The Sufficiency of Scripture

Well, our preacher today is Pastor Tim Mullett from Montevideo, Alabama. He's a pastor of Providence Church there, he's the father of five kids. He and his wife live there in Alabama, and he's also the host of a podcast called Bible Dashed.

Tim, welcome. We're looking forward to hearing the Word from you.

The Sufficiency of Scripture in 2 Peter 1:3-4

If you do have a Bible, turn to 2 Peter 1. And if you would, stand with me for the reading of God's Word. 2 Peter 1, 3 -4. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence, by which He has granted to us precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desires.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank You for this opportunity to gather together on Your day, to read Your Scriptures, Lord, and to learn great things about You from Your Word. We pray that You bless our time here today to protect us from error, and help us to know how best to glorify You today.

In Your son's name I pray. Amen. You may be seated. It's difficult to think of a doctrine of Scripture that's more comforting than the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. And this is a doctrine that we're going to do.

We're going to take some time today to study. But when you think about this doctrine in general, it really is as comforting as it is to a believer who actually understands it. It is the kind of doctrine that really is despised in the world that we live in, particularly among professing Christians.

And it's despised in a wide variety of ways. And so when you think about this doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture, it's a doctrine that says that God in His Word has given to us everything that we need for life and godliness.

He's not left us in the dark as to the things that are pleasing to Him. He's not intending to confuse us. He doesn't have a speech impediment. He's given us what we need to know how to serve Him. It's a doctrine that should, as I say, be a great source of comfort to believers.

Denials of Scripture’s Sufficiency in Worship, Decision-Making, and Counseling

But then it is a doctrine that as you interact with Christians around the world in various denominations, it's a doctrine that there's really few subjects like it that so easily provoke people to just the kind of sense of outrage and mockery that you can get when you try to apply this doctrine to various areas of Christian practice.

I'm thinking in particular about just the order of worship within a service. The vast majority of churches in America today, they're not looking to the Scriptures to be a sufficient source of revelation to tell us what God has for us as it relates to how we order our worship service.

The vast majority of churches in America are probably charismatic in their leaning. You have pastors of churches who are driving motorcycles into their church service, writing down zip lines. They're doing all sorts of crazy stuff in the society we live in, all of which could be fixed if we just look to the Bible to answer this basic question of what has God revealed for how we should be worshiped today.

This is a doctrine that if you try to point out to people that God has something to say about this subject, you're going to be greeted with hostility. That's true, as I said, of the order of worship. That's true in terms of decision making.

There's a wide variety of ways in which the church has accepted basically the premises of the charismatic movement and how we understand how to make simple decisions. The average person today makes about 35 ,000 decisions a day.

Instead of looking to the Scriptures to be a sufficient guide for how we're to do that, we look to our intuition. Many of us are influenced by a Disney theology that tells us to follow our heart, to look within for truth.

We live in a time where it's very common to look for additional sources of revelation. As I said, the charismatic movement is basically the primary form of Christianity that is exported over the whole world.

They teach us that God really hasn't finished speaking in His Word. His Word isn't enough. We need to look to our feelings. We need to try to discern and look for God's will, to pray for peace. There's all sorts of mechanisms we use to make decisions that aren't leaning on the sufficiency of Scripture.

Perhaps one of the most controversial areas in which we deny this doctrine is as it relates to the topic of psychological illness. If you were to tell people that the Bible has answers to the problems they face in this life, you will be the subject of scorn and mockery of a variety of individuals.

There's few topics that I've spoke about to any length that are so hated than to dare to suggest that God has answers to the typical problems that are so characteristic of the human condition today. As we read this passage today, we're going to be thinking about what this doctrine means and how it should be applied to our life and to the church in general.

The Divine Origin of Scripture

The first thing that you see when we're going to be discussing the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture is the origin of our sufficient Scripture. 2 Peter 1, 3 starts with these words, His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness.

