Study Your Bible

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 ministry. My name's Mike Abendroth, and I'm kind of on a roll today.

Actually, right now, it's a couple days before the big hurricane will hit. Interestingly, I was gonna preach

Sunday night on the God of the storm, Psalm 29, but I think probably service is gonna be canceled. Who knows?

Some fair -weathered friends. But anyway, taping three shows just because I've been out of the mode of taping shows, and now

I need to get back into it. I think we're gonna re -up for our radio shows on WVNE and continue on with that ministry, so I gotta tape some shows.

But man, it's harder than I thought. I think every year it gets harder, maybe because some of it, I'm running out of topics.

Well, that part isn't true, but I've run out of a lot of topics that I've studied for. So most of the time, when it comes to No Compromise Radio, I've not had to come up with,

I don't have to study for the show. That doesn't mean I don't have notes. I have all kinds of notes in front of me, and it's weird because I look up, and then

I realize I don't have to establish eye contact. But it's something that I've already taught, then I print it out, and then

I teach it. And so I don't have time to come up with five shows, four shows a week, brand new, with brand new material.

I have a life, I have a job. Like I said before, I don't get paid for this show, so if I guess it was full -time, then

I could really make it great. I have often wondered that, by the way, that if this was my full -time job, how much better No Compromise Radio could be.

But you know what, you do what you can do. Don't forget, No Compromise Radio Ministry is promoting the

Psalm 119 conference. You ought to be at that conference. The topic is discernment, and it's put on by Todd Friel and the folks at Wretched Radio and you can go to Wretched Radio to register.

You can't go to No Compromise Radio. I think if you go to maybe bbchurch .org, you could possibly register.

But it's through Todd Friel's folks, just go to Wretched Radio. I think it's .com, but maybe it's .org. And that's

Psalm 119 conference. Tim Challis will be here, the guru of Google.

You've got Trevin Wax who will be here. I don't know much about Trevin, but I hope I like him. You've got

R .W. Glenn will be here. I know I like R .W. Glenn. I actually sat on the ordination committee for the ordination of R .W.

Glenn. And so maybe I'm just going to call him W. And Todd Friel himself.

Oh, there's one other person who's at the bottom of the barrel and he's going to be speaking.

His name is Mike Ebenroth. So we'd love to have you come. That's September 23rd, teaching all day, 1 p .m.

to 8 .30 p .m., that's Friday. And then Saturday all day, 9 a .m. to 4 .30 p .m.,

Saturday, September 24th. Can you imagine? That's a lot of teaching. And I heard with Friel's conferences, there's not a lot of singing, special music, this, that, and the other.

It's just a powerhouse, one -two punch of teaching after teaching after teaching after teaching after teaching.

So we'll see what happens held here at Bethlehem Bible Church. Go to reshradio .com.

And I will say again, since it came out, I'm kind of excited about it. And so at the risk of being a compromiser, my new book is out,

The Sovereignty and Supremacy of King Jesus, Bowing to the Gracious Despot. That is to say,

Jesus is king. And the text even calls him a despot sometimes. And so what does that mean?

How do we act towards kings? What is a real king? And if I say the word king,

I wonder what you think about. Maybe you think of Martin Luther King. Maybe you think of the Sacramento Kings.

Maybe you think of King's Ex. Maybe you think of, I don't know what you think of, but I want you to think about Jesus Christ as king.

It's on day one. You can order it through Amazon or Christian Books. Or you could probably go to No Compromise Radio and get the special no -code deal, 10 bucks including shipping.

And I think that's a steal, man. While supplies last. See, I don't know how to do these commercial endeavors.

While supplies last. So I think you should buy one of these books and give it to your pastor.

Buy one for your youth group. I think you should just go crazy. I don't know how many they printed. My guess is they probably printed about 6 ,000, maybe 3 ,000, knowing the author.

Or you could go to Bethlehem Bible Church Bookstore and buy one for, I think, nine dollars.

