The Heart of Christ - Part 2

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and sitting next to me again in the studio Sinclair Ferguson himself. Sinclair, welcome to the show! That reminds me, Austin Hobbs is here, not Sinclair Ferguson.

Pat Abendroth, my brother, he had some contest or something, I don't know if it was Pactum or Omaha Bible Church related stuff, and he was going to give, I think, a Machen book away, and it was going to be signed by Jay Gresham.

Hmm. And so that was pretty cool. But it was signed by Pat's son,.

Jonathan Gresham. Abendroth. Oh, wow. What a prank.

I know. So you can write us info at nocompromiseradio .com. We're on Spotify, iTunes, etc. What are we supposed to say? Give us a rating so people can find us. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, No Compromise Radio.

We have Wednesday shows, video and audio, so if you like to see things on YouTube, you can pull that up. We have been talking, Austin and I, about Jesus and his heart, gentle and lowly are humble in heart, right from Matthew chapter 11, verse 28 through 30.

And Austin started his home group with the Gentle and Lowly book by Dane Ortlund. There's a lot of Ortlunds, by the way.

There's a ton. The Ortlund family dynasty.

I know, and we're trying to compete the Abendroths with Luke and Pat and Mike. We're trying to make inroads, but it will never succeed. I think it was my wife that said, honey, you never have to worry about having a megachurch.

Because, I don't even know, I don't even remember the reason she gave, but I'll give my own reason, because I'm too ornery. We talked to somebody the other day, and they were telling us about their church growth and how it's exploding in growth, and this person told Austin and I that the pastor—I said, well, how do you explain the growth of the church?

And this person said, well, maybe, you know, the pastor gives these really good illustrations, and he has like a object lesson that he does to start the sermon. And so I pulled up the church and clicked on the latest sermon, and he's got some big, huge, fat rope that's 20 feet long up there, and that's how he starts the sermon, with this big rope.

Preaching Without Props and Trusting the Ordinary Means

I'm thinking, I guess I could get church growth that way, but that's not the church growth I want. If you have to have—I mean, let's talk about this for a second before we get in the book. If you have to have some kind of prop to show from the pulpit, what does that tell me about you as a preacher?

What does it tell you, Austin? If I started every sermon with a prop—here's a cup of water, here's an ice cube, here's a rope, here's some leaves—what does that tell you about me?

Well, you know, I think sometimes people go overboard with the props, and so they kind of— they may perhaps, like, infantilize their congregation as if they just can't understand what their words are.

And part of being a pastor is that you have to use your words wisely, you know, precisely. You have to know what you're talking about. Your words ought to illustrate who Jesus is and what God's Word is.

So, you know, your words have to do some work.

Can we not describe whatever object that we're thinking about to the congregation, and then they can get a mental picture of it? Can't we just describe things? No, we can. Yeah, we can, for sure.

Plus, we use illustrations with our words, so that's absolutely important.

And then the other thing I think about, besides, this guy's cheesy, and he's into church growth, and he doesn't believe that the Bible will do the work, and I think of all kinds of things. But I also think to myself, what do you do next week?

So imagine, you have to prepare your message, and then you think, now I need some corny illustration. And by the way, I'm not against illustrations or object lessons. I'm just against them from the pulpit, preaching, Lord's Day, ordinary means.

If you want to use them for a youth group, if you want to use it for a Sunday school, a WAN, or something like that, I don't, why do I care? I, of course, I am a hypocrite, and I admitted to Austin yesterday, I did one time that I can remember use an illustration from the pulpit on a Sunday, but my caveat was it was a Sunday night.

And I was preaching about the trumpets sounding and the walls falling down in Jericho from Joshua, and I have a shofar from Israel, and I used to play the trumpet, and so I can purse my lips a certain way, and so I blew the shofar on a Sunday night for the sake of the kids.

But that's it. Oh, but they loved that. They loved it. But you know what? I didn't get any church growth out of it. So today, part two, Gentle and Lowly in Heart, Ortland's book. Tell me your favorite thing about the book.

The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers

Well, you know, I think the favorite thing about the, my favorite thing about the book is that, you know, it really resets you. I think over the course of our Christian lives, you know, we kind of have that honeymoon phase with Jesus when you first become a believer, on fire for the Lord, believing in his grace, but then you really experience what it means to be at the same time just and sinner.

