The sermon focuses on Chapter 2: Of God and of the Holy Trinity from the Baptist confession of 1689, emphasizing the importance of Scripture as the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience. The speakers discuss how the confession was meant to be studied by families, helping them to be grounded in sound doctrine. They highlight the need for families to read and understand the whole counsel of God and incorporate Scripture into their daily lives. The sermon also touches on the majesty of Scripture's style, the consent of all its parts, and its purpose of giving all glory to God.

Thank you. Hello, my name is Scott Brown and we're here tonight to discuss the Baptist confession of 1689 with my fellow elders and our families are all sitting here together so this really is a delight to come and discuss these things. So I'm here with my fellow elder of many years, Jason Dome. Hi Scott. Hey this is going to be great huh?

Yes. Yep, never done anything like this, so here we go. And Dan Horne. Good to see you. Okay, so our objective tonight is to discuss the first section of the confession.

And we're going to just walk through it and speak about how it applies to family life particularly. And then we're going to take a 10 minute break from 55 minutes after the hour until 5 after. And then we'll come back and then we'll discuss the second section of the confession. But before we begin, I'd like for us to seek the Lord in prayer that He might open our eyes to see wondrous things from His law tonight. Let's pray.

Almighty God, You're the source of every good thing. You are marvelous for everything in us. And we're so grateful that we can consider these things now. And I pray that tonight our families here would be blessed to bask in the truth and in the light of Your name. And so we pray, Father, that You would take sound doctrine, burn it into our hearts, and raise up a mighty army to praise You for all eternity.

May it be so, O Lord. Amen. Well, this confession is a historic, time-tested confession. There are people out there who say there is no creed but Christ, which actually is a Creed in itself. And so it really is legitimate to present doctrine in various categories so that people can understand it in a logical way and to bring all of Scripture together to present things that are true about God and the world.

And so that's what we're really here to do tonight. In the introduction to this confession, in the letter to the reader, there's a fascinating comment that speaks of how important a confession like this is for family life. In fact, this confession, along with the Westminster confession, was actually written so that families would benefit from it, that they would study it together. It was meant for the littlest child to the oldest person in the family to be grounded in sound doctrine. Let me read to you a note at the beginning of this confession.

They say, there is one spring and cause of the decay of religion in our day. It is the neglect of the worship of God in families by those to whom the charge and conduct of them is committed. And they go on to say that it results in instability and profaneness in the family and in the culture. And it happens because families neglect the commands of God to bring sound doctrine into their family life. And the purpose of our time here is really to focus on this element.

How does this apply to our families? And we'll be here really talking primarily to our own families and to you as well. So let's turn to the very first section here in the confession, the section on scripture. And I think it's probably worthwhile to just consider for a moment Why in the world would this be the very first section in the confession? What are your thoughts about that?

All of your doctrine and your theological perspective springs from your doctrine of scripture. What you decide scripture is ultimately determines how much you'll trust it, how much stock you'll put by it, and whether you'll believe it more than in your head, but actually have it work out in your life. Scripture really forces the issue in this way. It claims to be the very word of God. It claims to be perfect.

It claims to be sufficient for every area of life. And so you have to make a decision. Either that's true or it isn't true. If it isn't true, it's all a colossal waste of time. If it is true, then God makes very serious demands of people and we should understand them.

Yeah. Amen. And in the end, there always has to be an ultimate authority. There always has to be everybody, there has to be the last decision point that somebody is going to make a decision point. And if it's not scripture, it's going to be something else.

It's going to be your own wisdom, it's going to be the society, it's going to be what most people say. I mean, you can choose these other things, but in the end they all fail and there's plenty of evidence that they fail. But you need to start with an idea of what is the ultimate authority and in the end because everybody needs to make that decision what is their ultimate authority and for Christians it's scripture. That's what it has to be. And what we want you to know is that there are only two voices in the world.

There's the voice of God and there's the voice of the devil. And if a family doesn't understand that, then they'll be lost in what they think are many wondrous voices when they really are only two. And So this confession starts with the voice of God and it's the perfect place to start. So let's just read this first part of the first paragraph. Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith and obedience.

Now I think that's worth memorizing The things that the authors speak of here, sufficient, certain, and infallible rule. Those three words capture so much of what Scripture is all about. So let's just talk about that for a minute. Right and with the confession as you read and study a confession, these are things that people put together by giving a lot of time and a lot of thought. So they're being very specific and particular about the words that they use.

So it's worthwhile considering them. And they're usually not being redundant. They're actually being very precise in what they say. So when you look at these three words, sufficient means that it covers every area. Certain means that it is true.