Can you imagine that? Nine dollars. Nine dollars. So, No Compromise Radio.

Today we're talking about studying the Bible. Studying the Bible. Now friends, that assumes that you will read your

Bibles. That you will read your Bible. Now I would say 99 % of you have a cell phone.

And I would say to you that if you walk out of the house and drive down the street and then you put your hand in your pocket, at least the way

I do it, put my hand in my front left pocket. That's where I keep my iPhone, soon to be upgraded to the iPhone 4S.

When I touch my pocket and realize my phone isn't there and I left it in the kitchen, I pretty much turn around and go back.

I don't go anywhere without that thing. Because I can get emails. I can hear some of the nasty

No Compromise emailers. By the way, we used to get so many emails from people at No Compromise Radio.

Info at No Compromise Radio. I had to have Ray answer some of them. Tim had to answer some of them.

Steve had to answer some of them. I answered some of them. But pretty much now, I don't hardly get any emails.

So, I don't know what to tell you. If you want to write, maybe it'd even be fun if you wrote.

Hi, I listened from Timbuk3 and I found out you're stationed through Wretched Radio and get a life.

As Lewis Johnson said, the problem with American evangelicals is they don't read their Bible. They don't read their

Bible. And so now, if you go to bible .is, that app, it reads to you.

I mean, I was listening this morning to Luke 1, 2, 3, and 4, read by the Bible app.

Bible .is, Bible .is. And it was great just listening. Now, sometimes the drama version's a little cheesy.

I thought Satan in Luke 4 was pretty good. I thought the demons in Luke 4 were pretty weak.

But overall, it's just good to hear it and it's good to then, you can just follow right along in your text.

You can read it on your own. But today, we want to talk about studying the Bible and how that's going to mean you're going to have to read the

Bible. And maybe you should think to yourself, I wouldn't go anywhere without my Bible like I don't go anywhere with my phone.

See how we finally got back to that? That was a digression, that was a transgression of where we got back.

So I want you to be able to study your Bibles. And so here's the deal. In 2 Timothy, Paul writes to Timothy as a leader, as a pastor, as an elder, as an overseer, as a bishop.

And Paul writes to Timothy, but just like you want to claim 2

Timothy 3 .16, all scriptures God breathed, et cetera. Just like you want to claim that as a lay person,

I think the implication is there. But it's for pastors, it's for preachers, for the man of God, that the man of God may be, verse 17, adequate, equipped for every good work.

Man of God, Jeremiah, Isaiah. Preachers, heralders, is that a word?

Those who herald. It is about men who preach the gospel and the toolkit is the word of God and everything you need is found in the word of God.

That's the point. But by implication, by application, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

And so it's good that you could say, you know what, I have God's word and I have God's word and it can correct me, it can teach me, it can reprove me, it can rebuke me, it can train me for righteousness, it can make me adequate for ministry.

Of course it can. But the context, authorial intent, was Paul to Timothy. So similarly, when

I go to 2 Timothy 2 .15 and it's Paul talking to Timothy and elders about studying the word with great energy,

I think it's good for you too if you're a lay person. If you want to have a person that you look to to say,

I'd like to study the Bible like them, I'd like to know the Bible like them, I wish I knew the

Bible like they did, then you should look to your pastor, you should look to your elders, you should look to leaders.

They should be blazing the trail, they should be running point, they should be out there saying, this is how it's done by the grace of God, follow me.

By the Spirit's power, imitate me. I'm the one that is a model.

I'm a model on earth today. Paul is dead and gone, Timothy's dead and gone, of course their spirits are alive, but they're gone, so look to me.

And so when I first sat down and listened to John MacArthur preach, I thought, that's a good model for me.

He's not God, he's not Jesus, but he studies well. And so today on No Compromise Radio, I'm talking about studying the

Bible. Listen to 2 Timothy 2 .15. Be diligent to present yourselves approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.

