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Pastor Mike is in Hebrews 3:6 today.
Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.
Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.
Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. I guess I could talk really fast. So goes that 1 .5 speed. What a hard time. I was watching YouTube the other day. You can go faster than 1 .5, but it doesn�t really seem.
Always biblical. Always provocative. Always in that order. If you�d like some more No Compromise information, you can sign up at info at nocompromiseradio .com. Harry is writing blog posts. There are videos.
There are who knows what. I haven�t been writing very much lately. We�ve been radiating instead. But writing maybe will come up a little later. I thought, you know what? If I just write 500 words a week, the weeks go on.
Before you know it, you have a novelette. Novelina. What am I reading now? I�m reading Dispatches. I started it, that Vietnam chronicle. Not sure I really like it. It�s like jumping all around. But I thought I would read that.
And I�m reading some Vitsios. I�m reading some William Perkins. I�m reading a lot of Luther. And of course, Hebrews, which leads me into the show today. Hebrews chapter 3, verse 6. But Christ is faithful over God�s house as a son, and we are his house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.
What if I were to say to you, he who believes to the end shall be saved. He who endures to the end shall be saved. He who, all kinds of if-then clauses. Well, as you know, this is not trying to unsettle the Christian�s assurance.
This would be very unsettling if you weren�t a Christian. If you don�t continue to the end, if you don�t hold fast your confidence and your boasting and your hope, that will just demonstrate that you never were a Christian.
What�s going on here when it comes to either who Paul is writing to or the author of the Hebrews is writing to? I don�t think it�s Paul, but if it is, I�m not mad. What�s happening here? Well, what�s happening is, he is exhorting them to believe.
And real faith perseveres. But because you persevere, that doesn�t mean you�ve earned anything. Remember, the ground of your salvation is the Lord Jesus, is representative work, is substitutionary death, affirmed by the resurrection.
And the evidence of your faith is works, perseverance, love, etc. Now listen to what Luther said, �We conclude with Paul that we are justified solely by faith in Christ without the law and works. But after a man is justified by faith, now possesses Christ by faith and knows that He is his righteousness in life, he will certainly not be idle like a sound tree will bear good fruit.
For the believer has the Holy Spirit and where he is, he does not permit a man to be idle but drives him to all the exercises of devotion, to the love of God, to patience in affliction, to prayer, to thanksgiving, and to the practice of love toward all men.
And might I add, perseverance. We have to make sure we understand what�s what. On what basis are you saved? Are you saved on the basis of your perseverance, your holding fast? Well, then you�re not saved by grace now, are you?
Now, when you look at these warning passages, they are divine means to the end that�s already determined. How are you going to get there? Through these goads, through these warnings. The writer has been talking about Jesus, consider Jesus, he�s talking about faith, of course, and confidence and belief and rest in this great Jesus, and Jesus is faithful, Moses is faithful, of course, Jesus is more faithful than Moses, but they�re faithful and now the response to the gospel, not because you�re going to be saved by doing it, but in response to this gospel of Jesus� faithfulness, you hold fast.
We are not teaching hyper-Calvinism and there�s no human responsibility or response. That is certain, but we are saying that you don�t cause your salvation. You didn�t earn your salvation, you can�t keep your salvation, God does it all.
Your response is, believe, rest, hold fast, there�s all kinds of ways you could talk about it. You are not saved through faith and good works, faith and perseverance, faith and evangelical obedience. That is not how you are saved.
Luther, therefore we too say that faith without works is worthless and useless. The papist and the fanatics take this to mean that faith without works does not justify, or that if faith does not have works, it is of no avail no matter how true it is.
That is false. But faith without works, that is, a fantastic idea and a mere vanity and a dream of the heart, is a false faith and does not justify. If you have a tree and if it�s a good tree, it�ll have good fruit and that fruit is the evidence.
That fruit is not the condition or the ground or the reason for good works. What else does Luther say? On the other hand, the weak who are not malicious or slanderous but good are offended when they hear that the law and good works do not have to be done for justification.
One must go to their aid and explain them how it is that works do not justify, how works should be done and how they should not be done. They should be done as fruits of righteousness, not in order to bring righteousness into being.
Having been made righteous, we must do them, but it is not the other way around, that when we are unrighteous, we become righteous by doing them. The tree produces fruit. Fruit does not produce the tree.
That is excellent. That is excellent advice on No Compromise Radio. If you want to study this, I think a good place to go, besides the Bible obviously, if you go to Heidelblog or Heidelcast, R. Scott Clark, will make sure you understand the difference between justification as a category and sanctification as a category.
He will make certain that you understand that works are fruit or evidence, not conditions. He will also talk about that this is true to the extent that you don't say, well, you know what, I'm justified by Christ's work alone and I don't need to live a holy life.
