Reasons for Praise (Part 1)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth. That little section right there in the music is at about 13, 14 seconds, and so I have to just wait and just listen and enjoy the music up until that point.

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All right. Today on No Compromise Radio, I want to talk about a passage that lends itself to praise.

Because it actually is a praise. I started preaching this passage the 1st of January, 2023, to the folks at Bethlehem Bible Church, because I thought it's good to set off the new year with an attitude of,

I'd like to praise the Lord this year more. I'd like to praise Him for who He is and what He's done. I personally,

Mike Abendroth, too often can find myself complaining, grumbling, doing the exact opposite of praise.

And of course, if you complain about your life situation, you're ultimately complaining about the

Lord in the sovereign hand, right? Right. And you say, well, I'm single and I can't really praise the

Lord because I'm lonely. Well, God's sovereign over your marriage state. If you say, well,

I could praise the Lord better if it wasn't so snowy out, or if it was snowy on Christmas or whatever.

I'm God's sovereign over weather. If you say, well, if my wife is more godly, then

I would probably be better off. And that one, I'd probably say, well, you know, you get what you grow kind of thing at your marriage.

But all that to say, praise is important. And so today on No Compromise Radio, I'd like to look at 1

Peter 1, verses 3 through 9, both today and tomorrow, and see some reasons we can praise.

Now, Peter is praising the triune God, and he's not saying praise this way directly.

There's not a verse that says you must praise God in this apostolic way. Similarly, with Paul in Ephesians 1, verses 3 through 14, that great

Greek single sentence, I believe 203 Greek words, he praises the triune

God. He praises the Father for the work of choosing the Son, for the work of redeeming in the

Spirit, for the work of sealing. He doesn't say, praise God this way. But only an unwise person would look at apostolic praise and say,

I'm gonna praise God differently. There's a better way. I mean, I could come across this way. You read the

Psalms. The Psalms don't necessarily say every time, do they? Do they say it at all?

Praise God this way. The introduction of the Psalm, it'll say a special hygiene, some type of song, some type of used musical instruments.

It'll have a little liner up there, and it will say a Psalm of David. It doesn't say praise God this way, but it's built into the system.

So before you say to me, show me a verse that tells me to praise God this way, and I'll do it.

I think you have a different podcast you might wanna listen to and not No Compromised Radio.

And you know what's interesting about this passage? He tells them, or he explains to them, here's how

I praise God, and here's how I want you to praise God, is what he's inferring, and they're suffering.

I could put it this way. What do you tell suffering people? These are elect exiles in 1

Peter 1, verse 1. They're dispersed. I like to think about dispersion this way.

If you get a clump of grapes that are really ripe, and maybe the red grapes that grow in the backyard here in New England, the

Concord grapes, and you put them on the table, and with your fist clenched, your hands clenched into a fist, you slam it down on the grapes, and they fly everywhere.

The juice flies, they fly, and it's as if persecution smashes the church, and they fly everywhere.

They go everywhere, and so God even uses persecution to spread the seed of the gospel, and they're in Pontius, Peter's recipients,

Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia. They're all scattered around. And what do you tell them?

The end is near. Jesus is going to return. You could say all kinds of things, but what Peter does to start is he starts to praise.

He gives a nice little introduction that ends with the Greek and Jewish, I was going to say,

I'm trying to think of another word for greeting, but he says, may grace and peace be multiplied to you.

And then he starts praising God. So I thought about it this way. He gives reason number one, to praise

God for being triune. That's exactly what Peter does. He praises God for being triune.

What you're probably saying to me already is, well, what is even praise? We use the word praise all the time.

When I was a kid growing up, my mother would listen to Jimmy Swigert in the car when she would take me to the school.

Funny thing is, my first school was Laura Dodge Elementary School. It grew, so they built a new school right up the street, and we walked to it, and the name of that school, of all things, was

Masters. I went to Masters Elementary School. Our mascot was the monarchs.

By the way, I remember we would catch butterflies, swallowtails, yellow swallowtails, monarchs, these beautiful butterflies.

We'd catch them with our nets. We'd go home and put them in a jar, add formaldehyde, kill the butterflies, and pin them up on this board.

I remember I had one board for a class thing. It must have had 50 butterflies that I caught.

These days, I mean, what would schools do these days? Well, they would teach transgenderism, but they probably don't say to people, go kill as many animals as you can, post them on the board, and see if you get a good grade.

I mean, if you didn't kill that many, you probably got a C. I had to turn around and look at Renee.

Blessed be the God and Father. The word blessed, it has a meaning. The word praise has a meaning.