Over the course of your life, you struggle with sin, many besetting sin, you struggle to get over, and you just have to work, you think you have to work harder and harder and harder, and and maybe you tend to impute the toil of your job, the toil of your life, the the heavy ladenness of just this world upon you, upon who Jesus is.

Maybe he's just like the world. Maybe he's just like other people I know, and how could he accept a sinner like me? And I think over time our faith, I mean, really our souls can can be wearied. And so I think this book really goes back to the heart of Christ, like who is he truly?

Like who is he in your worst moments? Who is he always, and what does God's word say about the heart of Christ for sinners and for sufferers? So I think Dana Ortlund does a wonderful job of depicting just all the very facets of the diamond of the heart of Christ for you, that he is who he says he is in his word, and so he covers different aspects of that, what it means for Christ to be the Savior for you, how he feels about you, how he loves, how he's compassionate, all the things in which he cares for you as a sinner and a sufferer.

As you know, when Warfield wrote about the emotional life of Christ, he said out of all the emotions Jesus would have, and of course when you talked about passibility, impassibility last show, how God doesn't change, we're thinking about the triune God, how do I want to say it, without using Latin words, we're not talking about Jesus, because Jesus, the human man, had passions, right?

He had emotions of anger and joy, etc. So you weren't talking about the incarnate Christ, but the incarnate Christ having the number one attribute, sorry, yeah, the number one emotion would be of compassion and kindness and mercy, and we see that in many different ways.

And so I resonate with what you're saying. Tell our listeners a little bit about the passage when it says he's gentle and lowly in heart. So many times we think of heart as emotions only. What does the Bible mean, Old Testament slash New Testament, when it says heart?

The Biblical Meaning of the Heart

Yeah, so the heart really refers, it's like the command center of your being. It's the driving force of who you are, that central animating principle behind what you do and who you are. So when Jesus is telling us what he is in his heart, he's telling us who he is most deeply.

And what he is most deeply is gentle and lowly in heart. That's what drives him. That's what gets him out of the bed in the morning. If you just want to describe it in a couple words, you can say Jesus is gentle and lowly.

So oftentimes we hear the word heart and we think of mind and heart as completely different, and we'll say things like this. I have a lot of head knowledge, but not heart knowledge. Or we'll say, you know, I need to learn something in my head, and before it comes out of my mouth, it needs to go down into my heart and then out of my mouth kind of thing.

And I get that. I get head knowledge, heart knowledge type of thing. But heart, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, as Austin just said, this mission control center—and it's not excluding emotions, right?

There are emotions there, but we just don't want to have this kind of false bifurcation of love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And even that statement, it's not, well, the mind is different than the heart, and then what about the soul?

What about the strength? It's just stacking up words, as the Hebrews would, with love God with everything that you have. We're not talking about, well, is there a spirit and is there a soul? In 1 Thessalonians, Paul does the same thing and adds up the words.

Anyway, when we think about this is his heart—Austin, you are dead on, right on target—this is telling of us about who Jesus is. All right. Let's talk a little bit more about Dane's book, A Gentle and Lowly in Heart.

Do you think there's going to be any pushback at the home group about this? Hey, we're going too soft. This is going to lead to, I don't know, taking advantage of Jesus's gentle heart. Do you think anybody's going to push back?

Who knows? We'll see. I know people, generally speaking, will do pushback about that. I think we talked about that in a previous episode about how we don't want to overemphasize His grace. We don't want to overemphasize His heart.

Grace, Judgment, and the Patient Savior

But really, grace, properly defined, it can't be overemphasized. If you're defining it rightly, grace can't be. That's why Jesus has come into the world. He did not come into the world to condemn the world, as John 3, 17 says, but to save the world, that it might be saved through Him.

So we want to follow Scripture's priorities. When we talk about Jesus, if we're talking, you know, even 50 percent, 50 -50 about His wrath and grace, then I think we're not really following Scripture's own priorities.

So yes, we can't talk. Jesus is the judge. God has appointed Him to be the judge of all the earth. But He is going to be patient and long-suffering right now. He doesn't wish any of that. Any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

So He will come again, the judge and the living and the dead, but not yet. I think this is an era of time of, this is the time of salvation. This is the day of salvation. So we want to just focus in on that.

And even for those people who have those objections, you know, if they, so if they think that Jesus is austere and demanding at heart, and that's just who He essentially is, I mean, that's going to hurt their Christian life.

