No Compromises

Transcript

Alright thank you very much, and hello again dear radio friends. How in the world are you? Doing alright? Oh I’m fine thank you. I’m seated here at my desk in the ground-floor level, where there’s a big one room apartment that I’ve commandeered for office and studio in this home we have in Tannersville, PA. Out here with the deer and the bear and no buffalo, but other critters around, a beautiful setting, see the sunrise over the mountain and we can look over across to Camelback and see the skiers come down to break their ankles. Every day during the season the ambulance goes up and picks up somebody that made the wrong turn. Well, it’s all right. That’s how life is. If you want to ski, you take the chance, I guess. I never did learn to ski, did you? I guess lot of you do. I learned to ride a bicycle, a motorcycle, and took flying lessons, never got a pilot’s license, but I got enough to be infected with the bug, as we say, and I love to be in an airplane. Well, you know, you get some skills, you leave others aside.

I’m glad to be back with you, bless your heart. We’re family, aren’t we? Yes we are. We belong to each other. I meet people whom I’ve never seen before they’ll come up to me and they say, “I know you. I know all about you. I’ve been listening to you”. Well, we give ourselves away don’t we, and I’m glad. I’m glad that you feel as though we belong because I know I do. We were looking at the gospel of Mark chapter 6. The last time we got together we talked something about John the Baptist, what kind of person he was and the circumstances in which he found himself there in prison. John had come as the announcer, the forerunner, of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Messiah, but then John went over to King Herod and said, “You’re living in sin, you’re living with your brother’s wife and that isn’t right”. So, Herod clapped him in jail, bang that was it, and Herodias, the lady, I use the term loosely, in question says, she had a quarrel against him and wanted to kill him, but she couldn’t. So now you know that she’s thinking and planning and plotting for some way to get rid of this man.

Small thought here; if a person is determined to go on sinning, his only or her only alternative is to plan to get rid of the source of conviction. If you are determined to go on sinning in some matter or matters, your only alternative is to plan to get rid of the source of conviction, so that you won’t be bothered with it. That’s what happened here. That’s what happened in the ancient days of the kings. There was a King of Israel that said, “Don’t ask that prophet to come and prophesy, he only prophesies evil about me”. Well, the fact was that he was the only honest person in the bunch and was reflecting the truth of Almighty God. The judgment was coming on a sinning nation, but the King said, don’t bring him. I don’t like what he says. Get rid of him. Put Jeremiah down in a well and leave him there, put Daniel in the den of lions. The only alternative to a determinedly sinning heart is to get rid of the source of conviction, which is the truth of God. Now, you see, that agrees then with Romans 1, because they did not like to retain God in their knowledge. “When they knew God they glorified Him not as God, professing themselves to be wise they became fools, wherefore God gave them up and because”, he says, “they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not convenient, being filled”. This is the fullness of a life without God with all unrighteousness. That’s general wrong conduct, fornication, that’s immorality, wickedness, that is deliberately planned evil, covetousness, that’s when you want something that doesn’t belong to you, maliciousness, that’s desiring evil to happen to somebody else, full, again you have that idea being full, full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whispers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, inventors of evil things, disobedient of parents without understanding covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful and having pleasure in wrong things. What happens? If you’re determined to go on sinning, your only alternative is to get rid of God and His messengers, and when that happens all that God can do is just to give you up, and then the natural process of simple disintegration continues. Your life then, instead of being filled with God, is filled with these are the things.

Paul says the same thing in Titus 3, “We also were sometimes deceived, living in malice and envy, hate filled and hating one another, until the grace of God appeared”. So there you have it. Now, I spend a little time on this because people tend to overlook this. We think to ourselves, oh well this this doesn’t matter, this once doesn’t matter. Well, yes it does, because destiny is made up of a lot of little decisions, isn’t it, and as you repeatedly as you and I repeatedly, disobey God on a matter, we forge for ourselves that kind of change that binds us to the awful structure of unsaved human nature, Being full of all these awful things I just read about. The only answer is, moment by moment, to yield to the blessed indwelling Holy Spirit of God and let Him guide you in God’s truth. Jesus said, “When He the Spirit of truth is come, He shall guide you into all truth and bring to your remembrance all things whatsoever I have said unto you”. Alright that was a detour and it took a few minutes but maybe it helped to emphasize a very important point for some of us.