So lots of times as Christians, we say, praise the Lord. Jimmy Swaggart, praise the Lord. There's a

TV show, praise the Lord. It really, in the New Testament, is used only of God, this word blessed, only of God.

Now that in and of itself should make you just kind of sit through and go, hmm, only of God.

God alone is to be praised in this way, to be blessed, to be appreciated, to revel in, to celebrate.

That might be a good way to describe it, to celebrate with praises, to say, you're great, to just speak well of.

Did you know this word blessed in 1 Peter 1, verse 3, is where we get the word eulogy, to speak well of, to speak a good word.

You go to a funeral and someone gets up and says, my mother was this, my father was that, my son was that, and then you're speaking well of them.

And of course, in a funeral, that's appropriate. And you think of what God has done with common grace and the life of even an unbeliever, and you can speak well of them.

But here, this is only of God. I like Spurgeon's quote, many are the faculties, emotions, and capacities, but God has given them all to us and they ought all to join us in chorus to his praise.

What's he saying? Spurgeon is saying this, you have a voice, you have eyes, ears, hands, you can regulate your voice's volume, you can increase its pitch, you can do all kinds of things.

Why? Well, one of the reasons is so you can praise God. He's given you a way to praise him and to extol him and to celebrate him with praises.

And you say, well, you don't know what's going on in my life. I've got all these problems. Well, you're right. I don't know what's going on in your life and you do have problems.

But can you not speak well of God? Can you not say he's worthy to be praised?

He is inherently worth it. By the way, when you say worship, we could be saying he's of valuable worth.

Worth it? Worship? That's the same kind of idea. And here he begins praising

God for being triune. I asked the congregation. I asked myself, when's the last time you said,

God, I praise you. I celebrate you. I adore you. I revel in you for being triune.

I mean, most of the time, Trinity is causing a bunch of problems with our minds because we can't get our mind wrapped around three and one, one and three.

And we watch online and the Twitter debates and the wars and the internal functional subordination and internal function of the functional subordination of the son and all these kinds of things.

Oh, if I say Trinity, some say, how could I praise God? It confuses me. If I say

Trinity, how could I praise God when so many people are attacking the doctrine of the

Trinity that the church has upheld for thousands of years. But here, Peter, he doesn't have any problem praising

God for triune. Here, this monotheist here, this Jewish man, Peter knows that God is three, that God is one.

What I mean, God is three, one God, Deuteronomy chapter six, the Lord our

God is one. And we read in the scriptures that the father's God, that's no big surprise.

If you read the old Testament, the son is God. That is a very big surprise because how can we have

God as God in the old Testament? Now we have Jesus as God. Is there a new deity?

What's going on here? And the son, you could look at Acts chapter five, the son is

God. And now we have the father, the son, and the spirit all give attributes of deity.

I remember that, I think it was Bob Bowman who used the acronym of HAND to help people understand the deity of Christ.

And you could use this for the spirit of God as well, or the father HAND acronym. Next time a

Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon comes to your door, remember

HAND. H, honor, that Jesus on earth received honor as God.

Remember, they fall down. People fall down in front of the angels, John, the apostle in the book of Revelation.

And what do the angels say? Well, get up. Stop doing that. That's only for God. When people get on their feet and worship

Jesus, I mean, get down at the feet of Jesus, what does he do? Get up, I'm a created being. I'm the firstborn of all creation.

I'm just like an angel. I, you know, Satan was my spirit brothers. Don't, don't worship me.

Worship God, the father. Is that what Jesus does? Of course not. He accepts it.

So H for HAND is honor. A, attributes. When we try to describe

God, we say things like characteristics or attributes or perfections, trying to understand him and use

English language slash Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic language to do that. And we would say, God is holy.

God is love. God is good. And when you think about the attributes that God, the father has, the

God of the old Testament has, so too does the son. And of course the son is in the old Testament, but you know what

I'm saying? And Jesus has the attributes of deity because he is

God. So that's the H -A -N is names, the names of God.

If you call God in the old Testament, alpha and omega, what happens when you call Jesus in revelation, alpha and omega are here in new

England, alpha and omega. If you call God the first and the last, and you're referring to God in the old

Testament, now you call Jesus the first and the last. How does that work out? So we've got

H -A -N, how about even the word savior, right? Redeemer. Who's the redeemer?

Well, I thought God the father redeemed Israel out of Egypt. Jesus, how can he be called the redeemer?

And then lastly, D, the deeds of deity. He upholds the universe,

Hebrews chapter one, Colossians chapter one. He does mighty miracles, walks on water, and he thankfully and ultimately forgives sin.

Who forgives sin? I just read this morning. The Pharisees hate it that Jesus forgives sin.