The origin of our sufficient Scriptures is the power of God. If you just turn over your next page or just read a few more verses later, you'll realize in 2 Peter 1, 20, Peter says this, Knowing first of all that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

2 Timothy 3, 16 -17 says that all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete and equipped for every good works.

When you open up the Bible today, you are not simply reading the words of men. You're not reading the fallible opinions of ancient writers who were bigoted and had blinders on with their time. You're reading the very words of God.

And as you think about these truths and these facts, as I said, there's so many people who deny this in so many ways. When I started out doing counseling shortly after seminary, I did counseling with one of my fellow counselors.

He was persuaded and he was convinced that as we drove down the Word, that God had message to him that were to be found in the license plates that we're viewing in front of us. But this is by no means like an isolated phenomenon.

If you think about the broader evangelical world today, we are filled with voices who are trying to normalize this perspective that somehow God has other words to give to us besides the words that were found in Scripture.

And maybe a famous example of this that I'm sure that maybe some of you have heard about would be the example of Beth Moore and her conversation with God. Beth Moore describes a situation where she's in an airport and she sees a homeless man essentially in this airport.

And she feels like she is being led within a still small voice within her heart to go brush this man's hair. But this is what she said. She said, I just thought, oh no, please, oh no, because I'm already knowing he wants me to witness to this man.

So I say to myself in my spirit, and I'm not talking out loud, but in my spirit I'm talking to God silently. I'm sure my mouth is going because I say to him, don't make me witness to that man. Now I'm going to tell you as clear as I'm talking to you now, the Lord spoke to my heart.

There's very few times where I've ever heard God be this articulate with me. And I'm telling you word for word, these words came to my heart. I'm not asking you to witness to him. I'm asking you to brush his hair.

Now are you convinced this conversation had divine origin? Are you convinced that God spoke to her, that he gave her a word? I mean, isn't it remarkable how individuals who claim to have these supernatural revelations along these lines, it seems like always what God is telling them to do is directly opposite of the very thing that he's saying in his word.

What do you think that God thinks about this when we distrust his word in these ways and we don't lean on what he has to say to us in his scriptures? Well, the scriptures is clear that God has not left us in the dark.

He's given us his words. And these words that he's given us, we don't have to guess based on our feelings, based on what we've eaten today. We don't have to be influenced by our indigestion or our thoughts.

God has given us a word. He's given us scriptures that are more reliable than our experience. And we can trust what he has to say in this word because the origin of these scriptures are in his divine power.

The Sufficiency of Scripture for Life, Godliness, and God’s Will

The second thing we see here today is that not only is the origin of our scriptures from God's divine power, but we see the provision of our sufficient scripture. Note what the text says. 2 Peter 1, 3 -4 says, His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness.

God has given man special revelation as a sufficient guide to help us to navigate life. Now, this is one of those things that is very easy to say. It's very easy to say that God has given his word as a sufficient guide to help us handle life.

But you live in a society today that doesn't understand this basic thing. You're living in a society today that has no idea why we're here. The Bible comes to us and it answers these basic worldview questions that all of us should be seeking to answer.

Who are you? Why are you here? Where did you come from? Where are you going? You're living in a society right now that if they would just open up their Bible and they would read the first few chapters of the scripture, they could see that basically everything they're doing is diametrically opposed and opposite of everything that God says.

You live in a society right now where men pretend to be women and women pretend to be men. We are so depraved as a society at this point that you have individuals who are pretending to be animals. That's the kind of society that you're living in.

We're living in the kind of society that thinks that marriage and children are just optional things that God has nothing to say about, that he has nothing to say in his word about any of these things.

Marriage rates are on the rise because we're pursuing anything and everything, but the very things that God has designed us to do, you're living in a society right now that doesn't know why we're here, why we're designed in the way that we're designed.