Of course, Paul is telling this to Timothy, but now Timothy is gonna try to train the rest of the men, just like in chapter two, verse two, to do what he's doing, to learn what he's learned, to pass it on to the next generation.

We're not the Dead Sea that has a wonderful, fresh inlet called the

Jordan River, but no outlet and it just stagnates and turns stale. We're not like a lake that has no outlet.

No, we wanna have a baton -passing mentality.

So when it comes to pastors, they need to study hard. They need to study hard because they're going to preach it, but they also need to study hard,

I think, because that's a good example for the lay people. So listen to what the text says. The Greek word to be diligent is spoudadson, spoudadso.

I've had some wonderful Italian spoudadso before. It's thick and creamy, light and fluffy.

Oh, that's spumoni, sorry about that, spoudadso. And you probably wanna say it. If I was at a secret sensitive church,

I would say, turn to the person in your car and look at them and say, spoudadso.

By the way, I guess it's per preference. That's the only thing it is because there's nothing in the text that says anything about it, but that just is so lame to me.

Turn to the person to your left and say, spoudadso. Well, the person to your left isn't looking at you because the person to your left is looking to the person to his left and everybody's turning one way saying spoudadso.

Say the word spoudadso. All together now, one, two, three, spoudadso.

The text in KJV, I think, is study. Here in NAS, it's be diligent.

I don't even know what ESV says. Let's take a look. 2 Timothy 2 .15, what does ESV say?

Do your best, do your best, be diligent. That's what we need to do.

We need to be diligent studiers of the Bible. Certainly Timothy does, elders do, but I think that goes for everyone.

So, next time you see your pastor, I'd like you to walk up to him. Instead of having pastors say, look to your neighbor and say spoudadso, you go to your pastor sometime and say, spoudadso.

And I dare you to spit while you're saying it, having it fly across the room, spoudadso. That'll make you spit.

That kind of, it's almost on a monopoetic. Reminds me of the story, I think I've told it before, where it was

Leman Strauss, and he was talking about Maranatha, Lord come, and how, you know, Christians in the old days used to say, instead of, you know, good morning, good night, good evening, hello, how are you, goodbye, it would be

Maranatha, you know, Jesus is coming back. And we have to say Maranatha more often because it reminds us that Jesus is coming back.

That will purify us, that will help us long for his return, that will help us in holy living. And so the next morning at the conference, some ladies, maybe their hearing wasn't that good, went to Leman Strauss and were gonna do what he prompted them to do the day before.

They were gonna be good soldiers and they were gonna learn, and so they were gonna say the right thing. And so they saw him and they said, good morning,

Dr. Strauss, marijuana. I was in Santa Cruz for the summer, and man, there's a lot of marijuana there.

It just takes you a $35 consultation and you can get medical grade marijuana and you can have it and you can have it legally.

My friend is a policeman, my brother -in -law is a policeman in Scotts Valley, and he says now he pulls over people and you know, if he finds marijuana, he has to ask them, do they have a license?

Because you can have a license to carry medical grade marijuana. And he said, sometimes they have huge bags of it.

You need all that for you? Yes, I need it for me. Oh man.

So, Spurazzo, you need to study, just like Timothy does, do your best.

You want to make sure you accurately handle the word of God. Study with sweat.

I think of Calvin who knew the seriousness of faithful pulpit ministry. He lamented, some preachers deliver sermons, quote, without due care as though it were some game that they were playing.

So you need to faithfully study and exegete. And that's probably the toughest part of ministry is just sticking to the study, keeping your seat to your chair,

MacArthur says, until the work is done. The most crucial part of the pastor's ministry is the proclamation of the word and he needs to give due diligence to study it so he can speak accurately for God.

It needs to be handled with kid gloves, kit gloves, with due care, accurately, and hear this word, do your best,

Spurazzo. Paul is telling his young apprentice, it's an imperative, Greek imperative, that he must not spare one iota's worth of effort in the

Herculean task of proper hermeneutics, exegesis, and the art of proclamation.