They say that's blasphemy. Only God can forgive sin. God forgives sins in the old Testament.

Jesus forgives sins. Therefore, God is the son. The son is God. I didn't mean to say it that way.

God is the son. The son is God. The father is God. The spirit is God. See, you know what,

I want to turn around and see Renee's eyes. I just did. Yeah.

Someone said to me, you can't talk about the Trinity for more than two minutes without making a radical mistake.

And I've been talking about the Trinity for five minutes and I finally fell into one. God is the son. The son is God. So you can strike that out.

I might've said it, but I had to do the autocorrect. Not everything. The father isn't the son.

The son isn't the spirit. The spirit isn't the father, et cetera. And what's the point,

Pastor Mike? The point is, Peter and Paul in Ephesians 1 and 1

Peter 1 praises God for being triune. So I think that would just be good for you to do. Blessed be the God and father of our

Lord Jesus Christ. He doesn't say the Holy Spirit there, but that's fine. Because when you say the spirit, you think of the son and you think of the father and vice versa.

The father sends the son. The spirit of God attends the son's work. The spirit of God applies the work of the son now in time as the

Lord has seen fit. Secondly, as you just look at this, not a big exegetical outline.

You could just figure out this outline at home. Look at 1 Peter 1, 3 to 9 and find things in this passage that would cause you to say,

God is really great. God is worthy to be praised. You don't have to try to find the modifiers or what the key verb is, or is this an heiress or is it a participle?

Is it a nomic heiress? You don't need to find any of that. Just look like you would be reading an

English Bible. Why does Peter tell suffering Christians?

I praise God like this and you should too. That's the inference. You Christian should praise God like this.

So you see the Trinitarian there. And then he says, according to his great mercy. And again, that mercy is going to be the cause for us being born again.

But just to stop there and say, let's isolate mercy and say, aren't you glad God is merciful?

That would be a good way to say, thank you, God. I thank you that you're triune. And I thank you that you're merciful.

You don't have to understand every little detail of the Trinity in order to praise God for being three in one. When I was younger,

I simply knew the song, holy, holy, holy. God in three persons, blessed

Trinity. That's all I needed to know. That's all you needed to know to praise him. And he goes on though, his mercy.

And it's not just regular mercy, right? One of the things we do is we read our Bibles too fast. This is not mercy.

This is great mercy. And the word here, mercy is particularly a word in this context that means we are pitiful.

We're in a state that we can't save ourselves. We're damned, we're lost, and God does something about it.

People stuck in quicksand, you want to go rescue them. A person's in a pitiful state and you go help them.

That's what this word is. Remember Jesus in Luke 18, he has the tax collector say,

God have mercy on me, a sinner. That word's a little different. That's where we get mercy seat.

That's where we get propitiation. Gospel of the

Lord Jesus Christ has made it so that he has intercepted or exhausted the wrath of God in our place. That's what the word mercy there means.

But here it's simple. There is, I'm not trying to ascribe affections or emotions to God, but when writers say there's an impulse in God to relieve suffering.

And again, I'm not saying God has impulses. That's not my point. But God is merciful. And therefore he, in this outward manifestation of pity, takes care of our need.

What's our biggest need? Our biggest need is forgiveness. And therefore God does something about it.

Ephesians 2, it says, God is rich in mercy and here is great mercy. We have a lot of sins.

We need a lot of mercy. And that's exactly what's happening for these dear Christians as they listen through Peter's letter.

Here's how you praise God. Even though things are difficult. I have cancer. I have

TB. I have a lung transplant. I have problems with my children.

I have relationship problems. I have work problems. I mean, whatever they are, we've all got them. This is a fallen world.

And we say, I still know who God is because he's unchangeable and he's triune. He's great in mercy.

And I'm very thankful that God didn't let me die in my sins. I mean, can you imagine that noose of religion where you so think everything's fine?

You know, you're not a pagan. You're not like these other people and Wiccans and witches and warlocks.

You don't do that. And you're not looking at some new age crystal ball and having some

Hindu stuff. No, no, we wouldn't do that. We go to church Easter and Christmas and we've been baptized and catechized and confirmed.

Everything's fine. We call ourselves Christians, but deep down, we don't really care about the

Lord at all because we're not regenerate. We've been enslaved with this mask of Christianity called religion.

Now, religion is just a relationship with God. Relationship with God is called religion. I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about the external religiosity things we do for all of us. I mean, for me, especially ensnared to religion, religiosity.

What if God didn't have mercy? What if the whole time I thought, you know what? I'm doing these things. I'd never call myself a

Muslim or a Mormon or a JW or anything else. I'd call myself, I'd probably say

I was a Lutheran first. Then if somebody said, are you a Christian? Oh yeah, I'm a Christian. And then in the middle of it all,

I think I'm fine. See, that's the damning part about self -righteousness.