The end result of all of this is that we're in a society that's killed 60 million babies or more and counting since Roe versus Wade because we're given over as a society to sexual perversion. If you want to think about what God has done for us in the word that he has given to us, he's given us a revelation that is meant to explain to you not everything that there is to know today.

God hasn't given you an exhaustive revelation to explain to you everything, but he's given you a sufficient revelation to answer those basic questions. Why are you here? What did he make you for? What is his purpose for you?

What is his plan for you? What is his design for you? He's given you a revelation that is intending to help you to understand your place in the world, to understand why people do the things that they do.

You look around the world today and you see that people are so confused at basic and fundamental levels. They don't know why they're here. They don't know why God made them. They don't know why people behave the way that they behave.

They don't have any answers to the basic problems of life. They don't have any answers to what their actual design is for the creation that God has made. As I said, you don't even have to go very far in the Bible to get a very specific perspective of why God made the human race and why he put them on the planet and the intentions that he had for them in order that they may glorify him, enjoy him forever, and fulfill the purposes that he has for his creation.

So God has given man special revelation as a sufficient guide to help him navigate life. Now, as I said, sufficient... Most people, when they're criticizing the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture, they criticize it by pointing to the nature of Scripture not being exhaustive.

So they'll point to Scripture and they'll think that what you're saying is that Scripture has everything to say about every single topic as if it's supposed to be some exhaustive guide of all knowledge that exists, but just to give you an example of how this may work, when you think about...

I have kids, I have five kids, so I think in these terms sometimes. If you think about an instruction manual for Legos, is an instruction manual for Legos an exhaustive guide for all that you can do with those Legos?

Does it tell you everything that there is to know about Legos that you could possibly imagine and all the ways in which you combine those things and build it? No, but is it a sufficient guide to help you know how to build the picture on the box?

Yes, that's what it's designed to do. In a similar way, God hasn't revealed everything there is to know about His creation in His Word, but He's given you a sufficient revelation to help you to understand why you're here, what your purpose is, why He's made you.

God's Word is sufficient to help us to navigate life. But then maybe what's even more controversial than that is the second point. God has given man special revelation to help him to know his will. When I first started out college, one of the questions that was in my mind was the question, what is God's will for my life?

That's a good question to ask. You should be wondering what is God's will for your life, but then the more important question you should be asking is, what is God's will, period? Many of us, when we think about trying to answer questions along these lines, you can get so caught up in God's secret, unrevealed plan for all of your steps that He's going to order that you miss just the basic obvious things.

When I started reading the Bible on my own for the first time, trying to answer this question, what is God's will? What is God's will for me? What I noticed over and over and over again as I read the Scripture is that God used that phrase.

God had a will. He had a will. Obviously, He had a will for me. But what He said over and over again is He would flag things in the Bible to tell me what His will was. As you read through the Bible, what do you see?

What does God say about His will? The Bible says that this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality. As you read through the Bible, what does God say? In everything, give thanks, for this is the will of God.

God has revealed over and over and over again in the Scriptures the things that are pleasing to Him. When you look to the Scripture, you want to know what is God's will? His will is that you, you're a sinner, and He's provided a path of reconciliation for you and what Jesus has done for you on the cross.

He's given you specific instructions in His Word on how to be reconciled with God. And in this passage, this is a passage that is intending to tell you how to walk in a manner worthy of your calling. Colossians 1 .9 says,.

And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will and all spiritual wisdom and understanding so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him and bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.

But understanding and embracing this doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture can be an enormous source of comfort for you as a believer. There's an enormous source of comfort to know that God has revealed Himself in His Word.

He doesn't have some secret hidden will that you're supposed to discern and find and strain to discover. He's given you Scriptures in order to help you to know what are the things that are pleasing to Him.

And if you set yourself out by the power of the Spirit, leaning on Him for provision, trusting in His promises to do the will found in Him, that's the only will that He is holding you accountable for.

Do you understand? He's not trying to trick you. He's not trying to trap you. He's not withholding from you something that you need. And you see this no clearer than in the example of Adam and Eve in the garden.