If it sounds like I'm reading, I am. I'm reading that from a crazy man who wrote a book called The Prince of Preachers.

That was in my book. The word he uses, Spurazzo, means to do your best, spare no effort, work hard, be conscientious, be zealous, be eager, take pains, make effort.

Does any of that sound like what your pastor does? Does any of that sound like what you, by implication, should do?

He even bumps it up with an, what am I thinking, an infinitive, to be diligent.

He intensifies this command. And so pastors and everybody else should study the

Bible. These are the words of life. And I could go to other passages that talk about studying the Bible.

I don't have to go to a pastoral epistle, but there's something weighty here because you want to be approved to God.

You want God to approve your ministry. You want God to say yes with commendation, good job studying.

And you can learn a lot from pastors who study. By the way, if I hear a sermon preached and I don't learn anything that I couldn't learn from just a simple reading of the

English text, I think that pastor didn't study. He didn't cut it straight. We don't want the gain, the approval, rather, of humans, of popularity contests, but we want

God to be pleased. And so that comes through study, difficult study, toil and labor.

And so one of the things that I want to do today that if you are a Bible study teacher, you ought to study.

You'd better not throw the Saturday night special together. That's what preachers call Saturday night sermons.

You better not say to yourself, you know what, my Bible study's on Friday. I'll just kind of wing it today. I especially now want to talk on No Compromise Radio to Sunday school teachers.

If you're a Sunday school teacher and you don't study and you don't prepare and you don't get ready for your classes, would you do one of two things for me?

One, repent, or two, quit. I'd rather have no study. I'd rather have no

Sunday school. I'd rather have no Sunday school than a Sunday school that's just a bunch of babysitting with moral stories about be good, do good, be nice, do nice things.

No elbows on the table. Don't smoke cigarettes. Don't drink any alcohol. Don't swear.

Don't get a tattoo. Don't go out with girls that do. I mean, that's not Sunday school.

Sunday school is to, no wonder the wacky family -only, family -integrated church folks don't like Sunday school because if it's done poorly,

I don't like it either. I might not like it for different reasons than the family -integrated folks.

But if you're teaching children and you have a charge to teach them, I'll even go so far, this is thrown in for the family integration people.

If you're a dad or if you're a mom and you're teaching your children the Bible, you want to know what you're talking about.

You want to study. You are the primary ones and you want to know what you're talking about.

If you're evangelizing, you have to know the gospel well. If you're a brand new

Christian and you don't know all these details, that's fine because there's nothing wrong with immaturity if you're immature.

If you have not had time to grow, I'm not mad at my newborn for not being able to pick up a pea and eat the pea.

I'm not mad at all. But if the kid's 10 years old and they don't know how to feed themselves, there's a problem.

And so if you're a new Christian and you don't know propitiation and redemption and reconciliation, and you only know Jesus loves me, this

I know for the Bible tells me so, that's fine. You will learn, you will grow, and you will see the manifold riches of the grace of God found in the atonement to become sparkling with all kinds of vivid 3D colors.

You'll see that as you study and grow. But if you're teaching, you ought to be a teacher that knows.

And so if you're a dad or mom, you ought to at least study the passage you're gonna teach the night before and just read it over and maybe read some

ESV study notes and the Carthus Study Bible notes to do something so that you know you are laying down a trail for others.

So you need to study. This is an exacting discipline. And so Paul says to Timothy, I guess

Timothy could have said, well, I know all this stuff already, Paul, you taught me, but he has to study. And for us, how much more than Timothy?

It's written in a different language. Not many of you know Koine Greek and Hebrew, and different societies, different cultures.

We're Westerners, they're Easterners, and the list goes on. Geography, culture, we've gotta study to figure out what does

God mean when he says this? That's what we're after. Not what does it mean to me?

