Cat Got Your Tongue?

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 Ebendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

And after not doing many shows for many seasons, I now have Pastor Stephen for today in real time, show numero tres.

Yes, three of 30, apparently, that we're doing today. I wonder what the record is for amount of shows done in a day.

I don't know. We should set that. Uh -huh. Well, you know what? We could just like turn on the microphones, and then we just talk like we normally do.

We probably talk about three or four shows, you know, normally, just in a day. Sometimes it just happens to be about people, though.

We couldn't do that. Right? Shepherding issues. We could just change the names. Come up with codes.

Well, yeah, we probably could. Yeah, that's probably interesting. How many years has to go by, you know, somebody leaves or dies, that you can then, you know, tell a story about somebody with a fictitious name without anybody knowing who it might be?

I don't know. On the positive side, sometimes it's fun to sit around and talk about things that people have done well.

I appreciated the men at the preaching—preach -a -thon we had about a month ago. Ten men got up and did expositions of epistles.

Steve, I know you weren't here. Steve, I know you weren't here. It was great, though. The guys did a great job. I was very proud of them, and I'm going to post them online.

Are you? Yeah. They said, please tell me if there are any that you don't want posted, and I said, post them all.

Post them all? Uh -huh. Okay. Yeah. We need a new slogan, Steve.

So let's just think about ways we can advertise our church. Can you think of ways that other people advertise their church?

You know, love is the law or something. We're all about loving God and loving our neighbor.

We're here to convict you. There you go. What about this one

I just saw in Christianity Today? Community is our love language. Oh, that is great. I love that.

Did you ever read the Love Language book? Is there five love languages? Now this is the sixth one. Six Pants, None the

Richer. Five love languages. I'd have to go with French, Italian, Spanish.

I kid you not. Did you see the news article three weeks ago? They rated accents in America, right?

Because every part of the country has their own unique kind of accent. And they rated Boston, New York number two.

I can't remember who was number one, but does the Boston accent strike you as romantic? Not at all.

You know how I love to bust on Bostonians and Central Mass people. I do it out of fun because I've been here for 22 years, probably will die here.

But it doesn't strike me as romantic. It strikes me as rough maybe, gruff, direct.

You know, maybe it's just being American, but there's nothing about American accents that I find romantic.

So in New Zealand, there's a lot of New Zealand accents. A lot of Australians live there.

That's shocking. Yeah. And a lot of South Africans live there. It's interesting to try to then determine which is

South African, New Zealand, you know, Kiwi and then Australian. That would be hard because they all sort of do.

And I did not know that it's instead of saying, I'm talking about some loop to ride a bike or something.

If you go clockwise or you go anti -clockwise, and I thought, I've never known that. It's anti -clockwise.

Yeah. We just don't talk like that. No, I know. Thankfully. They go the opposite ways on rotaries too.

Well, I guess that would make sense, wouldn't it? And when you ride a bicycle outside, I hope you get a ride again after your knee and wrists and all that stuff.

And you wanted to press brakes on your road bicycle. Do you do the back brake first or the front brake first and why?

Back brake. I know. But in New Zealand, the brakes are reversed. So your left hand is back brake.

So here I am cruising down this hill and I never slam on the brakes unless like a dog was going to come out in front of me or I was going to get in a car accident or something like that.

But a couple of times I had to take my left hand where the back brake is on the New Zealand bikes,

New Zealand. And I put my hand on the brake lever itself and my right hand,

I just gripped with my thumb around the little handlebar area.

So then I wasn't confused. To prevent yourself from locking up. Because if you lock up that, for those of you out in Rio Linda who don't know, you lock up that front brake, hello.

And hello. You're going to be flying. How about something about real relationships found here?

Would that be good? Real relationships found here. Well, yeah, if we want to be like a singles bar.

I mean, wouldn't that be, wouldn't that be great when, you know, maybe we'd change our name to instead of Bethlehem Bible Church, you know,

Bethlehem. How about Bethmore Church? Ooh, very nice. Yeah.

That would attract, that would attract them. Pack them in. So your predictions on the Southern Baptist Convention in the next five years.

Will a bunch of churches leave, do you think? The conservative ones? I think so. I mean, we'll see.

But I mean, it, you know, we've been wondering for quite a while because there are these two extremes in the

Southern Baptist denomination. How long they could coexist. How long people could sort of straddle between the two and pretend like there's no major differences.

And it's become harder and harder. And I think they've pretty much reached a breaking point. When you've got men suggesting that Bethmore should be the, you know, the leader of the

SBC and you've got... Are treating her like she is already. Yes. Yeah.