God created man. He created man upright. He put him in a garden, and He gave him a command, don't eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And God gave Adam, I mean, think about the way that this doctrine actually works.

God gave Adam a lot of freedom about the kind of decisions that he could make. He put him in a garden of yes, and there was one no. There was one command that He gave him that He was going to hold him accountable to.

And so all the other questions that Adam might ask, I mean, there's wise ways to live and wise ways to order affairs, but there wasn't any secret hidden commands. There was one command that He gave Adam and Eve, and it was a clear command, and God doesn't have a speech impediment, and He didn't stutter.

And, you know, Adam and Eve obviously failed at this one task that they were given, but the point that I'm trying to make is just to say that God has given you special revelation to help you know and understand His will, and you don't have to second-guess it.

And the more that you embrace that and understand that, you don't have to look for other sources of truth to tell you how to live your life and manage your life, the greater comfort that you can actually have.

The Revelation of God in Scripture and the Knowledge of Christ

So first we've seen the origin of our sufficient Scripture. Second, we've seen the provision of our sufficient Scripture. And third, we've seen the content of our sufficient Scripture. What does it say?

God, through His divine power, has granted us all things pertaining to life and godliness through, so what does it say? It says, through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence.

What is Scripture? A lot of people think about Scripture as if it's just a list of do's and don'ts. It's just a list of commands, and obviously the Bible has a lot of commands. It has a lot of do's and don'ts in it, but what is it fundamentally?

What is Scripture fundamentally? Fundamentally, Scripture is a revelation of the character and nature of God. That's what it is, centering on the person and work of Jesus Christ. That's what the Scripture has come to us to be.

What does John 17, 3 say? This is eternal life, that you may know God. Is that how you think of eternal life? Knowing God and coming to understand God? Knowing God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. You see, the Scriptures come to us to reveal the nature and character of God because our most fundamental problems in life are not just problems of technique.

We think that our problems are just like we need to have practical solutions to our specific problem. Give me some advice, give me some wisdom, give me some counsel. As I counsel people over the years, a lot of people, they're looking to me as a counselor to come and to give them some neat suggestions that perhaps they've never thought about before in their life.

But the issue is that most of the problems that they have in their life come from the fact that they don't know God and they don't really know themselves. They don't have a good anthropology and they don't have a good theology.

The issue is that the more that you understand about the God that made you, the more that you understand His purposes for the world and why He made the world the way that He did. The more that you understand about Him, the more that you understand about yourself and the more that you're able to put every single thing that happens in this life in the context of who God is and the creation that He's made.

As we think about what the scriptures are coming to do to us, God's given us a word which fundamentally in the first instance is a revelation of who He is and who His character is. When Jesus came to earth, what does John tell us that Jesus came to do?

He says He came to exegete the Father. He came to make known the Father. No one has seen God at any time, but Jesus has come to reveal Him. This book that you're given, this book that God through His divine power has produced, fundamentally in the first instance, it is a revelation of God.

When you think about everything, every decision you make in your life, this is part of what it means to live in the fear of the Lord, is to in all your ways acknowledge Him and to realize that He is the most important treasure to be found.

Your knowledge of God will affect how you handle life. Your knowledge of God will affect the decisions that you make. Vice versa, the decisions you make will reveal what you actually believe about Him.

The Precious and Very Great Promises of Scripture

We see the origin of the sufficient word, the provision of the sufficient word, and the contents of our sufficient word. Fourth, we see the promises of our sufficient scripture. The text says, by which He has granted to us His precious and very great promises.

The promises of scripture are precious gifts. I don't know if you think about them that way, but that's what they are, and that's what the Bible describes God's word as. It describes it as containing promises which are precious gifts.

When you think about the way that promises work, there's really, at a human level, it's difficult to imagine a greater promise that can be made than the promise that a husband makes to his wife on his wedding day to say that I'm going to love you, I'm going to care for you, I'm going to cherish you, I'm going to provide for you, I'm going to protect you.