It is exactly as it will, it will never, and then, excuse me, then the last one is infallible, which means it will never fail. So you know it's true, you know it covers everything, and you know it's never going to stop being true. And so this is the core that you can rest your belief on, and you can know that it's the rock that you can build your life on. Scott, one of the things we notice about confessions in general right away, just even in this first phrase, is the amount of precision. We studied so many books in the Elder Discipleship curriculum last year, And what we found in reading modern books was the art of precision has been lost.

But the writers of the Confession had it in spades. And it's really helpful because they draw the lines very clearly. You know, when the authors say that the Scripture is the only sufficient rule, I mean, what they mean is that we are dependent upon this one primary thing. And what it means for our families, for my family, what I desire to be true to my family, is that the Bible is the most important book in the house. It is the book around which all other things revolve.

In terms of our own family life, my hope and prayer is that no other media, no other occupation would take more of our time. It's so easy to Facebook your life away or to plunge yourself and all kinds of things, but there is one thing that is sufficient and that is Scripture. So this just raises the importance of scripture in family life. And when other things elevate themselves above family life, families' lives get in trouble. Often we even put our sleep before our reading of scripture.

We put our entertainments before reading Scripture, or some kind of sporting thing, and they encroach on Scripture. Scripture is gone from family life. Why? Well, because all these other things have come into it. And I just think when we read that Scripture is the only sufficient rule of life.

We should think very clearly what that means to us as families, that Scripture should be, as one writer said, the sun and the center of all family life. Because it's sufficient, it's even more than that. When we read other books, we always need to be taking those other books and saying, do they align with scripture or not? It's very easy for us to add other authorities because we like the way they write or that they're real interesting or they're fascinating, but it is sufficient. And so when we consider its efficiency, it also means it's the standard to judge whether every other book is helpful as well.

It's really hard to read this and not have your mind immediately go to Psalm 1, because Psalm 1 applies the doctrine of Scripture. And it paints a picture of a man who meditates on the law of God day and night, and he's like a tree planted by a stream of water, always having leaves on the tree, always bearing fruit in season. Or you know, Psalm 19, The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.

I mean, that's what scripture is all about. Why would you not want to make something like that the center of your life when we often trade such inferior things for something so superior. The authors use the word infallible here. It's sufficient, certain, and infallible. And what happens to us in life is that we turn to all kinds of fallible sources.

But here, Scripture is given to us as the infallible source. It is always right. It's always perfectly balanced. It's always just. It's always true.

You know, when we were studying Deuteronomy recently, we were, I think, very gripped by the statement, you know, He is a God of truth, He is a God of justice. He is completely without injustice, righteous and upright is He. And so out of Him flows this wonderful word. What we do though is in family life we often trade the things that the Word of God presents to us for things that are so fallible. And we grab for expediency, we grab for our own ideas, we want to create our own life when God actually has provided something for us that is absolutely perfect for the governing of every part of our life.

And for fathers, I think one of the things that we need to do is certain is another word that frequently gets rejected, right? It is so easy for us to walk out of our own understanding. It's so easy for us to walk out of all these other things. No, this is certain. When you read this, it's certain.

It is true. You can build on it. You can put your weight on it. Instead, what we want to do is put all these other things. And we need to be very conscious as we lead our families to walk by faith and not by sight.

And the reason we walk by faith is because Scripture is certain. Right. You know, and here in the confession, we read that the Scriptures are for the sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruptions of the flesh. And that is so important for family life. Because the scripture shows you your corruptions.

Your children need to see their corruptions and unfortunately we as parents need to see our corruptions as well. It shows us who we really are so that we don't raise up in pride against our children or our children against us or them to one another. But it gives us the thing that we need the most, humility and the joy that comes from it, the comfort from knowing who you are as a sinner. I just don't think you can have comfort in family life unless your doctrine of sin is adequate and your doctrine of sin is not adequate unless you are seeing your own corruptions in family life. We need to make sure that none of our children ever think we're the one that's sufficient, we're the one that's certain, We're the one that's infallible because we are not that.

We make all those mistakes all too often. And what we need to do is from an early age, make sure that our children understand that don't look to us as the infallible source. That's God. That's His Word. That's what He's given to us.

And they see the heart of the Gospel in that, that God saves sinners, and He calls all to repent and bow down before Him, and there's one sacrifice that's sufficient for such great sinners. One of the things I like about this first section here is the authors identify with real clarity both the Old and New Testament and they list all the books. I mean did they really need to do that? Don't we know what books of the Bible there are? No, they listed every book in the Bible, but I really was happy that they did that.

