God and His Grace

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry, it's Mike Abendroff. It is in the middle of summer and I'm back here for a doctor's appointment, so I thought I would do a couple radio shows. Radio. You can email me Mike at NoCompromiseRadio .com.

Special thanks to Justin and John at Theocast. They had me on. Oh, I probably recorded it five weeks ago, but it just played. Glad to do that. Where else have I been? Thanks to Pat and Mike. I packed them.

That was fun. Anyway, it's been a good summer. My grandson Amos is probably 20 months old, so I've got to see Amos quite a bit. That was really, I was gonna say cool, but wonderful. And my newest grandson, Luke and Hannah's son, is named Eleazar Knox Luke Abendroth.

And he's not really a handful because he's only...the name's a handful, but he's not a handful because he was about seven pounds when he was born. Doesn't have those chubby legs yet, but we're excited.

And if you study the word Eleazar, I think you're gonna find out that it means God is help. God is our help. That's a good name. You can see Eleazar in Genesis, the servant of Abraham, and you can see Eleazar as a priest's name with Joshua.

Or after Luke and Hannah's passage in 2 Samuel 23, one of Davy...Davy's...Davy...Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. I can sing you the Davy Crockett song, or I can sing you the Daniel Boone song.

He was a man, yes, a big man. The other day I listened to the 1950s song about Tarzan, and when he swims across a river, alligators flee. There's never been another since the world began like Tarzan, the jungle man.

Here comes Tarzan, yaw, yaw. You didn't tune in for that today, now, did you? Anyway, Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio. My daughter, Haley, is expecting her second little daughter named Clara. They already know the gender, and they know the name, and so I'm a blessed man.

I just have four children, two children-in-law, and three grandchildren in California. The time, the clock is ticking, but the ministry is here. What am I going to do? Move them all out here? I have no idea.

Defining Grace as Demerited Favor

Today I'd like to talk to you about Grace. Well, I have a daughter named Grace. I'm not talking about her. There's an actress, Queen of Monaco. Her name's Grace, Grace Kelly. Could she be the most elegant movie star ever?

Maybe. Grace, you say before dinner or before lunch? Well, you do, but that's not what we're talking about. What about my father? When we would bump into something, he would say, Grace. He'd do a lot of things.

Many times I'm thankful to the Lord for my father, or I usually am, and he provided for us and protected us, but he really wasn't hands-on, he really wasn't, I don't know, some of the more gentle stuff.

And sometimes, and this is true for everyone, my kids as well, just whatever dad does, his deal is, just do the opposite and you'll be in good shape. But I'd like to talk today about God's grace, obviously.

Sometimes we define grace with the acronym God's Riches. What is it? I've already forgotten. My mind's cloudy today. God's Riches at Christ's Expense. Okay, there it is. B-I-B-L-E, Basic Information Before Leaving Earth.

Jesus Others Joy. Jesus Other You for Joy. This is bad. This is so bad. I do too, I know. Saw the other day that the Spock sign, Live Long and Prosper, that's really a satanic thing. I also saw a thing the other day that Monster is really satanic things.

The drink, I don't know. Australia banned those kind of drinks, you know, ten times more caffeine than a cup of coffee. I probably shouldn't drink those, but once in a while I do. Even if I said gracious, sometimes you might think kind, gentle, courteous, but we're not talking about that today.

We're not even saying that grace is unmerited favor, although it is. I think the best short definition is demerited favor. And of course, it comes from a triune God, specifically through the person that's sent by the Father and that is, can I say, assisted by the Holy Spirit?

The God-man, grace incarnate, if you will, as a second chapter of Titus talks about. That's how I rescued, by the way. I was going to say Titus too, but I said second chapter because I first thought it was Timothy, so if you ever do that, say second chapter, or you say second, and then instead of saying Timothy, you say second chapter of Titus, and then you rescue it.

See how we do these things? I'm a professional at this, I want you to know. Coming up is our 4 ,000th show, August 15th. Maybe this will play after that, 4 ,000 shows. I'd like to have some theological analysis of it.

Maybe AI could do a theological analysis to see if it's biblically accurate. Well, I also had lunch with Nick and Desiree, some NoCo listeners, and they live in California, and that was fun to talk to them.

By the way, I wish they all, you all, all the listeners of No Compromise Radio were as theologically adept and encouraging as Nick and Desiree, although they didn't buy me lunch. They just bought their own.

They didn't even offer. Since we have such a hard time understanding grace, the Lord Jesus, in a parable, helps us out. So, Matthew chapter 19, we have the rich young ruler passage. And of course, you know about that a lot because we talk about rich young ruler and Jesus, and did Jesus give him the law or the gospel?

