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First Person is produced in cooperation with the Far East Broadcasting Company, who rejoice in the stories of changed lives through the power of Jesus Christ. Learn more at febc.org. There's an ambitious stewardship that we should have. I want to get to the end of my life and be worn out doing all that God called me to do. Right? And as J. Vernon McGee said, I'd rather burn out than rust out. And I want to finish strong and hard and say I've done all I can do with what God gave me.
He's Pastor Mike Fabares, and he's our guest now on First Person. Welcome, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Pastor Mike will tell us about the ministry God has called him to and discuss his newest book, Envy, subtitled The Big Problem You Didn't Know You Had. Stay tuned for that conversation.
These weekly interviews are produced with the hope that they will encourage you in your life in Christ. Each person's story is a little different than the one before it, but together they describe the way God works to build His kingdom. Anytime you'd like to listen at your convenience, just go to our website, FirstPersonInterview.com, subscribe to the podcast, or use our free smartphone app, First Person Interview.
Well, let's meet our guest. Mike Fabares is pastor of Compass Bible Church in Aliso Viejo, California, and the speaker on radio's Focal Point program. He's also an author, and we'll be talking about his book, Envy, in just a moment. But first, I ask him about how many additional churches have been planted through Compass Bible. Several. We started overseas in Amman, Jordan, and in Guatemala City.
But we really know that evangelism is most effective in church planting. I mean, we see people come to Christ in a way that's just hard to replicate, not just...
you know, sharing the gospel, but getting them a new church home. And so we started in Southern California. We of course planted our church in Aliso Viejo. Which is going strong. Going strong, going really strong. Yep. And then Huntington Beach, which is going gangbusters up the freeway. And then Tustin. And then we branched out of state. We went to Boise, Idaho. We have one there in the Treasure Valley. It's doing great. They're,
running, I don't know, 1,200 people on Sunday morning. Probably more than that at this point. We also planted one in New Braunfels, Texas. Got them in a building and they're doing well. It's just outside of San Antonio, one of the fastest growing areas in Texas. And then North Texas, which is really just an hour or so north of Dallas. And that's another...
fast-growing area. It is, yeah. It's growing like crazy. So they're building high schools that look like universities and the roads are getting all widened. It's just an amazing place. And we know this. There's good churches in those areas, but they just cannot keep up with the growth. They're expecting like 3 million people
to move into that area in the next 10 years. It's just a crazy place where souls are everywhere and even if every church did a great job at expanding, we need new churches. So, that's our strategy and we keep doing it. We want to see more churches planted because people get saved and they get built up in Christ. Were you the startup of Compass? Yes, I founded the
Church in Aliso, our first Compass Church in 2005. When did the Lord give you the vision then to reach out beyond just your home base there? Yeah, I guess I did 17 years at one church in Orange County, and I realized at the end of that...
we hadn't replicated beyond ourselves. I mean, we had a Spanish church, which is great, but we didn't go beyond the borders of our church. And I really thought, you know, if I go another 20 years, 30 years somewhere else, who knows what God will give me, I don't want to be done with that and say, this is it. I want to train people and really give them a running start to
I don't want them to be fundraisers. I want them to be pastors. So I'm going to try to get healthy enough at the home base to have enough money to invest in new churches and give them all they need for the first couple years and then make sure it's staffed with the right people.
And see it multiply. So I could get hit by a bus today and I feel like, yeah, our church campus, you know, might have a tearful funeral and have to find somebody. But we've got churches now going, encompass Bible churches in different places. They're going to be just fine if I'm not here, which is really what I wanted. So it really was birthed about 20 years ago when I said, we need to multiply. Okay.
