Tom Leake Interview

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.

A Christ-Centered Philosophy of Expository Preaching

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and we have a little slogan around here, and that slogan is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. Our real goal here as a radio show, and not a local church, is simply to get you to go to your Bibles and see what the Bible says for yourself.

And if you do that, even if you disagree with me, we will have succeeded in our mission here at the radio show. We want people to open up their Bibles, and of course, when you do, you will see, obviously in the New Testament, the Lord Jesus Christ, but you�ll even see Him in the Old Testament.

From Genesis to Revelation, this is a book that extols the person and work of our Lord Jesus, and that�s who we like to talk about. And I regularly have pastors and theologians and friends on to talk to them a little bit about the Lord Jesus, and today I have a pastor and a friend and a theologian all wrapped up in one.

Pastor Tom Leak, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

Well, thank you very much. I don�t know if I�d call myself a theologian, but I am a pastor, and I do love that introduction you gave there about Christ and the Bible. That�s certainly what I�m about and our church down here in Maryland is about.

Tom, you pastor Hope Bible Church, and let�s just get right into that, since that�s a good segue. Tell me a little bit about your philosophy of preaching, that is to say, what about exposition, what about moralism, what about Christ-centeredness?

Just what�s your take when you come to a passage, and what are you preaching these days?

Well, I was trained at the Master�s Seminary to be an expositor. We went there to try to learn as much as we could about how to unpack the Word of God and deliver that to the people in a way that they could understand it.

So when we came back to plant the church back in �97, we just picked a book of the Bible. I picked 1 John. I wanted to ground people in the basic truths of Christianity and to develop their discernment.

So we took the verse-by-verse or paragraph-by-paragraph approach just to unfold and unpack the meaning of the text. I had been in a number of churches prior to that, and some of them had pretty good doctrinal statements, but not all of them would really explain the Bible.

When I came to church, I knew that it was important for me, sitting in the pew, to understand God�s Word. I was always searching for that and getting connected with Dr. MacArthur�s ministry through his radio and his tapes back in the day.

That was so impactful to me in my faith and developing my faith. I wanted to be that in the pulpit for the person sitting in the pew, that they would be able to open their Bible, just like you said, and see for themselves, �This is what God�s Word actually says.

Hopefully, if I�m doing my job right, anyway. Their faith would be molded and impacted by what the Spirit would speak freshly to them from the text of Scripture. So that�s what we did. We started in 1 John.

We went through all of 1 John. We went through Ephesians to sort of ground them in good theology and the practice of love in the body of Christ, and we�ve never really looked back from that. We went on to Matthew, and I don�t remember what books we went into there.

Right now, we�re in the book of Acts. We�re in a heavy transition area, so there are a lot of people in the Baltimore-Washington area, and then they�re back out again. So we have a number of newer people in our church, and I wanted to make sure they understood the purpose of the church and how the church is to grow in a biblical manner and the kind of things that we�re to focus on in getting the gospel of Jesus Christ out into the hearts of people and let that change their lives.

Acts 6, Church Leadership, and the Care of Widows

Tom, where are you in the book of Acts? Which chapter? I started chapter 6, the pointing of the 7, and I kind of wanted to stretch that out into a two-parter. Who knows? It may turn into a three-parter.

I never know as I�m going along, you know, how that�s going to be. But even though they�re not beacons, there�s some wisdom there about how the leadership team realized, you know, these widows that are being neglected, the Hellenistic widows that are being neglected, we don�t want that to happen, but we don�t want to neglect our calling to preach the Word of God, to make sure that that is done.

And so we�re kind of unpacking that right now and trying to glean the wisdom from that for our church. We do have a deacon board, but I think it helps to underscore the need for people that support those in the local church that are doing the work of ministry, that they get the opportunity to really pour time into the Word.