So they're going to fail and they're going to have a moralistic view of Jesus. He's just like this coach, this trainer. So I guess we want to be concerned for them, too, that, well, when you fail, when you suffer, Jesus is gentle and lowly at heart to you.

I don't think I'm completely right on this, but my kind of gut reaction to when people say, you're focused too much on grace, you're focused too much on Jesus's heart, as you quote from the book, the Thomas Goodwin quote, Jesus is love covered in flesh.

I think, I don't know, I just, the people that do that, I think they're the ones that need it the most. Right, right. Remember, No Compromise Radio is just a subset of the ministry here, and so if you look at the pulpit ministry, are we not preaching the Bible verse by verse, and when it talks about judgment and wrath and sin and rebellion and, you know, attacks against God's holiness, do we not preach those with the same enthusiasm and vigor as we do the others?

And so I think that's one of the great things about sequential Bible teaching, verse by verse, is you get everything, right? You understand all the different aspects that God wants us to understand, because He gave us 66 books that we're supposed to learn.

Austin Hobbs, Mike Abenroth today on No Compromise Radio. Austin, we have Jesus, He's gentle and lowly, and we can come to Him even as Christians who sin, but last time I checked, Jesus, His humanity's far away.

So how can He be so helpful if He's.

So distant? Well, really, the doctrine behind that is the doctrine of union with Christ. So the good news of the gospel, because Jesus has been raised again from the dead, He's ascended into heaven, He is therefore sent.

Union with Christ, the Incarnation, and the Ascended Jesus

He has poured out His Spirit upon those who believe. That's the glory of the Incarnate, the glory of the ascension is the descension of the Spirit. Jesus launches the Spirit to us. So the Spirit of God, He effectually unites us to Christ.

So Jesus is closer to you now than He ever was. So although He may not be walking on the earth, but because Jesus ascended from the grave, now the Holy Spirit unites us to Christ, and we now enjoy that fellowship and favor that we could not have enjoyed with Him had He not been raised again from the dead and ascended to heaven.

Well, I don't know about you,.

But Jesus is in my heart, so that's why He's close to me. And I know what people mean when they say that. So I don't want to be too mean, too old, you know. One of the things, Austin, I don't want to be.

I heard that Tozer and A .W. Pink, Arthur Pink, when they got old, they got kind of crabby. And so when you're young, you sometimes don't have any social awareness, you don't have a filter, you don't really understand etiquette and what to say and when not to say things.

I remember once when I was a kid, my mom came home from the beauty parlor when they had such things, and she asked me, what do you think of my new haircut? And I got my hair styled and everything. And I had been watching Creature Feature, those black and white movies late at night with Dracula and Werewolf and all that stuff.

And the Bride of Frankenstein, she had this hair that kind of went back, and there was kind of white streaks on both sides, but it just kind of went back a little bit. And so my mom's hairstyle was only similar to that, and it reminded me of Bride of Frankenstein.

So she asked me a question, I gave her the real answer. I said, it looks like the Bride of Frankenstein. But anyway, you lose your filter when you're older too, and I do not want to do that. So if you, Austin, find me crabby and mean and rude to people, would you just pull me aside and say, Mike, remember what you asked me to do on No Compromise Radio?

We want to be kind to people. So anyway, back to the Jesus issue. Of course, Jesus, the Eternal Son, assumes human nature, the Word became flesh, and now Jesus has two natures, right? Human nature, divine nature, perfectly God, perfectly man.

And that human nature, if we think about the womb for a minute of Mary, the human nature is in the womb, and the divine nature is holding the universe, omnipresent. And no wonder Paul says in 1 Timothy 3, great is the mystery of godliness, right?

The incarnation. How can we—I mean, this is so supernatural. How could we understand it, but we believe it because it's in the Scriptures? And so then Jesus is on earth, human body, and He literally dies, literally raised, literally ascends, and now He's seated at the right hand of the Father.

So Jesus' body.

Is in heaven, true or false? Oh, yes, true. Jesus is in heaven right now. Right. And His body, is He going to come back? He will return, physically, yeah.

And so what about His divine nature? Where's that?

Well, His divine nature is united to His human nature. He is one person, so He is always God, dwelling—He's not part of—so even God may dwell in heaven, but He's not a part of His creation. He's outside of it still, so it's a great mystery, you know?

It is. But the point is, Jesus isn't distant because, as you said, union with Christ, the Holy Spirit, we could think about divine nature, we could think about all kinds of things. Just because His body's in heaven, it doesn't mean He's distant from us, right?