I don't need to have any obedience. I will be an antinomian. I can just run carelessly throughout the world. No, as the Reformed churches have said, it is impossible for this holy faith to be unfruitful.
Belgic Confession 24, these works proceeding from the good root of faith, I saw these quotes, I think on an article by R. Scott Clark, yet they do not count toward our justification. For by faith in Christ, we are justified even before we do good works.
Otherwise, we could not be good any more than the fruit of the tree could be good if the tree is not good in the first place. When you talk about justification, we talk about this at the church and on this radio show a lot.
It can't have any discussion of our works, our love, our perseverance, our holding fast or anything else. Why? Because it's tainted. Our works are tainted. Imputation, immediate imputation, Adam's sin to all of our accounts.
Consequently, we are sinful by nature and we have tainted works. How sincere, how many works do you have to do before God would accept them? They need to be perfect, that's why they need to be Christ works, not ours.
The ground and the evidence is different, that's what you have to remember. J .C. Ryle writes, there are two ways by which a man may lose his own soul. One, he may lose his soul by living and dying without any religion at all.
He may live and die like a beast, prayerless, godless, graceless, faithless. This is a sure way to. Ryle also says there's another way you can lose your soul, by taking up some kind of useless religious experience or useless religion.
He, he's talking about a man who may lose his soul, may live and die contenting himself with a false Christianity, resting on a baseless hope. This probably is the most common way to hell that there is today.
Let me tell you what I mean by a useless kind of religion. A religion is entirely useless in which Jesus Christ is not the principal object and does not fill the principal place. There are too many calling themselves Christians who practically know nothing about Christ.
Their religion consists in a few vague notions and empty expressions. They trust they are no worse than many others. They keep to their church, they try to do their duty, they do nobody any harm, they hope God will be merciful to them.
They trust the Almighty will pardon their sins and take them to heaven when they die. This is about the whole of their religion. I warn you plainly that such religion will never take you to heaven. It may do very well in the eyes of man, it may pass muster very decently at the church meeting, in the place of business or in the streets, but it will never comfort you, it will never satisfy your conscience, it will never save your soul, neither will it meet the approval of Almighty God.
I warn you plainly that all notions and theories about God being merciful apart from Christ and except through Christ are baseless delusions and empty fancies. Such theories are purely an idol of man's invention.
They are all of the earth, they never come down from heaven. The God of heaven has sealed and appointed Christ as the only Savior and way of life and all who would be saved must be content to be saved by Him or they will never be saved.
J .C. Wright. There's a faith that doesn't save. It's a faith that doesn't hold fast the confidence that you have access to God through Jesus alone and the boasting in the hope that Jesus has paid it all and has lived the perfect life and that God has accepted His propitiatory sacrifice.
There's a faith that doesn't save and it can be a faulty faith, maybe a faith that says I'll mix with my own works, maybe it's a faith that says I only intellectually believe, maybe it's a faith that says I'll have a little faith and a little evangelical obedience and cooperation, maybe it's a faith that says I'll have a little bit of knowledge and some assent but not trust, maybe it's a faith that doesn't hold fast the confidence having the object of the faith in sight, walking by faith and not by sight.
There's a faith that doesn't save, but there's a faith that does save and because Christ is faithful and you consider Him and He's the Apostle and High Priest of your confession, you hold fast as response, as evidence, right, that's right.
When you see the parable of the soils in Luke 8, it's also in Matthew, or the one I'm going to turn to right now, you understand that there are different, no I don't think I'm going to go to Matthew, I think I'm going to go to Mark, Matthew, Mark, the Indiana Jones Gospel, Mark chapter 4, there are different responses to God's Word and the proclamation of good news.
And he began to teach beside the sea and a very large crowd gathered about him so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. And he was teaching them many things and parables and in his teaching he said to them, listen, a sower went out to sow and he sowed and some seed fell along the path and the birds came and devoured it.
Other seed fell on the rocky ground where it did not have much soil and immediately it sprang up since it had no depth of soil and when the sun rose, it was scorched and since it had no root, it withered away.
Other seed fell among the thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it and it yielded no grain and other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain growing up and increasing and yielding. And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables and he said to them, to you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables so that they may indeed see but not perceive and may indeed hear but not understand lest they should turn and be forgiven.
And there he is quoting Isaiah chapter six, is he not? And he said to them, do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word and these are the ones along the path where the word is sown.
When they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground, the ones who when they hear the word immediately receive it with joy and they have no root in themselves but endure for a while.
They don't hold fast. Then when tribulation or persecution arises on the counter of the word, think the book of Hebrews, immediately they fall away and others are the ones sown among the thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word and it proves unfruitful.