You can't really say a lot of that stuff in today's culture because that would seem to diminish women. But the idea is to say that when you think about the nature of that kind of promise that you're making to another person, you're making a promise to say, I'm going to protect you, I'm going to provide for you, I'm going to cherish you, I'm going to love you till death do us part, forever.

Good and bad, sickness and health, whatever. I'm going to love you no matter what you do, no matter who you become. I'm making a commitment to you as a person, and the same thing is true of a wife who makes the same kind of promises to her husband, to respect him, to obey him, to serve him, to be his helpmate, to be his friend, to be his companion.

You think about those promises that are being made in that kind of moment. Those are precious promises to say that another human being belongs to you. I am my beloved, and my beloved is mine. From a human perspective, there's no greater commitment that you could possibly imagine than something along those lines.

When you think about the nature of those promises, we're human beings. How often do we even remotely live up to the things that we just said? For many people, you can't even get to the honeymoon without having significant conflict because you realize that your mouth is writing certain checks that your body can't catch.

You said those things, you thought you meant them, you thought you believed them. You thought that your great love for this person was going to motivate you to fulfill all these things that you vowed to do, and then come to find out they're very different than what you thought, and this is a lot harder than what you expected.

It's rare today to even see pictures of healthy marriages that last for 10 years, for 20 years, the kind of marriages that you want to look up to, the kind of marriages that you want to be like. It's sad to say that.

You look around the world, you say that there's a lot of people who made a lot of precious and very great promises to each other, and they didn't seem to fulfill those promises like they said, and that was easier said than done.

But when you think about the nature of God's promises to us, God has made some very precious promises to us, hasn't he? And God will fulfill his promises to us. He's not like us. He's not like a man that he would lie.

He has promised you far greater things than any man has ever promised a woman, and promised you far greater things than any woman has ever promised a man, meaning he's promised to cancel your debt of sin, to fix your fundamental problem.

You, his enemy, who despise his ways and want nothing to do with his word, with his will, who refuse to accept him as Lord over your life, he is determined before the foundation of the world to have a plan that involves reconciling his people to himself.

And that plan is a precious promise. Without that promise, we are lost, pitiable men without hope in the world. God's word, like this passage says, His divine power is granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted us these very precious and great promises.

God's word is filled with these precious and great promises that are utterly and absolutely incomparable to anything in human experience that you can possibly imagine. And even the things like marriage that are pointing to those realities, they pale in comparison to the nature of the promises that God has made for us.

These promises are precious gifts, and these promises are very great. Christ has come, and in his word, he has promised freedom from the penalty of sin, that you no longer have to be his enemy, that you don't have to be an object of his wrath, who burns forever in conscious eternal torment, day and night.

And not only that, he's promised not just simply reconciliation, freedom from the penalty of sin, but to adopt you into his family.

Can you imagine that?

The creator of the universe adopting you into his family? So much so that every single thing that you see, the Bible says, blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. God owns the cattle and the thousand hills.

All of this belongs to you. It's part of an inheritance that God has, that's imperishable, undefiled, kept in heaven, reserved for you. God has promises for you in the scripture to reconcile you to yourself, adopt you as members of his family.

These promises are very great. There's no comparison to any of these things. And notice what the text says. So that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that's in the world on account of sinful desire.

God has given us these precious, the promises of scripture as precious gifts that are very great, and they're the kind of promises that you trust by faith. Do you understand? Do you see that in there?

That's in the so that through them phrase. Meaning God, through his divine power, has given us all things according to life and godliness by which he's granted us these precious and great promises. So that through them.

So that through them. That through them. How do we gain access to these promises that God has given to us? We gain access to them by faith. That's what we do. Scripture contains these wonderful, great, precious promises that we trust by faith, not by works.

