Sunday Live at Kootenai Community Church

Kootenai Church

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

12:00

Good morning everyone, welcome to Adult Sunday School class. If you'll come on in and find a seat, we'll get started.

12:27

Can you blank the screen, Peter? Alright, let's go ahead and pray.

12:38

Father, we would ask for clarity this morning in our thinking and in our understanding and in the communication of Sunday School and in worship.

12:45

We give our time to you and ourselves to you. We're grateful for the chance to gather around your word this morning and as your people to rejoice and to fellowship with one another and to enjoy our worship and our fellowship with you as well.

12:59

We pray that our time here would be spent profitably and that you would use this information to equip us to give an answer to those who are critical of the

13:06

Christian faith and help us to appreciate how it is that you have worked through history to give us your word and to preserve it for us.

13:13

So we ask your blessing hereupon this time in Christ's name, amen. Alright, we are in lesson 11, defining and defending the canon, and I would just reiterate that I didn't intend for this lesson to be four lessons long, but that's the way it worked out.

13:26

Today we are going to finish it, even if we just say we're done and we're moving on to the next lesson next week.

13:32

So we're talking about canonicity, and again, just to review, the idea of a canon or the definition of a canon is a list or a mark of books that themselves form the rule of faith and practice.

13:42

The word canon simply means rule, and when we use it to describe Scripture, we're talking about a canon in two senses.

13:49

Number one, the list or the rule of books that fit on that list of what we consider to be authoritative divinely given documents, and then second, we use the term canon to refer to the

14:00

Scripture as the canon, which is the measure itself of our life and faith and practice. And we have,

14:07

I would just reiterate one thing from previous lessons that we need to keep in mind as we move forward, particularly today, and that is that when we speak of a book having a canonical value or a canonical status, a belonging in the canon or being part of the canon, we're not saying that that book is conferred canonicity or conferred authority by anything or anyone other than God and the fact that He has written the book.

14:32

So again, when God wrote the book, that is when it became authoritative and canonical. Even if nobody knew that that book existed, the moment that Paul penned that before he even put a letter into the hand of Titus or Timothy or Trophimus, whoever he was sending the letter with, from the moment that it was penned and there in the process of inspiration and that completed product is itself canonical.

14:53

It's authoritative. It's divinely given. So even though nobody else in the world might have known that that document existed, it was canonical.