When I read that, I thought, What's the help in that? For me, I read it, and what came to my mind was really how important it is that a family knows every one of these books of the Bible. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, all of them. It's our conviction that our families understand the whole counsel of God that they've read through the entire Scriptures. Let me just make a comment.

If it's not in your family's road map to read through the whole Bible several times, I would just so encourage you to put it in your schedule to do that. It's very difficult to do it because there are a thousand things that wage war against it every single day. But it's important that you send your children out into the world with the whole counsel of God so that they have a complete road map for life that has been derived from thousands of years of history, from the Spirit of God working in thousands of different ways in the lives of dozens of people throughout history. And so, I know we've tried to do that in our family, to read it over and over again, but what I found is it really does give your children a grid. It gives them a way to understand the world.

Scott, I was just thinking about the listing of all the books, and it does seem strange to us. I think the reason that it seems strange is that we can walk into a Sam's Club and buy a Bible for $15. They're everywhere. Lost the perspective that the book of the law can be lost. But in fact, the book of the law has been lost in history and rediscovered later.

We tend not to think about how fragile these things are and that it can so easily be lost from one generation to the other. And so, hey, they've been very specific in listing exactly what the doctrine of scripture ought to be and even what books ought to be included. Right. And when we talk about how important it is, the idea that scripture is the infallible thing, it's really important to say what makes that up. Because as soon as you say this is the foundation on which everything else rests, guess who's going to attack that foundation?

That is where Satan is, and that's where Satan has always attacked the church. This is who's the final authority and this is always the attack. So they make this statement because, you know, there's a gospel according to Thomas that people are trying to introduce now. There was the Apocrypha which the Roman Catholic Church tried to introduce. There's always this attempt to try to undermine what scripture really is.

And so you need to say it because otherwise you know I would argue that higher criticisms in the same category there has Satan has constantly been trying to attack what the infallible rule is because then it will fail If he can change it it all of a sudden becomes fallible, and he wins and so you have to be very explicit This is coming out of the Reformation where all of a sudden you've had this transformation that it's not the Pope anymore that gets to Say that this is true because I said it all of a sudden now It's the words that God has revealed And so making sure you have the right books listed is a really important thing to defend and to build that wall so that the church and your family is protected. Right. You know, one of the things that we found in our own family life as we read through scripture is that, well, we didn't want to get stuck on our favorite book. If you read through the Bible, you can't do that. And you have favorite books, I have favorite books of the Bible, but God has something more for you than your favorite book or your favorite verse.

In a lot of ways, we want to create a life and a church based on our favorite verse. God has something broader and deeper. All the books are important. If we're leaving out certain testimonies of God, we're making a mistake in our family life. I just think back of the many times you've read through the long sections of names, right Claudia?

Actually, my children can pronounce almost all the names now after doing that. They just cause you to submit yourself to the words that are there. Every word of God is pure. Every single one of them. Every single word in the Old Testament and the New Testament is a word of Christ.

So they're really, really important words, even the ones that we might sort of deem unnecessary. Now, I think we would all acknowledge that there are passages and things like that that really loom in importance. But let's don't say in our family life that this book doesn't have any meaning for us. And because of that, there are certain books that you'll probably never hear preaching on. The first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles?

You're probably never going to hear preaching on that because who wants to preach through name after name after name, it's really hard to write a sermon. So if you're not reading it in your family, you're probably not going to hear it in the church. Right. Right. Scott, I've worked in an industry for almost two decades now that builds things.

We're always building against a gold standard. And for us, that's a product. It's a known good product. You know it meets all the specifications. So when you build something, you set it next to the gold standard, and you know whether this is good or not.

The Bible functions as that for us. When we see the phrase, infallible rule and standard, that's really what it means. The Bible is the gold standard. It's the known good that we can compare anything in life to, to understand whether it is in line with the thoughts of God, the will of God, the commands of God. Paragraph 5, let me read paragraph 5 for us here.

We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church of God to a high and reverent esteem of the holy Scriptures, and the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, and the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God. I just love those phrases there. The heavenliness of the matter. It's from another world. It's a flash of light from heaven to lighten this dark world that we live in, our dark hearts, the things that we get tripped up in.

I just love that phrase, the heavenliness of the matter. It comes down and then it lifts us up to heaven. I can't think of how many times that's happened to us, that God has just met us and given us a bolt of lightning in sort of a drab world that we were finding ourselves living in. And then the efficacy of the doctrine, like it works. It works.