We're not trusting by our own merit. We're not trying to lay hold of these promises by virtue of our own works. We're trusting God to do what he says he's going to do for us. And that has implications for justification.

What I mean by that is to say that we're reconciled to our maker on the basis of faith and faith alone by trusting in what God promised to do in his word. But then that also has entailments for sanctification, meaning we're trusting in sanctification that God is going to deliver us from the corruption that is in this world on account of sinful desire.

We're trusting that by faith too. So the promises of Scripture are trusted by faith, but these promises of Scripture also provide an escape from corruption. Whatever sins you're struggling with today, Jesus died on the cross to forgive you from all that, past, present, and future.

Christ died on the cross to provide you freedom from the penalty of sin. And what this passage is saying is that he also died on the cross to provide you freedom from the power of sin in your life. And both of those things are accessed by trusting in the promises of God.

What does God say about you now? All those who sin are slaves to sin, right? Isn't that the experience of our life before coming to Christ, that we're slaves to sin? Carrying out lawless acts, leading to more lawlessness, that's God's testimony of the human condition.

There's none that does good, no, not one. They've all gone aside, they've all turned away. There's none that does good, no, not one. That's the testimony that God has of us. But what is the good news of the gospel?

That if the Son sets you free, you'll be free indeed, right? Do you believe that? Do you believe that he's come to set you free from the power of sin in your life? That you don't have to be a slave? You don't have to be a dog returning to your vomit?

You don't have to keep on looking at the same stuff that you're looking at on the Internet? When no one's looking? And being filled with guilt and shame and condemnation from that? Do you believe that God has set you free from the power of that?

That you don't have to spend your life frustrated and angry every day because things don't go your way? Do you trust by faith that God set you free from that? That that doesn't have to be your new identity, that that's the old man that God is putting to death at work within you?

That you don't have to be filled with worry, anxiety, fear? No temptation has overtaken you, but what's common to man, God's faithful, he will not allow you to be tempted beyond your ability, but with that temptation he'll provide a way of escape that you may bear it.

This word that God has given us, this sufficient word, that's sufficient for life and godliness, it contains these very precious and very great promises that the creator of the universe has come to forgive you of the penalty of sin, but also from the power of sin.

And when you experience temptation, you need to turn to this book and believe what God says about the nature of your struggle in the here and now. You understand? Like the way we fight in the Christian life is that we trust that what God says is right and that my emotions are liars and that my feelings are liars, that my sinful heart is trying to deceive me, but God, his word will last, right?

So the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of God stands forever. Whatever God says is right, is right. And we're living in a culture, in a society right now that really just, we really hate these truths of scripture.

And we're being told to blame all of our behaviors and our thoughts and our moods and our emotions on a never-ending list of external factors outside of ourself, whether it's just our environment, our history.

We have whole categories of victimology that we lean on in our culture, whether it's all the intersectional categories of victimhood, the psychological categories of victimization, whether it's blaming your parents, your background, former generations, political structures, systems.

We have all sorts of complicated victim schemes that we've developed in the world today that are going to keep us from looking to this word to tell us why we're here, what God's plan is for us, what his purposes are for us.

And you have a word here that's filled with these very precious and very great promises to us today that we need to trust and we need to depend on because it's a lamp to our feet and a light to a path.

My prayer is for all of us that we leave here today with a renewed confidence in the word of God, knowing that God has not left us in the dark, but has given us a word that's sufficient to help us to know how to honor him.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for what you've done for us today. We know that you have sent your son to die on the cross for us in order to do for us the incomprehensible. We know that Jesus, Lord, is the answer to all of our problems, and we pray that you help us to remember these things and to trust in you.

We thank you for the forgiveness that you provided in the cross. If there's anyone here today who hasn't accepted that forgiveness, I pray that they would not be able to leave without talking to someone and finding hope.

Lord, we know that your words are hope to us. They provide hope for eternal life and hope for this life as well. Thank you for all you do. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.