Yeah, right. When Jesus said in John 14 through 16, my words, and I'll just make them easy to understand, amen, would you rather have me on earth with you, or would you rather have my spirit in you? I mean, I can still remember St. Clair Ferguson talking about that.

Everything in me wants to say, if I was asked that question, well, Jesus, stay here with me. It's better for you to be with us, right? So why would it be better for Him to send His Spirit to dwell in each of the men, and now us, than Jesus literally being there on earth with the men?

Well, that's really important because, again, the Holy Spirit is God Himself. He's communicating the redemption purchased by Christ to us. He's making all that effectual in our hearts, and, again, by the power of the Spirit, we are united effectually to Christ in His resurrection life in heaven now.

So if Jesus were on earth still, the Spirit had not yet been poured out then, so He had to be raised again from the dead, as Acts 2 says, for the Spirit to descend. So the ascension of Christ leads to the descension of the Spirit.

I like that. This makes me think about all kinds of theological topics, and that's what we do here at No Compromise Radio. I kind of have ADHD, and I have OCD. I think I have all kinds of things. I mean, if you ever meet a long-distance athlete or wannabe athlete like me, you know they're running from something.

So it's either psych drugs for me or long-distance bicycling. I think it was Lance Armstrong who said that. If you meet a long-distance athlete, you know they're running from something. So we're just jumping around to all kinds of topics, and I was thinking about the Old Testament and how God doesn't change, the uniqueness, though, of Pentecost.

The Holy Spirit Before and After Pentecost

What was.

The ministry of the Holy Spirit like in the Old Testament? Yeah, yeah, so we have to understand that.

By the way, I just interrupted Austin, as you could tell, but none of this is scripted, obviously, and so any question I ask him, I think he can answer. So that's one of the reasons why I ask him these hard questions, and then he didn't even pause.

He just starts answering, because I know it's in that brain of his. So what's the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament?

What does he do? Right, right. So, you know, we have to understand that Old Testament saints were not saved in a different way than New Testament saints. You know, there's one way of salvation throughout the entire Bible, after the fall of Adam.

So even people like David were saved by the blood of Christ. You know, perhaps maybe think about it like this, you know, however one person say it like this, that the Old Testament saints, they were saved on credit, while the New Testament saints are saved on debit.

So of course, like Jesus, he had to come, like he had to die on the cross to, again, make that just. God is the just and the justifier, the one who has faith in Jesus. So, you know, all of redemptive history is like pointing forward to Christ.

So I think we can say that the ministry of the Holy Spirit, he's giving that provisional, you know, outpouring of salvation upon the saints that will become more fully visible under the New Testament.

So basically, so I have to say, I have to affirm that with the resurrection, ascension of Christ, that's where the age to come was truly inaugurated, then right then there at, you know, the resurrection, at Pentecost.

But the Old Testament saints had a true participation in that. And we would just say that they were saved by virtue of that, that new covenant that Jesus established. So we're all saved the same way. But as you know, the new covenant, that's the launch of the age to come, and all saints were saved by that covenant.

When I was in seminary, I had to work through this issue, and I probably need to reread the book. I think it was Leon Wood, The Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, or something like that. And it'd been out of print for such a long time, we could make copies of it.

So I think I made a photocopy of it, and it might be right here in my study. The ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. And of course, as you just start trying to solve a problem, you go with what you know.

And we know that God doesn't change. We know that there's not the wrathful God of the Old Testament and a loving God of the New, or anything kind of silly like that. And so what happens in the Old Testament?

Well, I had someone here at the church, a lady, a dear lady, and she said, well, the reason why the Old Testament saints sin so much—Abraham, she's not my sister, I mean, she's not my wife, she's my sister, Jacob, Laban, Adam, I mean, you know, David—there were some bad sinners in the Old Testament, obviously.

Why were they bad? Well, she said to me, because they didn't have the Holy Spirit. And so I thought, oh, here we go. But I was glad to hear, so I could try to help her. In seminary, I was taught that the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, He was permanent, right?

You're not going to have the Spirit leave you if you're a believer, right? When David said, take not your Holy Spirit from me, it was a—the Spirit, He was helping in an office kind of way. A permanent abiding, so with, not using the word indwelling, but just abiding, He's with you.

Soteriological, that is to say, how could anybody in the Old Testament, in Adam, right, the fall of Adam, affecting everything, whole depravity, total depravity, mind, soul, conscience, body, everything else, how could they on their own come to faith without the Spirit of God's help, right?