Absolutely. And I know you have an elder board there as well. Well, Tom, as I think about Acts chapter 6, and you�ve probably talked about this as you�ve been preaching through the passage itself, but if our church, Bethlehem Bible Church, or at Hope Church, there was a race problem between, let�s just say, blacks and whites or Puerto Ricans and blacks or whites and any other color people, if there was a problem in the church with that kind of race issue, I think that would immediately skyrocket to code red, elder board needs to get involved.

And here, in Acts chapter 6, isn�t it fascinating, there�s the Hellenist and the Hebrews, and there�s this issue there, and it gets pushed off to the deacons, because the deacons can take care of it, the elders have other things, i .e. the apostles have other things that they need to do.

Any comments about that?

Yeah, I mean, they were, I think the apostles functioning as the elders in that church were very concerned that division not arise between the Hellenists, who I understand to be the minority, and the Hebrew Jews, who were the majority.

So they wanted there to be unity, they took the initiative, they pulled everyone together, but the overseeing to make sure the distribution was equitable was given to these seven men full of the spirit, full of wisdom, able to handle it for themselves, and meanwhile the apostles were having a fantastic ministry of the word, both inside the church and outside the church.

They were the foundation for the church universal, and so they couldn�t compromise on that. They couldn�t hold back on that, otherwise it would affect the long-term maturity and growth of the church.

For our elder board, I mean, if there is an issue, we have a good mix of white and African American and Hispanic and Asian, we have Indian from the country of India here. We have a whole mix in the D .C. Baltimore area, and if we had any wind as an elder board that there was some group that was being neglected, that would be a concern, but we would want to be able to turn to our deacon board and trust them to solve it in a proper biblical and gentle kind of manner.

Rejecting Social Gospel Strategies for a Word-Centered Church

Amen. Amen. Well, one of the things that I noticed with this whole social gospel emphasis these days is that many of these people that promote that kind of social gospel, which I don�t think is a real gospel at all, it�s more law than gospel, I go to other churches and I�ve been to Hope several times, and I know you don�t have some kind of sociology strategy or contextualization strategy, you�re just a guy with some pigment or no pigment and you just start preaching the Word of God and this transcultural, transchronological, powerful Word of God changes all kinds of people because there�s only one race.

Isn�t that our ministry?

It does change people. I mean, that�s the amazing thing. I mean, we never set out to have a diverse church. We never had a prayer for a diverse church, we never had a plan. I wouldn�t know how to do that anyway.

Anyway, we just preached the Word and actually a shared friend we have, Pastor George Lawson, at some point in time he and a group of African Americans from their church were tired of what they were getting taught in their church and they kind of crossed over and came to our all-white church and we weren�t trying to be all-white, it�s just what we were.

You wake up in the morning and that�s what you are. But they crossed over and they wanted the Word and that was a great blend. It took some adjustment for people in the church, different parenting styles, different ways of approaching things, but people worked through it and eventually there was another group that came from an Hispanic church in the D .C. area.

They were not being taught the sovereignty of God and they thought that that was important and they came over as a group and so the Lord just in His timing brought different groups. The same thing happened with an Asian group, mostly Korean at that time, and He put it together and we never had a struggle with race or as you mentioned also age because that was never the emphasis of our ministry.

Our ministry was always about glorifying Christ and hearing His Word and when people came they understood that that was different and that was the focal point of our unity and still is.

Talking to Pastor Tom Leak today, Hope Church down in Columbia, Maryland, and I can already guess that the listeners can hear your heartbeat and passion for ministry. If you�re looking for a good Bible teaching church in the D .C. area, I would direct you to hopebiblechurch .org.

Tom, I don�t know if you know this or not, but last year at the Shepherd�s Conference 2018, I saw George, Pastor George, and he had a young man on his shoulder who was holding his arm for guidance because that young man couldn�t see and that young man listened to No Compromise Radio and then found George through No Compromise Radio, so it was a big family reunion for us.

Wow, that�s really neat. No, I did not know that. Yeah, and I just thought about it, you know, it�s the Word of God. Here�s this white guy on this black guy�s arm and they�re all there listening to some great truths about a Semitic Jew who was born in, you know, Nazareth, so anyway.