And I'm sure it has its challenges, but the Lord's obviously blessing it as well. And pastors ask me at conferences all the time, like, what do you get out of this? Because I said- What's in it for you, Mike? Matthew 28. I mean, we're doing the Great Commission. And every pastor, I hope, if your heart is right before God, you want to see people saved. You want to see people
understand repentance and faith and what Christ has done. We want to see them grow up in Christ. And we can do that right here in our own backyard, but there are so many places that need good churches. And so to pay it forward, that's kind of how I respond. We're paying it forward and knowing it's going to get paid forward to every church we plant. They're
Yeah, they're not, you know, they're not putting something into some, there's no quid pro quo other than we want them to carry on with a conservative view of scripture, high view of scripture, high view of God, faithful to the gospel, and they're all about expository preaching. If you do that-
then we're happy to see you leave our church, which is hard. These are good, gifted people with usually about 100 of our own people go. And they'll move out of state or they'll go to wherever we're planting and they start with a core people. So you got 110
2,550 people with kids and all with a running start. They kind of invade a community. It's fast growing. And every one of these has done great. It's a great way to grow. We did that once across Chicagoland in our own life, in our family life, and moved on to a new neighborhood and helped start a new church. And it was very rewarding for us. On top of all this, and there's the Compass Bible Institute. Yes. And there's radio. Many people are listening right now saying, hey, I know that guy. That's the focal point guy. That's Pastor Mike. That's right.
Well, we started radio, I don't know, many years ago, over 20, probably 24 years ago on one station as you know, we didn't have any bankrolling us. We just had one station in Southern California and radio is interesting. You know all about it and better than I do, but it just, you know, you really got to have people that respond to it and people that have a vision for the message and the voice that you're bringing to
to see it pay its bills. Cause you know, it's not like some people ask, well, not a magic wand. And they think, what do you get paid for being on the radio? I said, I'm gonna pay anything. I said, we have to pay them to be on the radio. They're like, what? So, you know, as God provides people who see the vision of what we're doing, uh,
They give, and when they give, it allows us to go into another station. So we've gone from one to two to three to four. We're over 800 stations right now. Fabulous. And on XM, Sirius, Satellite, Radio, just good places where we get letters and emails every day.
where people are being reached with what I like to think is just going a few layers deeper, thinking clearly about the Bible and making sure it drives all of, just all the way into our lives. What difference does it make? That's every sermon we preach, we want to ask that question.
Well, it's fun to catch up. It really is. But that's not why I invited you to join me today, because I want to talk about your latest book. On top of all that we've talked about, you are an author as well. Been writing. Your latest book is entitled Envy. Congratulations on writing a book on a sermon topic, a book that I've never heard before. Yes. I don't think, I've tried to think, have I ever heard a sermon on envy? I don't think so. Yeah, and that's really what started this. I started to see it in my office in counseling, but
And just in one day, I saw like three different meetings where it seemed like everything traced back to this problem. I could see it strategically. And I started thinking, I've never read a good book on this topic. And then I started feeling convicted. Have I ever preached on this topic? And I have a very detailed database of all my sermons, thousands of sermons I preached over the years. And I went through it. I could find two sermons, I think it was, maybe three where it...
I had one of the four or five or six subject words, it was in there somewhere. And I'm thinking thousands of sermons and it's never been the primary subject. It's always been an ancillary subject. I was shocked. And I said, this is a problem. And I started opening up the Bible. Of course, I see it everywhere. Pete Yeah, the Bible's up front about this. Pete Yeah, I mean, Cain kills Abel because he's envious, right? And Jesus, it says, was crucified because the Pharisees were envious of him. Even Pilate could see that. And I think to myself, wow, all of the
problems within our churches and within the pages of Scripture. You know, Saul envying David and all the problems that go with that. And I think
I haven't read much on that. And then of course I went to seminary. I've heard it as one of the seven deadly sins. I started looking back in church history and I would say, Wayne, you and I sitting here today in the 21st century, if we were in the, in the seventh century or the fifth century, we'd say, oh yeah, pastor preaches on it all the time because they did. They talked about envy all the time. And they would say this, envy is really the archetypal sin of the universe. They would say, Satan really,
And as we define it, I hope we'll get to defining it. It's more than just he was prideful, right? He was envious. And when that became kind of the associated ultimate demonic sin, right? People started saying, we got to talk. We gotta make sure our kids are not. I'm just going to make sure our brothers in Christ aren't envious. We just don't have that anymore. No one's ever come to me, Wayne, and said, pastor, I got a real problem. I got to, I got to confess.