And there's nothing that works like Scripture. Nothing. It's efficacious. Efficacy matters, as one of my dear friends likes to say. And then I love this part, the majesty of the style.

Let's talk about the majesty of the style, just in terms of language and the literature of it. Jason mentioned before about just the, you look at a confession, the precision of words. Well, the precision of words in a confession is nothing like the precision of words in the Bible. In the Bible, right. I mean, you just look at the...

I mean, that's one of the majesty of style is just how God has related so much so that we have a rule for every area of life and what's effectively a fairly small book I mean you might look at it and say we're going to read through it in a year and think it's a long book But the reality it's a fairly small book when you consider that God was So dense in what he I mean dense is in thick and rich in what he has given us that he could do it in one book. It's a really remarkable, I mean there's just a majesty to the style that he could communicate so much with so little words. It's also immensely diverse. Hebrews 1-1, God has spoken in times past, in various, what's the exact quote? In various ways.

In various ways. Yeah, and in various ways. And so we have books of songs, we have books of narrative that tell the history, we have doctrinal books that tell us how we ought to conduct ourselves in the house of God. Right, and you have books like Romans, which is a great book on learning how to think because Paul makes a brilliant logical argument that I mean God even gives us as we read this it does more than instruct us and also instruct us how we should be instructed. Yeah right you know it's you know it's so majestic in its style it's so beautiful that I mean you'll often find preachers you know who will you know do expository preaching and they preach on one word, you know.

Five weeks later, they're on the fifth word in the sentence, you know, they're in Ephesians. But God, you know, Two weeks on the word but, another week on God, but God and His mercy. It's so deep you can't get to the bottom of it. It's so majestic. So the language here is so fantastic.

The majesty of the style, and then the consent of all the parts. So, what's that all about? This is the idea that all scripture can be harmonized. God, it's the revelation from one being. God has revealed it to us.

God breathed through the prophets to it. But it's not a multitude of voices, even though it comes across as a multitude of voices, because God is speaking through men. But yet, from that, all these diverse things over thousands of years and they still fit together perfectly and there's not one thing that's incongruous with something else. And here's what that truth means. It means whenever we're studying a topic or a passage, we need to Understand where the other passages are on the same topic and make sure that our understanding of it fits together and harmonizes With the other text particularly clearer text or more comprehensive text on the same on the same topic And it can never be a well there's ten texts that sound like this and five texts that sound like this, so therefore the ten texts wins.

That's never the right way to read scripture. It's always the consent of the parts. If you think they're in contradiction, you're wrong, the scripture's not in contradiction. Right, yeah. Yeah, if you think scripture contradicts itself.

It's because you're stupid, basically. Or you're contradictory. Maybe you're not stupid. Maybe you're just contradictory. Maybe there's a better word than stupid.

You're not getting the whole picture. The authors say it's the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God. It's just wonderful and fantastic language here. Paragraph 6. The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture under which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit or traditions of men.

Let's talk about the concept of the whole counsel of God. In our family, I'd hoped to somehow to deliver the whole counsel of God, which is why we read scripture all the way through. By the way, there are some difficulties in reading scripture all the way through, because you have to go so fast that you don't often get a lot of the details. And so you do miss some. But I had a conviction that we wanted to get the whole counsel of God.

And so we sort of made some sacrifices in some of the details, I think, in doing that. So let's talk about the whole counsel of God. And Let's specifically talk about how do you deliver that in your family? One comment that I just have to make on the delivering the whole council of God. When your children are small, there are certain parts that you're really glad that you get to go through quickly.

Right, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the answer to how you give your family the whole counsel of God is a day at a time. You can't give it to them all in a day, but there's such a beauty in having a daily pattern of dispensing the Word of God a little bit at a time, every day, day after day, year after year, so that a mighty deposit has been laid down over a couple of decades.

It teaches our children that we trust the Word of God because we're organizing our lives around it and a steady deposit of it. So Jason, let me ask you this question. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. That's Jason's deal.

That's his deal. So would you just tell us about that and how that works? Well, the point is, a lot like what I just said, it's impossible to eat an elephant in one meal. And so you just have to take a bite and then you take another bite. And it's the same way with the Word of God.

There is no reading through the Bible in a single sitting, but there is the concept of a steady drip always providing the nourishment that's needed day after day. And I think it's important though, when you eat that element, that you do need to chew some. Right? If all we do is read for the goal, And I've found this in my family at times, and I've thought we've just gotten to the point where we're reading it to get it done. Get that check mark that you read your 365th for this day.