But those that were sown on the ground, sorry, sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit and hold fast our confession and boldness of our hope thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.
That is Mark chapter 4, 1 through 20. See what's happening there? The main thing I want to stress on this show on No Compromise Radio is the fact that when you see these conditional statements in Scripture, in Hebrews, when you look at the warning passages in Hebrews, you ought not to default to, see, you can lose your salvation, trying to take away assurance.
For the Christian, he is saying, persevere to the end, hold fast, don't stop believing. He could easily have said, just don't stop believing, keep on trusting, keep on resting. And he goes on to say in verse 12 of chapter 3 in Hebrews, you don't want to have an unbelieving heart.
There's never a time in all of Scripture where it's okay, you know what, it's faith plus something else, including holding on for your salvation as the ground of it. That would take away the work of Christ.
As a result of your faith, yes, absolutely. Remember there's two ways to get into heaven, two ways to be justified, the legal method and the gospel method. The legal method says, do this and live. It stems from the covenant of works, obey the law.
But that's only a hypothetical now because it can't be done due to Adam's sin and his federal representation. It can't be done. If it could be done, well, why would God keep you out of heaven? You obeyed what he told you to do.
But there's another way. It's called the gospel method, the grace method. And that is to say, Jesus perfectly obeys the law. Jesus never sins. Jesus merits our salvation. Jesus, in addition, dies for our sin and lawlessness, our ungodliness, our unrighteousness.
And you, instead of working for salvation, you believe that someone else worked for you. That's what the book of Hebrews is about. Jesus, the one who can be the high priest, he can be and is the prophet.
Of course, we know he's the king. But focusing here, especially in Hebrews 4, on the high priestly work of Jesus. You'll need a high priest like Jesus to have any confidence in the hope of eternal life.
Why? There's a word that's going to examine you. You don't want to fall by the same sort of disobedience that these Israelites did, do you? Did you? Would you? Could you? For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we have, or we must give, account. I mean, left to yourself, left to the legal method of justification, you're doomed.
But the gospel method of justification goes on to say in verse 14 of Hebrews 4,. Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.
There he is again, talking about holding fast, holding fast our confession, our confidence. When you hear that sound, that's me putting my iPad cover on. That means the show's, we're ready to land the plane.
I've been counting calories, but I do have in front of me, and it tastes awful, a 160-calorie muscle milk, banana cream, genuine, ouch, 160 calories. I think what they did, I think they said, let's make a 160-calorie protein shake that's non-dairy and see what we come up with, 25 grams of protein.
And then the taste was so awful, they didn't know what to do. So then they said, well, let's just call it Jell-O pudding. Let's call it, since that doesn't work, Halo. Let's call it Bite Size Gateway.
Let's call it Auxiliary Power. Let's call it banana cream. Naturally and artificially flavored. You know, you can have a natural flavor that's 100 chemicals made in New Jersey, but it's the apple flavor and apples are natural.
It's crazy, man, literally crazy. I still have in front of me here this cricket bar, but I have not been able to be motivated to eat it yet. Justification, the legal method and the gospel method. And in light of God saving you, you must respond with belief.
And you will know it's a saving belief if it continues, if you continue to hold fast. In the book of Hebrews, if we have trials and persecutions and temptations that come along, like Jesus talked about in Mark chapter four, and you go back, it will prove that the soil, you, are faulty.
That's the point. Every one of us here who are real Christians know, and we have friends who say they're a Christian and then they go off the deep end and they never come back. I'm not saying they sin for a little while and immediately the first sin they commit, then we have to somehow say, oh, they're never a Christian.
But over time, you watch them just fade away. They're happy at the beginning. It's like Luke 8 or Mark chapter four, they receive the word with joy. That's not saving faith. Saving faith endures, and that endurance does not qualify one for salvation.
That is just the obvious response, a grace-wrought response to the gospel. You believe and you keep on believing and you hold fast to the end. You hold fast your confidence to the end. You're not disobedient and say, well, now I don't believe anymore.
No, original confidence held firm to the end. That's what it actually says in Hebrews 3 .14. If indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. The people in the promised land did not enter because they had unbelief.
That was a physical promised land, but it was a real unbelief. We have a promised land that's a spiritual promised land, and we have faith. Got to keep believing. So I ask you the question, do you believe?
Are you believing? Or have you turned your back because of some type of persecution, some type of trial? In the middle of all the cancer that I, and treatments that I've had, I've done a lot of dumb things and sinful things, but I've thankfully held fast this confession that Jesus is my only way to God, and He is my substitutory Savior.
I'm banking everything on that. Hoping, trusting, believing that He is the only one. Confident. Not on my own strength, it's just a grace brought response. Mike Abendroth, No Compromise.
No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.
Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.
The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff, or management.