I'm envious. I just don't hear it. But you diagnose the problem, you recognize it for what it is. Well, then I preached a sermon series on it. I said, I've never preached on this. I'm going to preach sermons on this. I preached, I don't know, three consecutive weekends on the topic and looked at all the passages in the scripture on it. And then all of a sudden...
started getting people coming saying, I am dealing with that. Because we look at the symptoms. There's a lot of symptoms. And we say, this is a problem. I don't have peace. I'm discontented. I'm bitter. I don't know why I'm so angry at that person. And we see the symptoms, but we don't see the root cause. And this book is trying to diagnose what is the root cause? How can we connect the dots? And then that's the first half of the book. Second half of the book is, how do we solve it?
Okay, let's get the definitions then. How is it different from jealousy, for instance? Yeah, jealousy can be a good thing, right? If you have people camping out in your front lawn or your back lawn or they move into your back porch, you're going to go, wait a minute, this is my house, right? I don't know if you belong here. You're jealous for your property. Some guy flips with your wife over the mailbox every day. You're jealous for your wife. There's an appropriate kind of
protection of things that are yours within reason. But certainly marriage is a great example. We have an appropriate kind of jealousy, also an inappropriate kind of jealousy. God is jealous for us. Exodus 34, 14 says he's a jealous God. He's so jealous, he says, my name is jealous. Why? Because he's God and we shouldn't, our God should not be golf. Our God should not be our hobbies or even our family's.
God is jealously desiring the proper relationship with us that he should have. He's God, we're his creatures, we should serve him, love him, and he loves us. Jealousy, though, couldn't be applied in a bad way. I can say, I don't like that my friend is golfing with those guys more than he golfs with me. Well, I have no right on who he plays golf with. So, I can start to be jealous when I shouldn't, and then it becomes a human vice.
That's just a desire to have something and control something I shouldn't have the right to control.
is probably better for us to compare it to covetousness because in the 10th commandment, we're not supposed to covet. I can't covet my neighbor's house, his wife, his property. And coveting, as people have so rightly talked about, is really that desire that just eats away at me. I like to put it, I defined it this way in my book. It's that sense of saying to myself, I can't be happy without that. And it really, it steals our joy and it's frustrating. And I think I just, if I had that, I'd be happy.
Well, all of that is not envy. Here's the thing, particularly about coveting. I can covet and not envy, but I can't envy without coveting because coveting, right, is the desire to have something. And then I find someone else that I know close to me has it.
And now all of a sudden, I become resentful that they have it. I become bitter and embittered against that person. That's the sin of envy. And that's why even we talk about the early church talking about Satan being envious. It wasn't just that he sat around being jealous of God or so prideful that he thinks I should be in that state. He rebelled against God, right? He fought.
He fomented a rebellion and took a third of the angels with him. I mean, that's the picture of someone doing damage. And it wasn't just that Cain said, Abel has all this favor from God. I don't have it. I feel bad. Woe is me.
He wanted to hurt him, right? And God said to him, just deal with me, deal with me. You do what's right, everything will be fine. Sin's crouching at the door though, wants to conquer you. And the sin that actually overcomes him, the New Testament says, is that he was embittered against his brother. I mean, fatricide, he kills his brother because he has what he wants. And God says, you and me, let's deal with it. We can deal with this. But he says, nope, I have to destroy him
And we destroy people's character all the time. We gossip against people. We criticize people just relentlessly when, in fact, it's all driven by I want what they have and I don't like that they have it. And it's kind of like the old movie, you know, like if I can't have her, no one can, you know. And we start to attack people because they have what we want. And we'll continue the conversation about Mike Fibara's book, Envy, coming up in a moment here on First Person.