Yeah. So tell me a little bit about your conference. That�s something that maybe if people live in the D .C. area but they don�t live close enough to your church, they could still benefit by the conference and the training school there.

Tell us a little bit more about both of those, please.

Grace Advance Mid-Atlantic and Biblical Love

Absolutely. I think back in 2007 we got started with inter-church conferences on biblical issues. The first one was on biblical counseling. We take a theme each year. Sometimes we have an outside speaker.

Sometimes we just have some of the pastors from our region preaching. We�ve done the solos of the Reformation. We�ve done Sovereignty of God. This past year, actually this last week, we did a conference on biblical love.

It�s not what you think. We worded it that way because one of the things that I think a lot of young people particularly are confused with is that if you�re loving then you can�t oppose things that are wrong in society or that the Bible says that are wrong, that it�s unloving if you�re against certain moral trends in society or if you correct somebody and their theology and you exercise discernment.

We wanted people to understand that yes, love is a sacrificial action. Agape love comes from God. It�s not in our heart. It comes from the Lord and we love other people. We also, part of that love is to rejoice in the truth and to rely on truth.

If we remove truth, what is love? What is it to love someone without truth that�s not really love? We wanted to shore up those attributes of God that they work in God�s mind and in God�s practice in harmony.

Truth and love always go hand in hand. We advertise in the entire area. There are about a dozen participating churches in the greater mid-Atlantic area. Some of them drive down from Delaware or Pennsylvania and up from Virginia.

We�re kind of in central Maryland here. We have a conference once a year. This year we had three of the local pastors preaching and then we have breakout sessions. We have a book display. We have great fellowship and worship together.

We started it because our kind of churches with our understanding of theology and our biblical philosophy of ministry, we often find ourselves in a sea of many other churches that, well, they�re not like us.

Of course, we do our best to get along with every gospel preaching church, but we really have a heartbeat for a full biblical philosophy of ministry. When people come with their pastor or with their elders and they come to this conference and they just kind of walk around the hallways and talk and go to the seminars and listen and learn and sing, they realize they�re not alone.

There are other churches like this. It is a growing movement. God is using Dr. MacArthur�s ministry and the Master�s Seminary and all the things associated with that to produce graduates. They�re out there.

They�re trying to build their churches and they�re trying to connect with others that way. That was kind of the impetus behind the start of the conference.

Well, if people want to learn more about it, it�s simple, graceadvancema .org, Grace Advance Mid-Atlantic. I�m on the website right now and from church support. How to Find a Church, Upcoming Courses, Conferences, Special Section for Pastors and Leaders.

I have been there for some of those conferences. I used to get invited to speak to them, but now I�m too far in the Northeast, so I still.

Give you my blessing. No, we paid you years ago an honorary member of our Mid-Atlantic Fellowship. I forgot about that. I need to cash that card in. You�re a member. That�s right. And we�ll have you back down.

In fact, I wanted to let you know, this probably doesn�t fit your train of questions here, but we are picking up and going to use your book �Sexual Fidelity, No Compromise� in our men�s ministry. We have a men�s breakfast that meets two or three times a month and we go through different books.

We�re going through �A Godly Man�s Picture� by Thomas Watson right now. But in January, our brother Steve Kirshner is going to be contacting you. We�re going to order some of your books and use that as our study in our men�s fellowship.

Well, that is very encouraging. I did get in touch with him and just sent him some of the books. And so, when I got the order, I thought, �Wow, that is great. And I tried to approach that topic with proper biblical caution, yet just deal with the text and come at it from a Christ-centered way.

And so, that�s neat to know. So, Tom, I remember back a few years ago, you got a call from the doctor or you talked to the doctor, and I�ve received one of those calls as well, but yours was worse. Can you walk our listeners through what is it like to hear from a doctor you�ve got cancer and some of the prognosis?

And I want to tie it back to when you were talking about there are churches in the area that don�t teach about the sovereignty of God, and just how important was it for you to know as you went through this that, �Though He might slay me, I�m still going to trust in Him, and God is sovereign over all this, and I can rest in that.