And to try to come up with specific ways. And one of the things that I do in my house is that we go around, and everybody has to ask a question on the chapter about a verse they don't understand so that we make sure that in each chapter we take some time and we discuss it. So that it's not just, yeah, you're swallowing the elephant, but you're just swallowing it, you're almost gagging on it, but no, we have to chew it and we have to make sure that we take the time to chew. Thanks for reminding me. I forgot, I haven't been doing that lately and I'm gonna bring that back on in, Dan.

That's a fantastic practice. Sometimes it makes for really long questions. There's a great quote from John G. Payton, the missionary to the cannibals, where he talks about how his father faithfully catechized their family. And he compares the experience that they had with very similar experience that some of his friends growing up had.

His friends' experience taught them to despise really religious things. And even though they did some of the same activities, his own father was very sincere and took the time to make sure there was life in the things that were actually being done. It wasn't just task work. And so he and his siblings found that it was life to them while the others had a very different experience because there was hypocrisy mixed in and it was task work, not really a true love for the Word of God. Right, yeah, love is the key point for sure.

And it has to be that you don't think of this as a medicine that you take, right? I mean, it can be that it's just a medicine, you just want to swallow it and be done with it and move on. And as a father leading the home it has to be that you have a love for it and that you want your children to see that love for it and have that same love for it that you have and that's why you do it. The other thing I think and it's kind of going back to eating the elephant, right, We're very impatient people. This is what our society teaches us.

You should be able to drive up to a window and have your dinner two minutes later, right? And if it's two minutes, you're really upset because they shouldn't have been that slow. You know, Isaiah talks about line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little. This is what we need to be thinking of when we're thinking of our families, is that line upon line, precept upon precept. This is not, I've got them, I go through the Bible in a year and now they understand the whole Bible.

No, this is you do it again, you do it again, you do it again, you do it again, and every time through they'll pick up new things. Hey, I'll just give you a personal testimony here. We tried to be very, very regular about reading scripture and devote a significant amount of time with it, But now that our children are really all grown, three of them are married and out of the house, and Claudia, of course Claudia, you're the only child left at home now. Oh no! But looking back, looking back, I wish we'd done more, I wish we'd read more, I wish we'd prayed more.

Even though we dedicated a lot of time, I think if I could live it over again, we would have just spent more time memorizing, more time reading, discussing it. And, anyway, that's my look back. And we need to make sure that we don't, you know, let ourselves fall out of the habit. When things happen and things get in the way and life does it, you need to get back on and you need to start over again. It's so easy to let it slip and when it starts to slip at all, we do read through the Bible in a year and we're just starting like halfway through Matthew now.

So we're basically three months behind, but that's after doing it for four years, we lose a month every year, so yeah, we're four months behind. But you keep going and you recognize the goal isn't, I mean the goal is to get it done. It's good to have a goal, but if you miss the goal, you just keep going anyway. Keep going, yeah, absolutely. So we talked about the precision of the language in the confession, And there's some language here I want us to just camp on for a second.

That this is in paragraph 6. That all these things, you know the whole counsel of God, you know for God's glory man, salvation and faith in life is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture. So, let's talk about that, because the writers are making a very, really, really important distinction about the value of Scripture and how you extract its gold from it. I think when we think of Paul and him meditating on Scripture night and day, that he talks about in Psalm 119. This isn't that, oh, I read it, I understand all there is to know about it.

This is that he kept working on it, he kept thinking about it, he kept meditating on it so more and more his mind would think deeper and deeper thoughts about God. So there are some doctrines that are very obvious because of the nature of the doctrine and the doctrine of salvation. There are some doctrines that are very obvious. But there are other doctrines that are much more difficult to understand than you need to study because in that meditation on that scripture and that studying that scripture, God desires us to know Him through that. Not just the Bible, but God.

This is His revelation of Himself so that we know God better. And so, when we think of these things, That's what it means. And so God doesn't just lay it all out there so that it's easy to pick up anything. Because if it was easy to understand every doctrine, we wouldn't know more about God. God wants us to know more about Him.

So some things are a lot less clear than others. Yeah. And so that requires our hearts to be really hungry to find the answers. Because it's either expressly set down with real clarity. Some things are just so plain.

And other things are harder to find the will of God on. And so they are necessarily contained. And so one has to humbly come before God and say, oh Lord help me to understand your will in this matter. What in Scripture from Genesis to Revelation would inform me on this? Are there any patterns?