Hi, I'm Ed Cannon. And as you know, situations around the world are changing quickly. Stay current with FEBC's ministry and get a deeper understanding of people who need to find hope. Hear how you can feel the pulse of God's Spirit moving through the hearts of believers dedicated to reaching the lost. Be sure you join me for the podcast until all have heard. Discover how the gospel is making a difference around the world.
Search for Until All Have Heard on your favorite podcast platform or hear it online at febc.org. My guest is Pastor Mike Fabares. Online, it's pastormike.org.
Calm. Calm, okay. I wasn't quite sure. PastorMike.com. And we'll put other information in the program notes at FirstPersonInterview.com as well, including information about the book we're talking about, which is entitled Envy. You mentioned bringing this up in church, and I watched some of those sermons online, several of them, and you said that people started coming to you then, realizing they had a problem. This is what I was thinking about as I watched and listened. It's so insidious, right?
we live with it every day and we don't realize it's there until we put a finger on it and then suddenly we recognize it for what it is. Right. No, and it's true. We find ourselves...
I think being hypercritical of people, particularly people that we work with, people in our small group at church, our neighbors, and we start saying things, it just tears them down. And we can look up verses and say, oh, I shouldn't have said that about them. But it's the real problem is what do they have on
Right.
And I think about things you can't argue about, like brains, beauty, brawn. There's no possible way we can say God dishes that out equally. There are people so much smarter than us, so much better looking than us, stronger. We just have to say God does not dispense his gifts equally.
And the punchline in Jesus' parable is, are you jealous, literally envious, because I'm generous? Right? And the point is, we can't be. We shouldn't be. And so, even we move into the solutions in the book, we've got to recognize our problem is not just with our friend or our coworker. Our problem is with God. Yeah.
So, we've been struggling with this since the beginning. You mentioned Cain and Abel. You mentioned the 7th and 8th century sermons on it. What about modern life? Social media comes into play here, doesn't it? Totally. Yeah. And this fuels it because, you know, the Gallet Church in your small group, they're
She's posting the best pictures of her night out with her husband, her kids, little league home run. You know, everything she posts is the best of the best. It's all filtered. It's all good. And then you sit there, you already think she's, she weighs less than you do. She's better shaped than you are. Her husband's more successful than yours. Your kid strikes out every time. And now all of a sudden the easy access to click on her pictures,
picture feed, it just fuels resentment and bitterness when we start to really dislike people on social media. And just think about it. It happens all the time. We don't even know it's happening. And it's because now I get this little window into everybody's lives, but it's only the best parts. Why do they get that opportunity and I don't get opportunities like that? Why do they get to travel and I can't travel? I can't afford to travel like that. Totally. And they're only posting their best
things, right? The best trips and the best sides of their face, you know. So, it was the antidote to give up on social media. Well, I wouldn't be opposed to us really dialing that back a great bit. But again, it's like everything. The problem isn't with the means through which you engage in the sin. The problem is in your heart. And so, we have to deal with our hearts. And I say something in this book I say all the time on every sin is we really need to start with that Psalm 139 prayer that
search me, try me, know my heart. See if there's any wicked way in me, any grievous way. I want to make sure that I'm saying to God, I want to admit the problem and we have to do that and then we have to move on to confessing the problem. And I think so many people are trying to fix issues that they find are biblical problems, but they're not starting with...
honest owning of the problem and confessing it. So we always start there on any sin. We confess it to God. Do we confess to one another? I would say this one is one you probably don't want to confess. I got an interesting call not long ago. Someone read my book and since we had mutual friends, they ended up getting the number to the church. They called me and since I knew the connection, I said, sure, I'll take the call. So I sat down with them in the middle of my afternoon and they said, I've been envious of this gal. The book just highlighted it and she's in my church and I just want to know, should I go and confess?
confess it. I said, well, what kind of damage have you done? There was nothing that was overt that this gal would have ever been able to connect. And I said, no, all that's going to do is make this worse, right? So, it's a case-by-case basis, but in a lot of ways, the people we sin against with envy are
It may not be that we need to confess it, right? It's like, it's this book about lust, right? Go around confessing, you know, I was been lustful toward you. It just doesn't help. It's going to make things worse. So no, it's usually you and God need to deal with this. And then you need to start implementing the things in the book that really are the solutions. What else do we need to know about this topic? Well, we need to know what solutions are. I mean, think about the first prohibition when God says to us what love is in the church.