And of course, he gave him the law to show that rich young man his needs so that he might turn to a sad—and so the context is eternal life. And Peter, if you remember, is listening to this, is watching this, and he says something to the Lord.

The Rich Young Ruler and Salvation by Grace

See, we have left everything—that's Matthew chapter 19, verse 27—and followed you, what then will we have? Right? He, Peter, understands that the rich young ruler, he didn't sell everything, the rich young ruler didn't.

He didn't give everything to the poor. He didn't have treasure in heaven. He didn't follow Jesus. He didn't come to Jesus. But Peter said, we have. And so, what do we have? What will happen with us? Jesus said to them, truly I say to you, in the new world, or the regeneration, the renewal, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for my namesake will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.

Great passage, which then leads into chapter 20, verse 1, 4, for the kingdom of God. So, see, these go together. Jesus answers them, and I don't know what his tone is. I mean, I haven't watched The Chosen yet.

I know, I know. I don't recommend it. Okay, watch it for about one minute, and you'll realize how dumb it is, and then you'll be done with that. A bad book is a good thief, they say, and similar in The Chosen, for even more reasons than just wasting your time.

Jesus is going to help Peter, the men following Jesus, and us, because he says, and everyone who has left houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, or children. So all those, through the centuries, through the decades, through thousands of years, including now in 2024, we don't follow Jesus in order to get saved.

We don't leave houses and leave brothers and sisters or fathers and mothers to get saved. We get saved through a non-meritorious instrument, faith, and faith alone. And of course, that faith won't be alone, and all of a sudden, when we believe, lots of other things begin to happen, if I want to put it loosely.

And so, we begin to follow, we begin to submit, we surrender, we deny, we leave father, mother, children, sister, etc. And Jesus said, if you do that, you're going to get a hundredfold return. I just was reading, I think it was Jerry Bridges, Transforming Grace.

A hundredfold return, percentage-wise, is 10 ,000%. And of course, if you're in the stock market and you want to double your investment, that's 100%. How about 10 ,000? So when it comes to God, there's a lot that He gives, because God is a generous, good, gracious God.

And then He says, for many who are first will be last, and the last first. And we have this parable that comes up then in Matthew chapter 20, and after the parable it says the exact same thing, except reversed, in chapter 20, verse 16.

So the last will be first, and the first last. How does that happen, by the way? If there's a race, swim meet. I mean, the Olympics are happening now. I didn't want to watch the Olympics anyway, and then when I saw some of the blasphemous stuff they had for the intro, for the opening, I just thought, I mean, this isn't just decadent.

Not that I'm okay with decadent, but decadent's one thing. Sleazy's one thing. Cabaret is one thing. Naked ladies up there is one thing. I wouldn't want any of those things to happen, obviously. But then all of a sudden, what they did, I mean, that just takes it to a different level, different plane, different—I mean, it's just total mocking.

I wonder what would happen if they would have done that to Muhammad and the Muslim religion. I would double dog dare 2024 Olympics in Paris, or 2026 Winter Games, wherever they are, or 2028 Games. I mean, to me, they're irrelevant.

Now, with all this stuff, I mean, I don't really care to go back to Paris last time I was there. It's just not the same. All that to say, it's completely crazy. So, back to the Bible here in Matthew chapter 20, talking about grace on no-compromise radio ministry.

If there's a race, how does everybody fit if their last is first and first last? Now, we used to take verses like this, and we would use them with the children, for instance, so they would defer to one another, who gets the best seed, who gets the best slice of pie, who gets the first ice cream.

Well, Luke never got that, except on his birthday, because he needed to defer to his daughters—he has a son now—his sisters and his mother. But, oh, last is first. Like, if you go first, you really last.

Now, we can look at verses in the Bible, let's say Philippians 2, and discuss preference issues and letting other people go first. I think that's a good principle, but as Greg Beal has in his book entitled something like, Write Doctrines from Wrong Texts, this passage here, first last, last first, and flipped around, last first, first last, how does that happen?

And the answer is a tie. That's the only way this can happen. It's a tie. It's a dead heat. The photo finish shows it's a tie. I watched the 30-minute review of the Tour de France this year, 2024, and sometimes they'd have the photo finishes with the cameras and everything else, and there was never a dead heat.

But this is a dead heat. And so, in the context of salvation, in the context of the rich young ruler not wanting to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and then follow Him, in that context, Peter asks a question, well, we did, we are, what about salvation for us?