Like she's a prophetess. You know, you've got some real issues there. And you know, the question is, how long can the conservatives just sit there and nod their heads and just in typical

SBC fashion go, oh, that's so nice. Bless their hearts. Steve, and I don't know all the details regarding these, but here's my guess.

We have pensions involved. We have retirement programs involved. Seminars. To be fair, you have

Machen, who realizes Princeton is not as conservative as it used to be and nor as he wanted it to be.

So Machen leaves Princeton and he goes to Philly to found a Westminster Theological Seminary in Philly.

And he didn't have to worry about vesting, pension, retirement, because he had money, right?

From his family. I believe his mother's side of the family, the South, had money. So he had a lot of money. But some of these other guys,

I don't think, was it Voss and maybe a couple other guys, they didn't leave right away, but then they did.

So I don't know if it was Voss or somebody else, but some of the men had some, you know, you have a wife and kids and all that stuff.

I wonder how this plays into it in the Southern Baptist Convention. If you leave, what happens to the church buildings, you know, it's autonomy.

So that's fine. But I wonder if they have something, you know, personally involved. Well, it's difficult.

I mean, you know, not that we would know anything about this, but you reach a certain point in life and it just gets a little difficult to make a massive, life -changing decision like that.

I mean, let's just be honest. If you're 50, 60 years old, you know, all of a sudden the idea of splitting denominations and being maybe on the quote -unquote wrong side of that, you know, which would be the financially impoverished side, that could be difficult.

So I mean, we'll see. I mean, you know, could there be a polite, sorry for saying this word, divorce wherein, you know, the conservatives get to keep,

I don't know, say the one in Kentucky and the liberals keep, you know,

Dallas or wherever it is in Texas and in North Carolina and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Could they amicably split? I don't know. Well, since we're not

Southern Baptists. We have no, you know, no dog in the hunt. Maybe we could start naming horses for the

Kentucky Derby after Southern Baptist seminaries and we could. See if we could pick the winner.

Yeah. We could bet. I remember once I went down to Exarban, which is Nebraska spelled backwards, and that was the

Omaha racetrack for horses. And with my buddy, because his dad pretty much made a living there, you can kind of get an idea of what kind of man he was.

And a very fortunate one if you made a living there. Yeah. And he took us down.

You have to look at the horses first and I don't know if you were looking for a hunch, some kind of burning in the bosom, some type of inner light

Quaker deal, but he could kind of think about it and pick them. I think the horses would just kind of wink at him. I got this one,

Sonny. They shoot horses, don't they? All right, here we go.

Here's some news. News that you can use so you don't snooze. Right? Pastor parking may cost churches and taxes.

Yeah. Okay. Let me just read this first. I've read that. Nonprofits, including churches, are not exempt from a 21 % tax on certain employee benefits under tax reforms enacted last year.

The IRS now treats employee parking as taxable income and requires churches who spend over a thousand on the portion of their lot used for employee parking to file a form 990 -T to report it.

As I look at our parking lot, I'm like, what? I can only imagine that that applies to like big city churches or something where I don't even know.

That just sounds odd. I mean, like the idea that we should pay for parking? I'm like, why? You know,

I mean, we just have a big old empty lot. Let's think about it too. Okay. So, so 90 % of the church week, it doesn't matter anyway, because who's there, right?

The church isn't full, so the pastors can park wherever they want. And so then for one day a week, you want special parking up by the church because you don't want to walk across the lot?

That's weird. Yeah, we don't even have it. Yeah. I mean, I can get it if you're a big church. So I don't want

John MacArthur parking over there, five lots down to walk across. He's got the bad knee, et cetera.

He can take the shuttle bus. He can. He can. Or doesn't the

RTD have a bus that rolls by there and he can just kind of pay a buck and ride the bus, catch an

Uber. Oh man. Anything else going on here with conferences?

Are you going to go to the Gather Practice Witness Colossal Forum Annual Conference?

All right. Here's this is a good one. Yeah. Russ Moore. Okay. Caring Well, the National Conference for the

ERLC, that's Southern Baptist, 2019, Dallas, Texas. And these are the speakers.

Okay. I only know four of the speakers. Russell Moore, Beth Moore, Rachel, Den Hollander, Gary Haugen, and Jackie Hill Perry.

Any of those you would go to? Well, you know, Den Hollander has a pretty good, you know, pretty good story.

So I might want to listen to that. You know, I presume she's not going to be exegeting scripture.

Yeah. Well, she's the only one there that I would think, huh, the other people I'm thinking, and I don't know the

Gary guy, the other ones, in my opinion, kind of have certain agendas that aren't really my agendas, especially if it's

CE. I mean, what if there's a conference on the five points of Calvinism? You know, I think Russell Moore could probably say, this is what

T is and depravity, and he would understand that. But since it's on caring well, and it talks about the abuse crisis, we want to make sure we care for those people.

