This is an overview examination of the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture through three lenses: Worship, Counseling, and Preaching.

Well, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and everything that we're going to do here today is on actually the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture and its various applications. And so Jason, we have Brian Borgman with us and he's a pastor at Grace Community Church in Minda, Nevada, and has written some marvelous books. He's a wonderful preacher. We were so happy to have him at our conference, our national conference on knowing God just a couple of weeks ago.

But we're here to examine the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture through four different lenses. Through first of all the lens of worship, the worship of God, and then counseling and then preaching, and then also if we're able to get to a theology and this is going to be a quick overview but we'd like to hit these areas I want to define the sufficiency of Scripture quoting from the Baptist Confession of 1689 in the first chapter, the first paragraph. The Holy Scriptures are the only sufficient, certain, and infallible standard of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience. Skip to paragraph six, the whole counsel of God concerning everything essential for his own glory and man's salvation, faith, and life is either explicitly stated or by necessary inference contained in the Holy Scriptures. Nothing is ever to be added to the Scriptures, either by new revelation of the Spirit or by human traditions.

So all of this is just to say that Scripture alone is enough to know how to be saved, how to think, how to shape your conscience, how to function in the church, how to work, how to be married, and everything is to be subservient to the Word of God, everything that is Biblical Christianity. So we're looking at these four lenses and the first one that we wanted to tackle is worship, the worship of God in the church. So brothers, what does the sufficiency of scripture have to do with the worship of God in the church? Yeah, well, I mean, It really is crucial, right? Because we would say that nature teaches us that God ought to be worshiped but scripture alone teaches us how God should be worshiped.

Mm-hmm. And so when we talk about the sufficiency of scripture what we're really Sufficiency is sort of one of those things that sort of overflows from our understanding of inspiration infallibility Inerrancy and authority right If all those things are true about Scripture, then Scripture is sufficient for everything regarding faith and life, right? Well, if we come to the Scriptures, we realize God tells us how he wants to be worshiped. In terms of then affirming the sufficiency of scripture, what that then means is that I follow scripture and scripture alone in the worship of God. So I don't introduce the opinions of men, I don't introduce, you know, long-held traditions, even if they're venerable traditions.

If sufficiency is true, then you have to have scriptural warrant for the elements of worship in the life of the church. And I think the heart of this is that the object of worship ought to be the one saying what pleases Him in worship. In other words, it's not the pleasure of the worshiper, it's not for the worshiper, it's for the object of worship. And so God is worthy of all worship and so God ought to be worshiped in the ways that please him. Right, and that goes beyond just the heart.

Actually, as Brian said earlier, it has to do with how, like what you do, the actual things that you do in worship. In John chapter four, Jesus talks about worship in spirit and in truth, and both of these are essential elements. The heart does need to be engaged. We do need to worship in spirit, but also in truth, according to what God has revealed to us in His Word. If you have truth with no heart, that's not legitimate worship.

If you have heart but no truth, that's not legitimate worship either. Yeah, amen. Very good. And I would just, I would say that one of the things about sufficiency of scripture and application to worship today is that among evangelicals, broadly speaking, we basically have turned worship into, whether it's entertainment hour or we've turned it into a dog and pony show, or we just have done what we've wanted to do, what we think will attract people. And yet, when we think about, you know, like Jason just said, the object of our worship, the one we're coming to worship, does it not make perfect sense that if he commands us to worship him, then he will tell us how he desires to be worshipped?

And so the sufficiency of Scripture is incredibly relevant for us today in the church. Brian and Scott, there's an amazing historical account in the Old Testament. I think it was King Ahaz. He goes to Damascus, and he sees in a pagan temple an awesome altar, more awesome than what God had prescribed for his own worship. So he wants one, and he sends the design back to Jerusalem and they make one.

Now here's the interesting part to me. What do they do with the altar that God prescribed? Well, nobody's bold enough to just throw it out because God told them to make that altar. So they actually move it over into the corner and use it for different things than God prescribed it to. And I think that's really a sort of a perfect analogy for what we do when we invent things.