What's for us? And Jesus talks about what wonderful things they will receive, and then He gives the parable. It's going to be a parable of a generous Master, a generous Master. It says, labors in the vineyard, in my ESV study Bible, the heading, but it's about the Master, because the Master is God, and how generous is God?

Union with Christ and the Equal Gift of Salvation

And the summary to this is, I'll tell it to you ahead of time and then we'll work backward, if you are a believer in Christ and you get saved when you're 12 years old, or if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and you're 85, if your background is Jew or Gentile, because there's some of that flavor here, Jew or Gentile, you get Jesus, right?

When you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you're saved, and you're trusting in the risen Savior, the one who died for all your sins, was raised from the dead to confirm it, the one who's praying for you now, the one that won't hold any of your sins against you because they've been paid in full, te telestai, it is finished, that Savior who sought you and bought you with his redeeming love is yours.

You are his and he is yours. And you are, among other things, theologically, you are united to Jesus. You are in Christ. You are the bride of Christ. You have Christ's righteousness. You have Christ's perfect obedience credited to your account.

You have no more sin to pay for judicially. There might be discipline, of course. We always have to add that in for those that want to call us antinomian. Of course we want to obey the law, and if we disobey God's law as Christians, just like a father on earth would chasten, correct, discipline.

I just don't use the word punish because we'll, most of the time, we're going to see punish in the Scriptures as the eternal punishment. Not every time, but most of the time, so I'll just say that most of the time.

You get Jesus is my point. He gets you. United. Bride. Bridegroom. You get the picture. So, if you get Jesus when you're the thief on the cross, the one that believes, or you get Jesus who you believed in Him at the beginning of His ministry, Peter, I mean, I guess you could argue when Peter got saved.

If you want to argue about Samson, when did he become a believer? Some think, you know, because he was such a rascal that he didn't get saved till the very end. We know he is saved. But you get Jesus, and so everybody who's a believer gets Jesus.

If you believed a thousand years ago, not you because you couldn't be listened, but if a person did, or they believe now, or if the Lord doesn't come back in a thousand years from now, if you get saved at 15 years old, or 115, if you can live that long these days, you get the same Jesus.

So, it's a tie. You get everything because it's all of grace. Everything you get is generous, gracious, above and beyond, something that you could never, ever imagine. It is the grace of God. That's what you're going to get.

And so, that's the wonderful part. You get grace, and so everybody gets Jesus. Everybody's united to Jesus. Everyone's in Jesus. And so, whether you get saved early or late, you get Jesus. That's the point.

And so, then Jesus begins to tell the story, and He's trying to focus on how generous and how sovereign the gracious Master is. Grace is generous, and grace is sovereign. I think it was in Knowing God by J .I. Packer, and he said—I just listened to Pat Abenroth talk about J .I. Packer.

You know, old Packer, new Packer, the good stuff for Packer, the bad stuff for Packer. This was a good book, the Knowing God book. Grace sometimes isn't amazing to us. It's boring. And that happens for lots of reasons.

God's Holiness, Human Sin, and Amazing Grace

Maybe one, we don't think of God's holiness rightly. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. Sometimes we don't think about our sin rightly. You know, they go together. Horatius Bonar said, we've got two problems, a low view of God and a high view of ourselves.

That pretty much summarizes everything. The unbeliever thinks that, so he doesn't think, or she doesn't think they need a Savior. But for us, we realize, okay, if God is that holy and we're that sinful, grace is going to be not boring, it's going to be amazing.

And so Jesus uses this parable. A wonderful, masterful teacher is Jesus. And there's a punchline to the parable, and of course, you know, parables, generally speaking, not always, we learned on No Compromise a while ago, the word parable is just to set alongside a word.

And sometimes parables are earthly stories with heavenly meanings. Sometimes they're just illustrations and analogies, like at the end of Luke chapter 5. Here it's more kind of a regular parable, and we don't want to make it walk on the proverbial all fours.

The Parable of the Generous Master

Yet, I'll just read it and you can get the tension without me having to read a verse and talk about it. For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.

I said I wasn't going to make comments, but I guess I will. We don't know why. It doesn't matter. It's harvest time. They've got to get rid of the insects. They have to water the stuff. They have to prune them.

It doesn't matter. And agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, that's the normal pay, he sent them into his vineyard, his vineyard. And going out about the third hour, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace.

So he goes out at 6 a .m., hires some people. Third hour, you start with six and add three. Now it's 9 a .m. There's some people standing around. They haven't gotten hired, and they need work. They're living day to day, providing for their family.

He said to them, the nine o 'clock people, you go in the vineyard too, and whatever is right, I will give you. So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour, so you start at six, add six. Now that's noon.