Are there any role models? Are there any principles that are there? Are there any stories that help me see what a godly example is for me? And that's necessarily contained. And what the authors of this confession believed was that everything pertaining to life and godliness was here.

That this was the place where we went to get our answers. Not that this is where you go to learn how to operate on a kangaroo or whatever, but what you need to live life in the world is all here. Yeah, I think one of the key points here is that there are no gaps, just like what you said. Not that it's a step-by-step manual for everything that you might come upon, but that there are principles to be mined out of the Scriptures that touch on everything. There are no areas of life that are left untouched.

There are no gaps that are not covered by Scripture. Well, There is one area of life that's completely, not completely, but partially left untouched by scripture, and that is how to do evil. Scripture is sufficient for every good work. There are lots of evil works that people do that scripture is not teaching you how to do evil. So when it talks here about necessary, it's the necessary for God's glory where we glorify Him in our life.

Because the Bible is not a place to learn how to do evil. We've got enough of that in our own heart. God didn't reveal more of it. So there's something that's touched on at the end of the fifth paragraph and then picked up again in the sixth paragraph and that's the necessity of the Holy Spirit in all this. The Bible is sufficient and yet it's also intended to be mingled with the help and enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

These things are spiritually discerned. It is possible to go through a lifetime of exposure to the Bible and not be one day wiser than when you started, unless there is the help of the Holy Spirit to impart these things to your soul. And it can just create you wiser in how to be deceitful, right? Because we deceive ourselves in our own unrighteousness. That's what the unregenerate man does.

And so if you teach him more about Scripture, all he'll learn is how to deceive himself better without the Holy Spirit opening his eyes to see how truly wondrous it is. There's a question that somebody has about the efficacy of Scripture that's a term that was used and again it's just one of those very helpful words, I'll read the question. I know the men have gone into Section 6, but can they speak about the term efficacy more? I looked up the definition and it seems to make a lot about the context of the Word. It appears that the efficacy of Scripture has some to do with it being alive and the Holy Spirit is with us as we read.

I'd like to hear more thoughts on that. What a fantastic question. Yes, I mean, the Spirit of God illuminates our understanding so that we can know what it means and put it into practice And I love I love the language that you use Brother that it you know that it just is Such an enlivening thing For us and I think when we look at its effectiveness, there are certain things that Scripture is efficacious for by its nature, because this is what God has commanded. This is God's law word. We recognize our guilt from it.

We don't recognize that God is merciful from it, because if we're looking at him as a judge, we'll just see his guilt. But it's efficacious for that. It's efficacious for constraining evil in society. But in terms of it being a way that a man becomes righteous and lives a righteous life, that requires the Holy Spirit. It's the Holy Spirit adding to it and bringing conviction on our heart as we read the Word of God that we're made righteous before God and that we're made to walk in a holy way.

Beautiful question. Isaiah says When the word goes out that it doesn't return void, but it accomplishes its purpose. That is what efficacy is all about. It is alive. The law is spiritual.

It's holy, just, and good. Every word is pure. What a marvelous thing. Let's move to paragraph 7. I'd like us to move through this one fairly quickly and then we want to get to some real...

What does it look like when a family or society of the Church gets this right or wrong? But I want to just touch on this in number seven. All things in Scripture are not alike, plain in themselves, nor alike, clear to all. That means that Scripture is a mind bender. It makes you think, it teaches you how to think.

There are many things that the littlest child can understand, but also the greatest and the most brilliant would have to struggle to draw together. That's the beauty of Scripture. And we need a multitude of counselors because of how deep that is. That's why in the end only the confession is not authoritative. The Holy Scriptures are.

Commentaries are not authoritative, only the Scriptures are, but yet because of the depth of it and that you can study for a lifetime, it's worthwhile to look at these men who have studied for a lifetime and learn from them so that you're starting off on the shoulders of the men that went before you, and God's gracious to give that. But in the end, the authority comes back to the Holy Scripture, and if they're not standing on the Holy Scripture, they're not leading you to a place that's going to be beneficial. What he says... Let me just jump on this for a second. He says that, or the authors say that they're so clearly propounded and opened in some place.

In other words, it might not be apparent to us, but it is clearly propounded somewhere. Now, you know, the Bible... That is specific for salvation, that the Confession says. Salvation, what's necessary for salvation, is clearly propounded. You know, whether you should, you know, go to the mission field or whether you should be an elder of a church that's there's a lot that's not clearly propounded but that what's necessary for salvation is clearly propounded.