I’m always aware of the fact that my small thoughts, my detours, may very well be planned by our Lord to meet some special need in people’s lives. Well we’re talking about John the Baptist and Herodias was planning to kill him, but didn’t quite know how until, this birthday party when her daughter danced before Herod. He was probably in his cups, had had a few, and so now recklessly said, “Anything you ask, even to the half of my kingdom, I’ll give it to you”, you dance so well, oh boy. He probably was in a very mellow, as we say, mood. Well she went and asked her mom, and mother said, you ask for the head of John the Baptist, that will get rid of him. So it was, and Herod didn’t want to lose face before all of his lords and ladies, he just gave in. The mark of a weak person is the point at which he refuses to do the right thing, for fear of losing face. Now, all of us at some time or other have come face-to-face with that challenge. I have I know, Haven’t you? Shall I do the right thing and risk the displeasure of people or the scorn of people around me, or shall I compromise and hope to keep their pleasure and respect? Oh, I’ll tell you the pressure can be pretty, pretty tremendous sometimes when it’s related, let us say, to your job and your paycheck, or when it’s related to some matters of the heart or when it’s related to someone maybe you are dating or someone in the family, and the question is, shall I do the right thing and risk criticism or scorn or loss of face, or shall I compromise and hope to get away with it? Well, you and I know what is proper, we know the right thing to do, don’t we? Yes we do. Do right.

Dr. Bob Jones, Sr. who’s now with the Lord a good many years, used to thunder that out to his students, “Do right, though the stars fall, do the right thing!” Compromise is not God’s way. Now the politician believes in it, politics is the art of the possible, Lyndon Johnson used to say, great negotiator with Congress, between negotiations and compromise and what he called jawboning, which means talk to people, he managed to get some things through. So politics I suppose it has some negotiating and some compromising built right into it, where people have differing points of view and belong to different parties. In the business of living every day beloved, I don’t find any teaching in the Word of God about compromising, do you? If a thing’s right, it’s right, and if it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and when God says it’s right, it’ll always be right, and when God says it’s wrong, it’ll always be wrong, no matter how society may view it. It’s fashionable nowadays to say, oh well yes we know this was written 2000 years ago, and it may have been true then, but it really doesn’t apply to us today. Oh, doesn’t it? Well, I’m afraid I’m a little old-fashioned. If you don’t like it dear friend, I’m sorry. My father used to say, “We’ll be in heaven someday and you’ll know I was right, boy”. Well, I’m sorry if we disagree, but I am a little old-fashioned at this point, and I think is better to stick to the Word of God than to try to second-guess whether God meant it or not. Don’t you really?

Every now and again we’ll have someone who runs afoul of the very few house rules, no drinking, no smoking, no gambling, no immorality, that’s sort of thing. We have a few house rules, not that if you keep those rules you’re a good Christian, but it does it helps to form a matrix of conduct and attitude within which the person can mature and learn, but every now and then somebody will run afoul of the rules and so here it will be that some boy was out somewhere in a restaurant and ordered a beer and somebody saw him drinking and reported it, whatever it may be. Now, he’s up before the committee and generally speaking, what is said when somebody runs afoul of our house rules like that, well I know that it was in the thing I signed, I know that it was in the pledge, I know, but I didn’t think it applied to me or I didn’t think it really meant anything, or I didn’t think. Now, you can’t do that with God beloved. If God said it, He meant it. If He didn’t mean and why did He say it? And so stick to the word of God and leave compromise out of your life’s plan and out of your destiny, good idea? Oh, I hope you will. May God bless you today with that loving commitment to your Lord, that views everything from the point of view of, not my will but Thine be done. Then you’ll be walking in the footsteps of your own Savior.

Dear Father today, make us strong to do Thy will, keep us from compromise, make us truly consecrated to God, I pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!