Well, this means to me, to do no compromise style, I don't really care what it means to you.

If you weren't here in this room, what would this text mean? As one man said, what would this mean if you were dead?

Because the meaning is the meaning. We don't have reader response theory, we're not postmodern, we're not wackies.

We believe the text was written with a single author, God, through other authors, human, through agents that were moved by the

Spirit of God, like ships are moved, like sails are moved by wind, and they're sails.

And so maybe we don't have a lot of preaching out there, the expository preaching, because it takes a lot of work.

It even takes more work. So if you're a teacher, you need to really study. And so I would say that if you're teaching the

Bible in any way, shape, or form, you should start to get some tools. Go ask your pastor what you should get, and you should have a good

English Bible. Let's start there. Get a good English Bible, ESV, NAS, or New King James.

Those would probably be the three that I would recommend. I personally don't really, my preference is I don't like the

New King James, although my wife does. Allegedly. I like the

NAS maybe the best, and I'm using the ESV because I'm a compromiser.

No, because the NAS is killing the translation, and the ESV is run by a godly group of people.

And there's lots of translations that are excellent on that. It excels in 2 Timothy 2 .1, and NAS isn't very good there.

Okay, I'm digressing. So an English Bible. Secondly, a good study Bible. At the top of the list is a

MacArthur study Bible. ESV study Bible's right up there. NIV study

Bible's not so good. NIV, of course, I wouldn't have you get that if you're an international student or you've got a young kid.

The 1984 NIV would be probably fine, eighth grade reading level. And so then you need a study

Bible. There are other study Bibles. I wouldn't get the end time study

Bible for teens with purple hair and tattoos. You know, they have every kind of genre.

I like to have study Bibles that teach me what does the text say? And I think MacArthur excels in that.

And the ESV study Bible's not bad either. I guess you could get the Reformation study Bible. That would be helpful.

Reformation study Bible would be my third pick. So then what else do you get?

If you've got one of those study Bibles, you get other things in that too. You don't have to get an atlas necessarily because there's some good maps at the back.

You might wanna get yourself a concordance, but you can use a computer for that. You could use a computer for concordance.

And so once you have a computer site, you can go to the ESV site. There's a lot of notes there, a lot of things that you could get.

You could go to parallel Bible sites. I forgot what it's called, not Blue Letter Bible.

But you can get on sites like Crosswalk and Monergism and find some of these tools.

Concordances, so then if you say, well, if I have the word delight, what does God delight in? I can look up every word delight.

Jealous, is God jealous? It tells me every verse that has the word jealous in it. That's a concordance.

So get one one way or the other, either computer or regular. You wanna get a Bible dictionary. So if I have a word that's used in English, but it's used differently in Greek, I need to know what that is.

So for instance, love. In a Bible dictionary, it would say, eros is erotic love, sensual love.

Phileo is Philadelphia, brotherly love. Agape is self -sacrificial love, wanting what's best in the other person.

Storge, family love, because in 2 Timothy 3, there's a storge without family love.

And so a Bible dictionary, Bible words would help. Baker's Bible dictionary maybe is my favorite.

And I think you're off and going. You could probably get the MacArthur Commentary set. Comments about the

Bible would be something excellent. Or for about $90, you can get a computer version of the

Expositors Bible Commentary series, 12 -volume series, edited by Frank Gableine.

And that would give you a conservative, I think it's premillennial view of pretty much every verse.

So today, No Compromise Radio, studying the Bible. Why don't you set a plan to study the Bible? Why don't you start reading the

Gospel of Luke today and read three or four chapters, think about what you learned, study the things that you can't figure out.

And then if you're gonna be a dad, then the next day you read some of those chapters to your kids. Well, No Compromise Radio.

My name's Mike Abendroth at info at nocompromiseradio .com. Wretched Radio Conference is coming up. You can go on our website or Facebook to look at the new book,

Sovereignty and Supremacy of Jesus. 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 six. 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.