We see something that's more awesome than the things that God has given us. We're not bold enough to throw out what He's given us, but we relegate it to the corner and we take all the time and resources away from it in favor of this whiz-bang thing that we discovered, actually in a pagan place, usually. And it doesn't go well, you know, if you just read through the history of the kings of Israel, whenever they depart from the regulated worship of God, God destroys them. I think we should recognize that God will destroy a nation by the way that they worship when they import foreign things when they get involved in strange fire something that God did not command That was the problem with Nadab and Abihu. They did something that God didn't command.

It wasn't that he prohibited it. It was that he didn't command it and that was that was the problem. But it's such a serious thing when the church turns away from the ordinances of God in worship. He will destroy that nation. Yeah, if I could just pick up real quick on something that Jason said that is so important, and that is we worship in spirit and in truth.

And the sufficiency of scripture tells us not simply how to worship in terms of just form, right? It does that. It tells us what the elements of worship should be, what the legitimate elements of worship are. But the scriptures also command us to worship the Lord with gladness, to worship the Lord with joy, with reverence, with awe. And so it's not just simply a matter of saying, well, the Bible gives me the forms and if I have the forms down, then that's all that matters.

I want to do what God tells me to do in worship, but I also want to worship him with the right heart. I want to worship him, you know, with true thoughts, obviously, but also true affections. Yeah. And Jesus said, you know, you honor me with your lips, but your heart, your heart is where they were doing the, they were doing the regulated thing. Same thing in, in Isaiah one, they were doing everything right except they didn't love God.

The heart was not there. Okay, so worship in the church. Let's turn to the matter of counseling. You know, in the 1960s and 70s there was a big tumult. Secular psychologists, their terminology, their methodology had worked its way into pastoral counseling and preaching.

And the skunk in the garden party was Jay Adams, and he said, no, let's use the Bible. Let's go back to the Word of God and describe people's problems with the words of the Bible. And it launched really a very helpful movement. People started thinking about biblical counseling, and psychiatry and psychology was attempted to be replaced by the Word of God. It's interesting, the Puritans were practicing a form of biblical counseling, but the church lost the formula in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, so we've been in recovery.

So let's talk about what the sufficiency of Scripture has to do with counseling. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the background Scott, because when I was in college, I was a Bible major, but I went to a school university that had a school of psychology that was attached to it. And it was a wholly integrationist approach. And of course an integrationist approach basically says we take the principles of psychology and we integrate them. So integrate quote faith and learning, right?

And in this case, theology and psychology. And I think that the results were disastrous Because what you have is you have two colliding worldviews. You cannot take the worldview of secular psychology And just take, for instance, what is man, right? You can't take a secular, psychological anthropology and then somehow marry that to a biblical perspective on what man is, because the Bible will tell us man's made in the image of God. You know, the Bible will tell us man has certain faculties.

The Bible will tell us that man's fundamental problem is he's in rebellion against God. Secular Psychology won't tell us any of those things. So when Jay Adams starts this what really was a revolution it was a revolution that was that was spawned by a conviction about the sufficiency of scripture and Now to be sure that there there are true things that may be observed by a psychologist, right? They observe patterns and so forth, but the sufficiency of scripture But the sufficiency of scripture in counseling really in a sense gives us a foundation to diagnose issues of the heart, right? And again, we're not saying that we're these backwards people who think just take a verse and it'll cure you, right?

We understand that there are body-soul dynamics and all of that. We're body-soul people. But at the end of the day, it is the scriptures that actually expose the sin and the idols of my heart. It's the scriptures that debunk and expose false thinking. And so the scriptures not only diagnose my problem, right, but the scripture also then sufficiently gives me the path of correction and the path of obedience and thus the path of righteousness.

And so when we sit down with people, you know, yeah, there are a lot of things that come into play with counseling somebody, being a good listener, those kinds of things. We don't want to discount any of that, but we also want to insist on, you know, to the law and to the testimony, and if they don't speak according to these it's because there's no light in them. And I just want to say that the sufficiency of scripture actually is the thing that gives us tremendous hope for real change. You know, we're not talking about behavior modification. We're talking about the word of God washing us, cleansing us, transforming us, sanctifying us, growing us.