And the ninth hour, start at six and add nine. Now we're at three. He did the same. So he's hired people at 6 a .m., 9 a .m., noon, and 3 p .m. About the eleventh hour, so 6 a .m. at 11 hours, so it's 5 p .m.

Day's almost over. You work from six to six. About the eleventh hour, he went out and found others standing. I mean, they still have to pay their bills. They still need to work. Nobody's hired them. You go to Home Depot or Lowe's, especially in bigger cities like Los Angeles, and you see people hanging around at 6 a .m., and they want to get hired for the day.

And some of them are still around at noon, and you can hire day laborers, and they'll come and do yard work or whatever you need done. And so there's still some at 5 o 'clock, 5 p .m. They didn't get hired all day.

And he, the master of the house, said to them, why do you stand here idle all day? They said to him, because no one has hired us. He said to them, go into the vineyard too. And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, call the laborers and pay them wages.

Okay, so far, no big deal, not that great of a story. I mean, it's fine, but it happens every day. But now the master storyteller, the master preacher, the master parable author turns everything. Pay them their wages beginning with the last up to the first.

Now, if they started with the first, they're going to get a denarius. Okay, no big deal. That's what they signed up for. And when those who hired about the eleventh hour came, and again, still not quite a slamming parable with truth that shocks, and beginning with the last up to the first, when he hired about the eleventh hour came, when those came, each of them received a one twelfth of the denarius, one hour's wage.

No, they got a full day's wage. And when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but they also received a denarius. See what Jesus is doing here? So the landowner says, you work for me for twelve hours, I'll give you a full day's pay.

Okay, fine, no problem. Everybody else came along, they probably thought they're going to get a percentage. You work for four hours, you get paid for four, you work for three, you get paid for three, etc.

Now the last guys, they work an hour and they get a full one. That's one hour, not twelve, for the denarius. So they're thinking, if they were hired first, I'm getting paid twelve denarii. That's what I'm getting.

You know, that's what they're thinking. Oh, what is happening here? And on receiving it, that's what they signed up for. They grumbled at the master of the house, saying, these last worked only one hour, and you made them equal to us, who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.

But he replied to one of them, friend, I'm doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I chose to give to the last worker, as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I chose with the one, or with what belongs to me?

Or do you begrudge my generosity, so the last will be first and the first last? Wow! Can you imagine being there? I mean, let's call Johnny Cochran, let's call a union labor steward, let's call somebody.

I mean, this is not fair. And it leads us into a discussion about grace, does it not? A generous God who's sovereign, who graces, and if He gives you salvation, you get all of salvation. You don't get a part of it, you don't get one hour of it, you get it all, because you get Jesus, because He has you.

And God is generous. And if God wants to be generous, and people that get saved last, they still get everything of the person that gets saved first, like Gentiles, in terms of with Jews, then that's God's prerogative, is it not?

You see what's happening there? Now I ask you the question as we land the plane on No Compromise Radio, talking about grace. Did you earn grace? Did you deserve grace? Do you merit grace? Of course we know the answers to this, but we live in a works world, a merit world.

Grace Alone and the Fullness of Christ's Salvation

The law is written on our heart, grace isn't, and we need to be reminded again that we stand before God by His grace and His grace alone. And if you got saved later in life, like me, 29, or earlier in life, like some of you at 14, some even later in the 50s, it's all the grace of God, and we all get Jesus, and God's sovereign, and He's generous to give salvation to all because all have received the perfect work of Christ Jesus, credited to their account.

All have received not what they deserve, justice and sins punished, but grace, demerited favor, much more than unmerited favor. We have the grace of God incarnate, the Lord Jesus, who is gracing us. And so when it comes to God's grace, we ought to think it's sovereign.

Why didn't it seek out other people? We don't know. It sought out us, though, so we ought to be thankful. When it comes to grace, is it not generous? If everything else in your life is going to pot, as they say, but you have Jesus and He has you, isn't that a cause for rejoicing?

The first is last and the last first. You all get Jesus. Now, we can talk about rewards, and we can talk about Johnson's new book, we can do a lot of that stuff, but I'm not going to do that right now.

In the context of salvation, the rich young ruler, Peter says, we followed you, what do we get? You get it all. You get the kingdom, you get the Master, you get His Son, you get forgiveness, you get righteousness imputed, you get eternal life, you get glorification, you get it all.

And you listeners, you get it too. The same Jesus Peter got, you get. And so, my name is Mike Abrams. This is No Compromise Radio Ministry. I wanted to talk a little bit about grace today because it's not boring.

It's amazing. And the more you think about grace, the more thankful you should be, and I should be. No Compromise Radio Ministry.