In terms of thinking about our grasp on scripture, I think it has dawned on all of us progressively how deep the well really is. The more we study, you would think that we would think, now we're getting a grasp on it. No, exactly the opposite. The more we study, the more we understand how little we know, how much work there is left to do. And in the last paragraph, or not the last paragraph, but paragraph 8, the authors speak of that it's the only source, only true source for controversies in religion.

And it's easy for us to argue from our own reason, for our own experience, but families need to learn to base their arguments from scripture alone. Set that as the basis for all truth. That that becomes the place from which, the place to which we look, from which to gain our opinions. Often we want to bring in all kinds of other things. But if we can agree, if we can agree as a family that scripture is the place that we start and end, then we can have a debate.

But if it's about our feelings or about what Joe is doing down the street, we're kind of lost. We have to have a center. The family has to have a center. And here, the writers of the Confession place the Scriptures as the source and the basis for all arguments and controversies. That's just another practical way that families make the Scriptures the center of family life.

And just maybe a final comment here. It's important to understand that All the answers that we're looking for, for life and godliness, are found in Scripture. You might not be able to find the Internet in a concordance in your Bible. You might not be able to find texting. But the Bible says something about texting.

The Bible says something about everything in life. You don't find the word marijuana in the Bible. But how you relate to something like marijuana is absolutely communicated in the Bible. Scripture is sufficient and it is certain and it is infallible and all those words that were used to explain it. So, let's just back up for a bit and talk to our families here a little bit about what happens when the family gets this wrong.

What happens? They start to do what's right in their own eyes, right? This was the curse that happens in Judges over and over again, is that if you're not going to Scripture for the answer, what you're going to do is go to something else. And what goes to something else in the end always becomes what's right in your own eyes. Because as soon as you say that you're going to judge something else to be the standard rather than what God said is the standard, you've already said that this is what's right in my own eyes and it ends up destroying your family.

This is the basis, this is the protection against your own foolishness, this is the protection against your own wrong thoughts, because all of us need to be sanctified. And so if a father comes and says, I see in scripture that I'm supposed to leave my home, but they leave it without scripture. They're going to lead it off the cliff. Here's what happens to your daughter. She becomes led by her feelings.

Here's what happens to your son. He becomes led by his testosterone. How good a leader are those things? Not very good. So the family ends up splintering into really a devolving process that happens to everyone who abandons the word of God.

It's just so destructive to the family. The way of God is always the narrow way, and without saturating yourself with the thoughts of God, You'll never ever stay on the narrow way. You'll there will always be a drift that will take you into a wide way And that's what happens when we don't devote ourselves to the Word of God as we just cannot keep our feet on a narrow path So what happens when the church gets this wrong? Look around visit visit no seriously, I mean that's the answer right visit around the church is good That's not the recommendation by the way. Go to a church that's based on the word of God.

But... Go to the internet and you see 50 churches. How does that know? I think we have a thousand different manifestations of what happens when the church gets it wrong. We can see it.

It's everywhere and it is the church following its own desires, creating anything that seemed like a good idea at the time. Hey, the guy with the best idea has the floor in most churches instead of God's word governing today. It being sufficient. That's all we need. Right.

And in the end, we just have to understand it causes breakdown of all authority in the family and in the church. If you can't take the word of God as authoritative, then why would this word of this man be authoritative? Why would the word of an elder be authoritative? Why would anything be authoritative? Because sooner or later the people are going to sit back and say, wait a second, the reason we have this rock band is because the pastor likes a rock band.

Well, I don't, so why should I be here? And you cause everything to fracture and you cause the rejection of authority. If you can't accept the authority of Scripture, you won't accept any authority at all. So Scripture is sufficient for church life. And if Scripture is not sufficient for church life, what will be?

Well it's going to end up the creativity of the most influential leader. And so the Church ends up becoming an invention of man, because it's based on the creativity of man, which seems to be endless. And so the church either is founded upon the sufficiency of scripture, and it trusts in scripture alone, and governs itself and limits itself, and is hemmed in by scripture alone. Or, it is off to the winds for the next hot creative guy that shows up. I mean, those are really pretty much the choices that you have.

And usually because God's words and God's ways do work, people don't start out by running away from them. They start out by keeping the same thing because they actually work, they actually see fruit from God's ways that are different than the fruit that you see from the ways of wickedness. But the next generation doesn't remember why the previous generation did it because the previous generation was just doing it because that's what their fathers who understood was doing it and a couple generations later you're off that you're just running wild and you're just leading yourself to destruction. So what happens when the state gets this wrong? I think you mean when the church gets this wrong, what happens to the state?