And so, you know, I really think that the sufficiency of scripture as it comes into play with counseling especially pastoral counseling but also just the counseling that we're going to do with each other within the body of Christ. That was one of Jay Adams' emphases. His bombshell book was competent to counsel. And the very premise was, if you have the Word of God and the Holy Spirit, then you are actually equipped to help somebody who is in need. So, brothers, if the, I'm going to pick up on a word that you just used, if the sufficiency of Scripture is true, then we ought to find the Bible claiming that for itself.

In other words, we don't want to make claims for the Bible that it doesn't even make for itself. So here's what the Bible claims for itself, and it's a whopper. It's from 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work." So actually, to deny the sufficiency of Scripture is to deny the truth of what Paul is saying here and to say, actually, if you just have the Bible, you're incomplete and you're not thoroughly equipped. What Paul, the claim that Paul is making here is that scripture can make you complete and thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Counseling's a good work, one among many works, and the scripture is sufficient to make you ready to do it. Amen. Amen. Hey, let's jump to the next topic here on preaching. You know, we have all kinds of different preaching around today, contemporary, user-friendly, therapeutic, whatever you want to call it.

So what does this sufficiency of scripture have to do with preaching itself? Listen, we have a preaching professor with us right here. How about that? Outstanding. My goodness, how we could talk about this for a while, right?

You know, there are so many negative trends in contemporary preaching. And, you know, obviously we all are of the age that we can think back to the the seeker movement, things that were percolating in the 70s and into the 80s come into full bloom in the 90s And there were a number of things that happened to, I'm gonna say evangelical preaching. I'm not even talking about, you know, liberal Protestants. I'm talking about evangelicals. So you had guys that were just kind of picking topics that they felt that there was already a pre-existing interest.

And so you picked hot topics, you picked emotional topics. And the goal, of course, was just to kind of give somebody a little bit of help, right? And Scott, you said the word therapeutic, right? And that really was sort of the big thing. But the preaching was kind of designed to be a minimally attracting element to what church was doing.

The sufficiency of scripture actually condemns that as wholly inadequate. We are supposed to preach the whole council of God. We are supposed to preach the word, be ready in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort, do the work of an evangelist. We are to preach the Christ-centered scriptures. And what the sufficiency of scripture does for us when it comes to preaching is it says that the word is enough.

The word is enough. I don't need to be really clever. I don't need to be a great storyteller. I don't need to be a great stand-up comedian. I need to be faithful to the word of God.

Now I would say that our understanding of sufficiency should compel us to make consecutive expository preaching as the primary diet of God's people right right so the sufficiency of scripture Leads me to to to the conviction that I want to give the Word of God to God's people as God gave it, right? So he didn't give pearls on a string, he gave us the book of Romans. He didn't give us a series of propositions, he gave us the Gospel of Matthew, right? And so going through the scriptures and expounding the truth of the scriptures, yeah, working hard to apply, working hard to have helpful illustrations. Preaching is hard work, right?

We're not just reading the Bible, We're actually preaching it. But sufficiency says, preaching the word is sufficient to bring people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, and preaching the word is sufficient to build people up in their faith and equip them to live a life of godliness in every sphere of life. And the people who maintain the sufficiency of scripture assert at this point that there's nothing more relevant than that. In other words, we don't need to be tasked with picking out things based on whether we think they're relevant or not. If God gave us a book of the Bible, everything in the contents of that book are relevant and the people of God need it.

Amen. Amen. Yep. So, preach the Word in season and out of season. Preach the things that people don't know about.

Preach the things that people don't want to hear about that are in the Bible. That's the great thing about consecutive expository preaching. You have to talk about it. It might be uncomfortable and difficult, but it's transforming to engage in things that are outside of our comfort zone. Well, brothers, thank you so much for this firestorm of topics.

There's a lot more to say about worship and counseling and preaching. We're here to advocate the simplicity of the sufficiency of Scripture. Trust the Word of God for your counseling. Trust the word of God for your counseling. Trust the word of God for everything, and base your life on it.

Amen. Thank you, brothers, for joining us. Thank you. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. We'll see you next Monday.

See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.