He says, love is not envious. It does not envy. So I know this, that if I just had more love, the right kind of love, right, I could start to edge envy out of my heart. And it's easy to think about. Like, I think about if I said, you know, Wayne, it's interesting sitting here with you. I just talked to another guy who does exactly what you do. He makes twice as much money as you.
He's better looking than you. Don't go there. And man, everyone just wants him on every podcast. You'd be like, oh, I don't understand. That comparison is hard. But if I said, Wayne, it's your son. Oh, yeah. Your son weighs less. He looks better. He's doing better. I'd be very proud of him. I'm so proud of him. Of course, that's what we want for our sons, right? And I'm in a unique position because my sons are both pastors. I don't ever...
feel envious that they get opportunities. You know, my son is, my one son works on our staff doing great things. My other son is at another church doing great work. And when I get to see it, I just, I feel warm inside. Not with anger, not with envy. Right? But just with, I'm so glad. I want them to have better lives. I want them to excel. And the reason is because I have this God-given innate love because they're my kids. If I could love my
the way I love my kids, I would not have envy in my heart. And you touched on it earlier. Contentment is a big part of this too. Yes, absolutely. You cannot on the spectrum of your life in terms of inner peace, you cannot have envy in there if you want to be content. And part of this is, and I have a little section in the book and I say it often, is you really need to learn to enjoy what God has given you. Enjoy what you have. And that really gets back to the problem of contentment.
covetousness fueling all this. I need to learn that contentment is saying, I'm a responsible servant before God. I'm a steward. God has given me things, right, that he hasn't given you and he's given you things he hasn't given me. But before God, I have to look at what I have and just enjoy that. I have opportunities other people don't have and you have opportunities I don't have.
But I'm going to say, God, I'm going to enjoy what I have. It doesn't mean we sit back and just accept that. There's an ambition, a God-given ambition, too. That's right. And some people, that's their first criticism of the book. I mean, they haven't read it all. They say it, but they say, well, you're trying to gut my life or my kids' lives of ambition.
There's a godly ambition, right? But there's also a selfish ambition. And the selfish ambition is always laterally comparing all that I do, all my accomplishments with someone else. And this is where Cain's advice is so important. It's not advice. God is saying, look to me, solve it with me. And I think that's where I need to look at everything that makes me feel envious. I've got to look up.
and say, okay, God, I don't have that opportunity. I don't live in that place. I don't make that money. I don't have those opportunities. I don't have those, whatever it is. And I'm going to look to you and say, I want to be content with what I have and leverage that as a steward. And that's where the word really comes in. There's an ambitious stewardship that we should have. I want to get to the end of my life and be worn out
doing all that God called me to do. And as J. Vernon McGee said, I'd rather burn out than rust out. That's what I want. And I want to do that. And I want to finish strong and hard and say I've done all I can do with what God gave me. That's Pastor Mike Fabares and a strong call to all of us to finish well for God's glory. To follow up on this conversation about envy, look for Pastor Mike's book with that title. We'll have a link to it as well as more about all these doing in ministry at FirstPersonInterview.com.
The church that Mike pastors is one of many that support the Far East Broadcasting Company. FEBC has local staff in some 50 countries of the world serving God through the use of radio programs, apps, and social media. It really is exciting to see and hear the reports of people turning to Jesus Christ and being instructed in God's Word. You can see and hear these reports online at febc.org. Also, sign up for the prayer target at febc.org.
Now, with thanks to my friend and producer, Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Thanks for listening to First Person.