Because what happens to... And part of that concept is, we need to remember when Jesus Christ said, you are the light to the world. This is the responsibility of the church to say which righteousness is. It's not the state. The state doesn't find it's on its own.

If the state decides what's good and evil, guess what? You've got evil people ruling over you and the Bible, Proverbs 29, 2 says, you'll be groaning. It won't be good. And so when you look at the church and when the church starts to lose these things and starts to look to other authorities, I mean, one example that I think of is the Constitution. If we don't work, if the church doesn't teach that the Word of God is authoritative We should never expect the Supreme Court to hold that the Constitution is authoritative.

Why would it? This is actually from God and we don't hold it very authoritative and the church for the last hundred years has done a very bad job of holding it authoritative. And we look at what happens in the state and the Supreme Court constantly rewrites the Constitution. Why do they think they can get away with it? Well the church is doing that to the Bible.

If the church is going to do that for what God has done, what about what men wrote? Who cares? Right. You know, I mean, there are all kinds of questions that we can ask in the same line. I mean, What happens when a husband gets this wrong?

What happens when a wife gets this wrong? What happens when a daughter or a son gets this wrong? The implications are enormous. What God desires to do is to create his people out of his own word. The word is life and it creates life in His people.

Moses said that it makes for a wise and understanding people. That's what it does. That's what happens when the church gets it right, or the family gets it right, or a father or a mother or a son or a daughter gets it right, is that they become a wise and understanding people. And the blessings of God are upon them. And I think in the end, Probably the easiest way for that to happen in the family to get it wrong is that you effectively become, I think, some of you were this morning talking about being a practical atheist.

And it's so easy to talk about how scripture is sufficient for all things and to say all these words. But if a father's not actually saying, what should I do, what has scripture told me to do, all the words won't matter. A father has to teach his children how to do this by doing it, by actually looking to scripture for the answers. As I look forward into the coming years, I really do want to have my home even more saturated with the Word of God to fight off the pressures of schedule that just seem to be so corrosive to the whole enterprise. It's amazing to me how many things wage war every single day against this.

It's easy for us to look and say, oh, but we're so busy now compared to prior generations. And it's just not true. It used to take four hours to make dinner. Now you have ovens that you turn a dial. This is a whole different style of life, and we want to make excuses where our forefathers, like Luther, said, I pray for two hours a day.

Right? I mean, and we say we're too busy. It's just blatantly false. We need to stop lying to ourselves and making excuses. The reality is we enjoy what we think are our pleasures.

What we need to do is understand that the true pleasures are in God's Word. Scott, there's something in paragraph 8 that's super important and we haven't talked about yet. And that is verbal inspiration. And it's really important today because this is a doctrine that has fallen out of favor. But what essentially verbal inspiration teaches is that the unit of inspiration is the word, not that God impressed a thought on an author and then the thought was expressed, but that actually God chose each word that he put in the Bible.

And we know this is true because Jesus made arguments based on a single verb tense, and Paul made an argument based on whether one word was singular or plural. So to say the unit of inspiration is the thought is to testify that Jesus didn't understand and Paul didn't understand, and we don't want the theological consequences of that. But many Bible translations are based on a rejection of the doctrine of verbal inspiration that God actually picked the words. And even the whole concept of what is authoritative is important in false fact, because God picked every word in the end. The ones that are truly authoritative is no translation.

It's the Greek for the New Testament and the Hebrew for the Old Testament. And because every time that we have to take it to a vulgar language, in the end, there is always some, you have to say, well, what does this mean? And you have to change it because languages just aren't that parallel because God did a really good job at the Tower of Babel when he confused everything. And so in the end, we always have to remember, you know, King James only is a bad idea. Any translation only is the wrong idea.

The confession is very clear. What was verbally inspired is the original text. And it is sufficient, certain, and infallible. And our prayer for our family and for the families of our church is that we would have the same heart that Moses expressed when he said, Oh, that they had such a heart in them, that they might fear Me, and always keep all My commandments, that it might be well with them and with their children forever. May that be said of us and our generation.

May God raise up a mighty generation." Exactly like that. We're going to take a break now, a ten-minute break, and we'd like to encourage you to send us questions. We weren't able to get to all the questions that were asked, but please don't give up. Send us your questions, and we'll do our best to try to get to them. We'll see you in about ten minutes and enjoy some of the slides and the films that will be shown during this ten minute intermission.

God bless you and we'll see you back in a few minutes to discuss the second section of the Baptist Confession of 1689. Thanks for listening.