Tell us about your cancer diagnosis, some lessons learned, and then how are you feeling now?

Cancer, the Sovereignty of God, and Learning to Trust

Yeah, that�s a very important part of my life, I guess, now that you�ve had a diagnosis as well. You know that it�s quite a shock. I went into the doctor�s office with my wife, Susan, thinking I needed to have a gallbladder removed.

I�ll never forget the day, April 30th, 2015, and I was sitting, joking with my wife like I do a lot. We�re in the doctor�s office. He came in the room, he opened his little laptop, he looked at it, his facial expression changed.

He looked at me, and without any preparation at all, he just said, �You have cancer. Being a pastor, I�m sitting there thinking in my mind, first of all, maybe he�s got the wrong patient. I�m the guy that�s got the gallbladder, you know.

You can go back and double-check that, but I�m thinking in my mind, I need to ask intelligent questions about what kind of cancer I have, and what am I supposed to do, and all of that. He said, �Well, you have pancreatic cancer, and by definition, that is the kind that spreads and kills.

Honestly, the rest of what he talked about there, I didn�t really hear too well. He was talking about where I could get started with this or that. On the way out, I grabbed Susan�s hands, and we walked out.

She was a little weepy. I looked at her, and I really honestly wasn�t afraid. I looked at her, and I said, �Susan, I walked in as a believer into that doctor�s office. I�m going to walk out as a believer, and I don�t know what any of this means.

I don�t know why it is, but let�s just take one day at a time, one step at a time. That�s what we did. I think my biggest struggle, Pastor Mike, was just the confusion. You follow in your life a sense of a call, how God might want to mold you and shape you and then use you in his sovereignty.

This just didn�t seem to fit what I had been called to do here in Maryland. How is this supposed to fit? Of course, I couldn�t figure it out. I wasn�t supposed to figure it out. I was supposed to just work through what you just said, that God is sovereign, and God is also good.

Whatever he�s going to do in his sovereignty, he�s going to work it out for good. I knew that he was going to use it to humble me more, to shape me more, to make me be more compassionate of a man. I knew all of that.

I could process that in my mind, but I didn�t know how it fit with the future for our plans for the ministry for the church and outreaching with the church and helping other churches as well. There�s no way to know.

The Lord used some brothers in the church. One was a retired pastor and a retired surgeon. He talked to me, and he encouraged me, Pastor Tony Gadula, just that they never know what they�re going to find until they cut you open and look inside, and so just trust the Lord and move forward.

We got into the Johns Hopkins program. There are so many details here. I don�t want to go through all the details, but I got into a program that�s very difficult to get into. The man who had perfected the quipple surgery was literally the world�s greatest surgeon there.

I got him at Johns Hopkins, and he took my case. I was in the hospital 21 days there, but it was just such a privilege to see God work the details out. My family was incredibly supportive. My children were so supportive, and the staff here and the church here was supportive.

I think the whole church went through a jolt at that time. I think there was something like 10 or 12 weeks in a row where there were visiting pastors from our Gamma region, and you yourself were in our pulpit as well.

Mike, I appreciate that, too. You even took time to come by my home and pray with me. It�s such an uncertain time, and when you go through that, you have to lay everything on the table, everything out, and say, �Lord, this is how it always is anyways, but right now I can see that acutely, and I am surrendered to whatever you want to do.

Here I am. I�m weak. My body is frail. I got down to 118 pounds. I mean, there�s not too much you can do when you�re that small and that weak, but God is the same God, and he�s the same power, and the gospel is the same gospel.

Everything that you say you believe, it just gets tested, and you come out believing it even more strongly than before.

Tom, what would be some of the passages, if you can remember, during that initial time that you were just drawn to as the Spirit of God would have your mind fixed on a psalm? Were you reading psalms or one of the gospels?

Can you think of any salient passages? And I�m just thinking about other people who listen, who get that diagnosis, or their family does, and maybe it�s just kind of a pastoral,. �Well, if this happened to you, these things really helped me, and they�ll probably help you, too.