So quickening, recognizing your sin, being born again, becoming a believer, saying no to sin as a believer, getting to glory. So a permanent, abiding, soteriological presence is how I was taught that.

And I still think that's true today. Some things in seminary I learned and maybe have matured. I almost said evolved. Austin, there's always room, as John Gershner said, for deprovement. So anyway, what do you think of that?

Permanent, abiding, soteriological presence.

Yeah, I think that sounds sound to me, because again, we don't want to say that they're saved by works in the Old Testament, that after the fall of Adam, it has to be all by grace. And how is grace made effectual?

Well, it's by the Spirit. Why is there grace at all? Well, because Jesus has earned for us eternal life that can be distributed by grace. So again, like somehow, some way that God poured out His Spirit in a provisional way, in an anticipatory way.

But of course, that payment had to be made. Like when you pay your credit card, you can pay for things on credit. But at the end of the month, you have to pay up. And so that's what happened when Jesus came.

He paid up. He paid the credit that was due for saving all the Old Testament saints. And now we, too, in the New Testament, we.

Reap those benefits as well. I would never use the word credited when I think about salvation. Listen to what the Bible says, Romans 4. What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh, has found?

For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Now to the one who works, his wage is not credited as a favor, but as what is due.

But to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness. Just as David also speaks from the blessing on the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works.

And then he goes on to quote Psalm 32. So some have called Romans 4 the imputation chapter, the crediting chapter. And that's language, of course, that we can use. Reckoning, I believe, is the King James.

Justification by Faith and Imputed Righteousness

Whenever you think, dear listener, how are people saved in the Old Testament, just automatically go to Romans 4. It's called the imputation chapter, but it's also, in my mind, called the chapter that answers the question how people are saved in the Old Testament, and they're saved the exact same way.

I mean, was Abraham justified—was he saved before he was circumcised or after? It was before. Yeah. Very interesting to read the rest of Romans 4. So we're talking about the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament.

How did we get there? I have no idea, but we're just a stream of consciousness. This is what we do on No Compromise Radio. That's why you're listening at 1 .5 speed. Do you ever listen at 1 .5 speed, or are you 2 .0?

Ah, well, you know, for podcasts, I listen to 1 .0, actually. Oh, do you? Yeah, so it's just easy for me. I like listening along, and just—it's a little easier for me, because I sometimes get lost in thought when I'm listening, and then I'm like, oh, I lost my track.

So I've now, if I watch Netflix, I've started watching at 1 .25 speed. Oh, okay. Okay. I listen at 1 .5 speed to podcasts. I try to listen to sermons at 1 .5 speed. Because I like the pausing, and I like the meditation, and the Selah kind of moments.

But 1 .5 for podcasts, 1 .25 on Netflix.

Okay. Well, you know, when I read, I have this one reading AI app called Speechify. If you scan your book or you upload your file, it'll read it with you. And so basically, I put mine at about 1 .5 speed, so I can read along in the book while it reads in my headphones.

And that's really helpful for reading. It really increases my page per hour reading. So it's really helpful. I really recommend that app. What's it called again?

Speechify. Speechify. Well, I was reading the other day about someone who said they pray out loud, because then it helps them pray biblically. It helps them stay on track in terms of mental, you know, your mind's going, drifting, and running other places, you know, pell-mell and hither and thither.

And so I thought, you know what? That could be good praying out loud. By the way, back in the day, as we wrap up the show, people would read out loud. Reading silently is a common, modern thing. I can't remember when it started, but for the most part, people used to read out loud.

Like the Ethiopian eunuch, and Philip heard him. So that's why he went over there and shared the gospel with him. If he was silently reading, he wouldn't know, right? That's in God's providence right there.

That's exactly right. So we started off the show today talking about Jesus's heart, gentle and lowly. I think you should read that book by Dane Orland. You know, is it Dane or Gavin? It's Dane. Dane. Gavin was a pastor in Thousand Oaks, California, Camarillo, someplace out there, but I don't think he's there anymore.

Yeah, he was at Ojai First Baptist. Now he's at Emanuel Nash. That's his dad's old church.

Okay, okay, gotcha. So anyway, you can write us info at nocompromiseradio .com. I should probably get you an email, Austin at No Compromise Radio. Oh, yeah, perhaps. Well, you know what? I'm delegating that to you now.

Go get yourself an email. Thanks for listening.