I just, this just seems like it's the latest deal that they're just trying to do. I think defining that word,

I just read, I can't really talk about it, but I just read a blog post that has been publishing about abuse.

And I think defining that word is going to be like the next big issue in the church because it is so overused right now.

Abuse means anything, you know, from you took my parking space to, you know, tax my parking space.

Yeah, to you, you know, physically beat me. So you know, I mean, if abuse means everything, then it means nothing.

And I think the problem is it's been used as a gigantic blanket word to indict, you know, to really make people sound like first class scoundrels.

You know, you abused me and you, well, in some cases that's true, but we need to be more explicit in defining that word and what it means and not let people just use it as, you know, like some kind of atomic bomb.

Hmm. Okay. Yeah. That's interesting. I sometimes feel abused by people in the congregation and stuff.

I ask your forgiveness for that. Visitors sometimes abuse me.

Well, let's not even talk about this particular brand of abuse.

And of course, sexual abuse is heinous and sinful and awful. I'm even thinking about when spouses might say, my spouse abuses me.

Now a generation ago, it was okay. We wouldn't even ask the question. We would say, we better call the police.

Yes. Right. But now it's morphed into this, I'm emotionally abused, psychologically abused, verbally abused.

And I would say, I hate to say this. I hate to admit it. I hate this about myself, but every time

I speak an untoward word to my wife, I think it's abuse.

Right? I've never touched her, abused her, you know, hit her, that kind of thing in an angry, mean way.

But I've said things that I should not have said. So what's she going to say? I feel abused? Well, that's what

I mean. I mean, we have to define what the sin is rather than letting people get away with, you know, I was abused by, well, what does that mean?

You know, are you saying that your husband spoke unedifyingly toward you? Well, you know, let's get into, you know,

Ephesians 4 .29, let's get into, let's get into exactly what's going on so that we can specifically address it.

Because if you use the word abuse, it just conjures up all kinds of things that may or may not be true.

Agreed. Well, my name is Mike Abenroth. This is No Compromise Radio. I'm here with my favorite Tuesday host,

Pastor Steve Cooley. Sunday School is wrapping up for you. You're going through the 1689 London Baptist Confession.

So far you... I did finish it. Oh, you did? Yeah. Okay. So you finished it? And you want to know how many weeks it was?

Guess how many weeks? Eighty -nine. That would have been nice. I should have shot for that.

Seventy. Seventy. Seventy. Do you know it took me 70 weeks to preach through Daniel? I was at about 68 weeks.

I just got a fist bump. And I thought, I'm stretching it out for two more weeks so I can preach for 70. That was pretty good.

I really wasn't paying any attention and all of a sudden, you know, I'm wrapping it up and I go, 70 weeks? That's not bad, bro.

And let's see, minor differences. You're not a Sabbatarian and you think 1689 is, right?

Yeah. Okay. Any other differences? Well, I mean, I don't think dispensational premillennialism really fits into the 1689.

So I think that's a little bit of an issue there too. Okay. So if you were an elder and you were premill, that is to say pre -trib premill, not historic premill, two peoples of God, it'd be hard to subscribe to the 1689.

Wholeheartedly. Yes. Okay. I think, do we not say something on our statement, on our website?

We generally hold, loosely hold, these things are - Loosely. That's not what

I meant. Más o menos. We, there's room for some minor disagreement in essence or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. We have some kind of little caveat there. Yeah. Okay. I mean, for the most part and especially, what is the heart of any confession?

Is it eschatology? No. It's the gospel. It's the things to do with Christ. So we have no reservations whatsoever on that, the gospel.

Yeah. Okay. Good. Steve, on the Christianity Today, I just was skipping a few things and it's got a

Christian approach to wildlife conservation. And then

I opened it up and it's got like the little highlighted quote, and here's a highlighted quote. I have not read the thing, but it said, but I'd read the quote,

I pray over every animal I kill. I thank God for each and every one. End quote. Wait a minute.

Is that that guy from Michigan? Ted Nugent. Ted Nugent. State of shock.

No. No. And here's what it says underneath it. And this is why I find it so odd. Lutheran pastor and poacher. No. Poacher.

Uh -huh. Come on. So if I said life coacher, if I said Lutheran pastor and mentor, Lutheran pastor and, uh...

Burglar. Burglar. Meister burger, burger meister. Lutheran pastor and hit man.

I mean, there are just some things that, you know, poacher, poaching is a crime. I'm kidding.

Poacher. Here it says, Deuce, a 30 -something

Lutheran pastor used a stick in the sand to tally the income he generated per month from poaching. He paused after drawing an equal sign, quote,

I preach in church every week, except when I'm hunting, of course. End quote.