James 1, the Psalms, and Philippians 1 in Suffering

Well, I had just finished preaching on James 1 in the fire. I literally had. In fact, I got a bazillion cards, and one girl wrote me and said, �Now, we�re going to get to see if you practice what you preach.

And it was kind of a cute card, but consider it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

So I knew God�s going to build into my character more through this, but that was so encouraging because you preach that to others, and I�ve been through many trials, but having a kind of cancer that kills 99 .9 of the people, that makes you face death�s door even more.

Just a lot of the truth in Scripture that I had taught about God�s sovereignty, that our Lord sits in the heavens and He does whatever He pleases, or that the Lord in Psalm 3 is a shield about me and He protects me, those were important to me because even if you�re not healed in this life, you�re ultimately always healed by Christ in the resurrection.

So you focus on, for me to live as Christ and to die as Gain was a verse that I was constantly reviewing in my mind when I had a hard time remembering�chemo takes a lot out of your memory, and it was hard to remember a lot of things, but that was one short verse that was so easy to remember, you know, for me to live as Christ.

Everything that I�m going to do for today should be something about promoting the kingdom of Christ. And if I die, it�s not a punishment. If I die, it�s not a punishment, it�s a reward. Recently someone came to me and they said, �You know, we prayed for you and realized that it�s been three and a half years and the cancer hasn�t returned, congratulations for being healed.

And I turned to that person and I said, �You know, it�s not actually a reward to be healed. You know, it�s a blessing from God, I�m so thankful for it, if that�s indeed what has happened in my body, but Paul said it�s so much better to go on and be with Christ, and life down here is struggle and it�s trial through many trials we enter into the kingdom of God, trials and temptations in this world we enter into the kingdom of God.

Those are the kinds of verses that guided my heart and mind to know the Lord is a shield about me and He protects me, His sovereign, my health will always be in His hands. If I have more years, then that means more fruitful labor for me, as Paul said.

So that�s kind of where my mind went during that time.

Amen, thank you for that, and it�s amazing that when we go through these things, we understand, at least I. Tom, I understood the sovereignty of God, more than intellectual, more than just from the academic standpoint.

But then you really begin to say, �All right, I have to just throw myself on the goodness of God and His mercies and rest in Him because I�m weak, I can�t think. If I was taking three naps a day with some radiation, I don�t know what you were going through, but you�re just tired and can�t process things.

I had a hard day yesterday and I was just tired, and one night�s sleep helps, but then when you can never get that rest. Are you on chemo right now? No, everything seems good. I�ll have an MRI in December to follow up and then a biopsy final for next May, and if both of those are negative, then everything should be good.

Well, we�ll just keep reminding the Lord that we need Pastor Mike down here.

Well, I don�t want to go anywhere, but we do understand just those verses, �When my mom was dying, to live is Christ, to die is gain. And I said, �Mom, I know you love me, but it�s me or Christ, it�s going to be gain in heaven, and there are grandkids you�ve never met that you�ll have one day, but you won�t ever see them, but still it�s gain for heaven.

And I really thought during those moments I�ve never been more convinced of the authority and sufficiency and divine authorship of the Word of God. It was the Puritans that said, �If you�d like to increase assurance of salvation, the confident realization that in fact you�re a Christian, then the Lord has ordained some means and that would be the Word of God, sacraments, i .e. ordinances, prayer, and the last one is affliction.

And when God afflicts you, and then you realize, you know, I have to look outside of myself, yet I am still trusting in who God is. Very wonderful statement, Tom, you made earlier about, �I was a believer when I walked in, I�m a believer when I walk out, and the just shall live by faith in the Lord Jesus.

So how about in the future here, what are things looking like for testing and diagnosis?

Ongoing Follow-Up and Living with Greater Spiritual Drive

Well, we used to go in quarterly for the CAT scan, now I go in twice a year, and I have one actually coming up I think next week, so we�ll see how that goes. It�s been three and a half years. The doctors look at the five-year mark as the mark that, where if you�re free from cancer for that, that�s good news.

