God’s Sufficient Word

flowersIn our day, no Christian doctrine has been more assaulted in the world and in the church than the truth that God’s written Word — the Bible — is altogether sufficient.

Right now, many of the worst assaults on the Bible are coming from seemingly friendly sources… people who claim to follow Jesus and also from Christian book publishers.

You see aspects of this assault in the modern charismatic movement with private personal revelations couched in “the Lord told me…” formulas… with special hidden revelations.

And you can also see an undermining of the sufficiency of Scripture in best-selling devotional books, like “Jesus Calling.”

And you see this same downward trend in personal experience books about heaven and the afterlife in “Heaven Is For Real” and so forth.

This trend is also found in private messages from God, so-called ‘words of knowledge’ that are essentially an evangelical breed of ‘fortune-telling.’

And then there’s the growing cult of personal experience all of which is distracting Christians away from a reliance upon God’s all-sufficient Word.

Scripture itself has much to say about its own sufficiency.

We don’t need private supernatural messages from God; we have Moses and the prophets – moreover, we also have Jesus and His Apostles to give us everything God wants us to know about life and death; and about heaven and hell.

Yet the Bible also requires us to think… and that’s an increasingly unpopular activity.

So I want to briefly consider the sufficiency of Scripture in this blog.

The first six verses of Psalm 19 describe God’s general revelation through nature. In particular, it reveals His self-disclosure through the skies and by the light of the sun.

Then in verses 7-14, we have a description of God’s revelation through Scripture, here described as law, testimony, precepts, commandments, and rules – which all emphasize its binding authority.

What does it mean to speak of the sufficiency of Scripture? It generally means that the Bible tells us everything we need to know about God and how to follow His will.

It means that we go to Scripture alone when we want to have God’s words for us.

It further means that private messages having nothing to do with the Bible that come from individuals who claim to speak on God’s behalf are false. We are not to seek them.

God considers His written Word to be enough for us… all we need for life and godliness… all we need to please Him.

All that God requires of us is recorded in His written Word: to do everything the Bible commands of us is to be blameless in God’s sight.

And since none of us can ever do all that God commands of us, Scripture alone reveals the way of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, as the Savior of all who believe.

In 2nd Timothy 3:16-17, we are told that…

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” [ESV]

Verse 17 teaches us that if there’s any “good work” that God wants a Christian to do, then God has made provision in His Word for training us to do it.

In other words, there is no “good work” that God wants us to do other than those that are taught somewhere in Scripture: the Bible equips us for every good work.

In this equipping ministry, the Bible is both sufficient and supreme.

If you are a follower of Christ, be comforted by this thought: ‘God doesn’t call the equipped; He equips the called.” Have you been called to salvation? Have you been called to some blessed form of service in His kingdom? Then go with His equipping.

Scripture is what equips us for every good work in this life. It is altogether sufficient.

All for His glory,
Pastor Kevin

 

 

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