That's the damning part of religiosity. Remember what Jesus said in Luke 5? It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are what?

Sick. I've not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. I thought in my religious deeds that I had righteousness.

I had more than my neighbor. I had more than some of my friends at school. I mean, I would try to do what the

Bible says sometimes, and the list goes on and on and on, trying to get to heaven by religious things that we did.

And by the way, as I've said many times, why would Jesus have to come and die if we could just do some religious things?

We could just have some water poured on our head or dunked in a big tub or whatever.

I mean, I have a spiritual pedigree. Can't that get me into heaven? And then you think of Paul. Out of all the spiritual pedigrees that people have, the credits in their account for doing good things, and Paul circumcised on the eighth day, and of the best tribe,

Benjamin, and a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and as to law -keeping, blameless, a

Pharisee, all these things. I mean, he even persecuted the church. You want to know how zealous he was?

And I think it was George Whitefield that said all those things. It seems like it's a ladder going up to heaven, but really at the top of the ladder, it's a noose.

And can you imagine on that day, that fateful day where you think, if it wasn't for God's mercy,

I would have gone to heaven. No, I would have thought I was going to go to heaven and end up being in hell, and then it's too late, right?

Then it is true where you have Dante in his book, Dante's Inferno, abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Aren't you glad that you don't have to go to hell? Aren't you glad that God has taken care of your greatest enemy, you and your own sin, me and my own sin?

I mean, here's how it works. I know how it works. It's relative morality. I know I'm sinful, but I'm not as bad as the other guy.

I know I did some sins, and I think about some sins, but I've been baptized. I've been confirmed.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Acts, the Letter of the Romans, I know the books of the Bible. Matter of fact, I pulled out my old confirmation quizzes from when

I was 13, 14, 15. Some of the stuff, they actually taught me the Bible, and some of those things that I got good grades on,

I wish I could still remember. Luther said, I find that still

I cannot preach self -righteousness down. Still men will boast in what they can do and mistake the path to heaven to be a road paved by their own merits and not a way besprinkled by the blood of the atonement of Jesus Christ.

Did you know that is why Martin Luther preached against self -righteousness every single sermon?

From what I can tell, every sermon, there was some aspect of that, because even now as Christians, we know our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness, but somehow we think there's something in us that makes us favorable to God.

That is not Christianity. That is not right. And that's why we need revelation. That's why you need to be at a church that proclaims the gospel every single week and gives communion in such a way that you remember that salvation is accomplished by God and it's outside of you.

Spurgeon said, I say that I have no need of salvation by the blood and righteousness of another, for I believe that I have kept the commands of God from my youth up, and I do not think that I'm guilty in his sight.

But I hope that I may be able in my own right to claim a seat in paradise. Now that's not

Spurgeon talking about himself after he was saved, but that's what he would think about before he was saved.

And it goes for you as well. That's why we need God who sees us in our pitiful state, enslaved to religion, and then comes and rescues, sends his son.

Because Romans 2 is correct. God will render to each one according to his works. So I ask you the question, what would he render to you according to your works?

Could I have mercy? Is there a great mercy for my great sin? Romans 2 goes on.

It's not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.

And do we do the law? Have we perfectly done the law? How many times do we have to sin in order to be lawbreakers?

We know the answer to that question. God has great mercy, and he takes care of our biggest problem.

That is our sin. Well, those are two. Did you know I have nine reasons to praise

God in 1 Peter 1, verses 3 to 9? So I'll cover a few more next time.

But the big picture is simple. Dear Christian, if you're going through troubles, that is your lot in life, of course, it is

God's will for you to go through trials and tribulations, and he uses those for his own glory and your good.

Romans 8, James 1, Romans 5. But no matter what you go through, you still have an opportunity to thank

God and to praise God for who Jesus is, right? Because none of your trials affect

Jesus. None of your trials affect what Jesus has done for you. So you can still praise

God. So in the midst of all this, and you say, well, I have a hard time praising God, you can go to 1

Peter 1, verses 3 to 9, and it starts off with, God, I praise you for being triune, and I praise you for your great mercy.

Why don't you just do that today, even in your heart right now? Say, God, thank you that you're triune. Please forgive me for being so unthankful, so unfilled of praise.

Fill my heart with praise, once again, by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that I might sing your praises and evangelize with a happy heart.

Well, my name is Mike Abendroth. This is No Compromise Radio Ministry. We'll see you this

Friday, Escondido, Westminster Seminary, 5 o 'clock. The conference starts at 7 o 'clock.