Church, I ask, doesn't your denomination see poaching as a sin? Now, I'm going off script here just for a second.

I think it's in one of those vice lists, maybe Revelation 20, Galatians chapter 5, you know, those 1

Corinthians 6, maybe vice lists. Oh no, he said, God gives us every animal.

I stared at him and he sensed my unease at his benediction of my illegal activity. I'll have no king but King Jesus.

I know. So while I don't see poaching on vice lists in the scripture, I do see that we're supposed to submit to the government and therefore

I think illegal killing of animals would be wrong. Man, once again, hollow notes just running through my head.

What if the person was starving, the government said, you can't have any food, we take away your corn and a zebra ran across your path?

Okay. I mean, you know, if you're going to, it's a matter of life or death.

Okay. All right. So we understand that part. But here, he's a Lutheran pastor poacher. Like I said, you know, what if you were starving and the only way you can get any money was by stealing it?

Oh, okay. Well, that's fine. You know, Lutheran pastor and burglar. I expect you to say, you know,

Deuce, not his real name. I doubt it is.

We've masked his identity to protect him from prosecution because we're real journalists.

I know. So do you think we should keep getting to Christianity today? I mean, is it just like a launching point for some of our little talks?

Well, I think it is interesting. And, you know, sometimes there are interesting things that it brings up, you know, like whether it's persecution around the world or, you know, in China and some of the surveys and stuff.

Do I, do I think, you know, do I wish I'd kept every issue that I ever received? Nope. Let me just, nope.

Well, what about, you could send in for probably some of the microfiche copies and you could just keep those forever.

Valuable. Remember microfiche? Yeah. And I'd have to study something. You try to find an old article from the newspaper.

I'd have to go to the library and, you know, go through the microfiche. Is that what it's called?

Microfiche? Microfiche. Okay. Any of these new books you've read? The Night Tiger, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls.

It doesn't sound like it's on my reading list. No. How about The Celtic Way of Prayer? The Recovery of Kyrie Irving's Religious Imagination.

Oh, I misread that. Sorry. I was going to say that it's not really the title because we all know he's going to be with the

Nets next year. So they did a great thing today on the radio and they talked to some of the Boston Bruins after they lost game seven of the

Stanley Cup and some of them were crying. They were devastated. And then they played the little clip from Kyrie Irving when he lost second round playoffs, whatever, 5 -1.

He's like, no reason to be distressed about this. It's all good. Ain't no big thing.

It's all good. In the grand scheme of things, I'm going to hook my wagon to, hitch my wagon to -

I know. So we don't do much sports on this show. What's going to happen now with KD and stuff and all these people?

Any predictions that we can get you down for? Yeah, I think KD is going to opt in and get his 31 million and probably extend with the

Warriors. Okay. But he wasn't going to do that until he got injured. No, I agree. Okay. And then who's going to get the dude from the

Pelicans? Anthony Davis. I think the Lakers are going to overpay for him. Okay.

So then it'll be LeBron and Anthony Davis. Will they get anybody else to make a run at it? I don't think so.

And where's Kyrie going? I think he's just going to go for the money and head to New York or New Jersey, one or the other.

I mean, he could go to LA, but I think he'd have to take a pay cut. Yeah. All right. And then the final NBA note, who's going to pick up that free agent,

NT Wright? I think he's going to wind up going to the Houston Rockets so they can blast him to outer space.

Either that or he'll go to the Olivet Nazarene University for a conference this September 5th through 7th.

Yeah. Leadership? He's the last guy I would want leadership advice from. Well, you know, typically

I don't like his theology, but when theology and practice intersect, then sometimes he's insightful.

Not. I double dog dare any of our listeners to call the office of church relations at Olivet 815 -928 -5651 and ask them if they've got any new perspectives on NT Wright's views of justification.

Terrible. Just terrible. I mean, why not have the Pope come in? Maybe he can do a

Biolagos thing. I think he's into Biologos, isn't he or wasn't he? Is he? Yeah.

That wouldn't surprise me either. Yeah. And then lastly, not but not leastly, last page, Fall 2019,

Tony Evans Bible Commentary and Tony Evans Study Bible, one volume,

Fall 2019, Discover God's Word Like Never Before.

New insights never discovered before. I know. Maybe like transdispensationalism. That'll be great.

That's what he teaches. It has nothing to do with dispensationalism. It has to do with people getting saved who haven't heard of Jesus. Which, you know, hey, if I wanted that,

I would have stayed in the Warren Church. I knew today's shows were going to be spicy, but as my daughter would say when she was four and she had something spicy, she would say, that's picey, that's very picey.

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.