy without latex and the list goes on and on and on, but I think you want to be careful of saying, we want ease and we just won't think about those microscopic considerations when it comes to having a baby.

And so you want to be careful that you're not killing a fertilized egg. Yeah, and in line with that,

I mean, the one thing I would be absolutely clear about, there's something out there called the morning after pill and anything like that obviously would be wrong.

That would be essentially murder. Absolutely. Romans chapter 14 says this, he who observed the day observes it for the

Lord and he who eats does so for the Lord for he who gives thanks to God and he who does not eat for the

Lord. He who does not eat, he gives thanks to God. It's for the Lord, for the Lord, for the Lord to God.

You make decisions for the Lord. And if you decide whether we eat or drink, our homeschool, public school, private school, birth control, have a bunch of kids, whatever you want to do, no birth control, we want to make sure you do it for God and we'd be happy with that result.

Yes. Well, Steve, you're a man of many words. Not many. I mean, this is, to me, this birth control,

I'll just put in a plug for one of our friends here, Jerry Rag, I once heard him say in a class, pre -murder class, he said, we teach what the

Bible teaches on birth control. Nothing. Nothing. Silence. Yeah, I mean, if you are not ending a human life,

I think you have freedom. That's right, and make sure your motives are good and then enjoy each other.

Read Proverbs chapter five in Song of Solomon and enjoy each other to the point that you can't hardly stand up because you're drunk with love.

That's Song of Solomon. That's Proverbs chapter five. Be infatuated with your wife's physical love.

Be drunk with her physical love. How about that? Can you see people getting red on radio right now? I'm getting red.

Legalisms, we're going to have to do the next week as well. We're going to keep punching through these. This is NoCompromiseRadio .com.

My name is Mike Abendroth. Pastor Steve's here. It's good to have you, Steve. God bless you and see you soon. Five seconds.

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