I don�t look to that day. I think that it�s just taught me to live every year with as much passion as I can. I have less energy now, but I have more spiritual drive, if that makes sense.

That is exactly a wonderful description. Tom, did you think like I thought, �All right, if this kills me, there�s a lot of books in the Bible I�ll never get to preach through.

Yes, but I kind of knew that was going to happen anyway because I go too slowly.

Well, when the doctor calls and says, �Eighty percent chance you�re going to make it then you�re like, �Well, I wonder about the 20. But when they tell you, �This is 99 .9 percent chance going to kill you I mean, what goes through your mind?

You have nowhere else to go except up. Lord, I�ve committed myself to you by the grace of God, and you�re going to have to see me through. And if that means absent from the body, I guess it means present with the Lord.

I mean, it�s really real. These are not just ethereal thoughts. And what if you were giving your people just a moralistic pietism every single week, just do these things, versus you have to look at the one who saved you and loved you and has promised you�re good?

Yeah, if you�re just going through moralism, you�d suffer in this life, and then you�d go to the judgment seat and find out that you tried to live a good life and you didn�t live good enough, and now you�re rejected.

You suffered in one life, and now you�re going to suffer more in the next life. Why?

Right. Well, we�re going over time here, but just another thought, Tom, since I so appreciate your heartbeat for ministry and life and outlook on trials. Somebody said to me, they said and my cancer compared to yours is really nothing but they said to me, �Mike, you�re different now that you have gone through this.

And my flesh, I think I wanted to say, �Well, I hope so. I didn�t want to go through all that for nothing, but you talked about this spiritual kind of drive and energy and passion that you have now renewed.

How does that flesh itself out? Is that in prayer or study, or you have more energy and focus when you�re preaching? How do you think that methodologically fleshes itself out, that drive? That�s a good question.

It just is in me. I mean, even coming out of the anesthesia, when you come out of the anesthesia, the first thought that was in my mind was 2 Thessalonians 3, that the Word of God needs to spread rapidly and be glorified, and literally that means to run.

And I came back talking about that. There was just an intensity in my voice. Some of my closer friends said they could just hear an intensity in how I was speaking. Even in our prayer time, in our men�s circles, as we�d be praying together, they said that.

For me, there were times I struggled with my prayer life. Not that I didn�t want to pray, but that I didn�t know how to pray. I didn�t know what was God doing and how was I supposed to pray. And it just came back to over and over again, �Lord, I�m here to serve you, I�m yours, and help me to use each day.

So I think what it did, it made my future smaller. It kind of condensed things in my mind where every day and every week and every month was important. I needed to do the best I could during that time, and I think that intensity came out.

I think the other thing, I�ll just say briefly, is compassion. Being in the hospital that long and suffering, I went through a horrific week, I call it hell week, but I�m sure it wasn�t close to hell, but it was a bad week.

Going through something like that just allows me to look on our people as they�re suffering with more tender eyes, I think, as well.

Closing Exhortation on Christ, Suffering, and Pastoral Tenderness

Well, Tom, thank you for taking time out of your schedule to be on No Compromise Radio. I�m positive that the listeners could hear your passion and desire to proclaim the truth, whether God gives you a healthy body or one that�s not so healthy, and I just appreciate you.

I know we don�t talk that often or hang out that often, but if I lived in the D .C. area, I would be at Hope Bible Church, and I think our folks can hear your desire to preach Christ. And then there�s that tenderness, I think, of Paul as he was dealing with those Thessalonica people that he said that, �We were gentle among you like a nursing mother taking care of her own children.

So being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God, but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us. And when I think of Tom Lee, that�s the verse that I think of.

Tom, thank you for your ministry. Thank you for your faithfulness that God has granted you. And one of these days, I�m sure we�ll see each other face to face. Thanks for being on the radio show.

Thank you. It�s an honor to be here, and Lord bless you and your ministry.

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.