SERMON: Sola Scriptura

The Authority Question: Sola Scriptura

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. And we pray that as we declare the Word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you. I want to begin this morning with a question. And it's not particularly a very clever question. It's not a very complicated question, but the most important question that perhaps you and your loved ones will ever ask.

And it's the question Job himself asked in Job chapter nine, verse two, while he sat down in the ashes, he said this. How can a righteous or how can a man be righteous before God? How can a man be righteous before God?

Martin Luther's Crisis of Conscience

That's the question. Now, in the summer of 1505, a young law student named Martin Luther asked this very same question. Luther was walking home along a country road in Germany when a thunderstorm rolled in on top of him.

And according to historians, a bolt of lightning struck so close to Martin Luther that it threw him to the ground in mortal terror. And right there lying in the mud, certain that he was about to die and stand before a ravenously holy God, Luther cried out the only aid at the time that he knew how to by saying, help me, St. Anne, I will become a monk.

Now, as a Catholic of his day, it would have been normal to appeal to a local and popular saint. And given Martin's father was a miner who worked in the mines and St. Anne just so happened to be the patron saint of miners, one can reasonably conclude why Luther would have found this particularly helpful.

But regardless of who the appeal was addressed to, Luther believed that he was appealing to God and he believed that God had spared him and he believed that he had made an oath that he would have to go into the priesthood.

And in fulfillment of that promise, he walked away from a prestigious law degree that his father was more or less working two or three jobs to put him through. And he walked straight out of that and into an Augustinian monastery and slammed the door behind him.

Luther does nothing unintentionally. And what is fascinating about Luther is that he actually tried to earn his way to God. He tried to make it up to God for sparing his life. If anyone in the history of humanity ever attempted to discover how an unrighteous man could have communion with a holy God apart from God doing the work, then Luther was that man.

Because Luther knew the villainy of his own sin nature and the total depravity of his soul, Luther fasted with so much fervor that he became a bag of skin and bones. He prayed with such deliberate intensity often all through the night that his health and his body became on the verge of collapse.

He slept in a freezing cell in order to pursue penance for himself, to punish himself for the sins that were ever haunting him. He went to confession so often and so meticulously and he stayed so long detailing the ever lengthening list of sins that was before his mind that his confessor finally told him, you are not allowed to come back again until you have a sin worth confessing.

But none of his efforts actually worked. The harder that Luther labored towards holiness, the heavier the guilt laid upon him. And that was because underneath all of that religious performance was the same haunting question that haunted Job that would not let Luther sleep at night.

And that is how can an utterly guilty man be right before an infinitely holy God? Every data point that Luther examined, every inventory of his thought life, every glimpse into the darkness of his own soul stalked him like a hungry vulture watching you in the desert.

Luther, for his part, was not as eccentric as he may come across. He was not being as extra as we often attribute to him. He was not being hyperbolic for the sake of being hyperbolic. Martin Luther was being far more honest than the majority of men.

He was being far more honest about the state of his soul, and he had good reason to be terrified. And the fact that we so often are not says more about us than him. He was merely asking out loud the very same question every single one of us are going to have to answer when the lightning storms of eternity strike between our feet.

Transition from Proverbs to the Reformation Solas

Now, some of you may be asking, why are we talking about Martin Luther? Why did we transition from the series on Proverbs? Why didn't we go to our next mini series on the book of Proverbs? I liked Proverbs and what are you doing?

Maybe you're asking that. Well, for months now, we've been walking through this great book of Proverbs, watching how the wisdom of God reaches into every nook, cranny and crevice of our life. And what we've seen happen is when the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, gets a hold of a man, it actually works itself down into his mouth, his marriage, his money, his work, her work, and the things that he and she does that nobody else can see when no one else is watching.

We have seen how our practical theology, which is the root or the fruit of our faith, intersects with the practical theology, which is the fruit of our faith. We've seen how what we believe about God, which is the root, takes physical form in the way that we live.

That's the fruit. In Proverbs, we were not looking primarily at the root of our faith. We were looking at the fruit. We were looking at Christian behavior. We were looking at what we must do in light of what Jesus Christ has done.

We were looking at Proverbs as Christians who know that we can't do anything righteous without Jesus doing that work for us. So we were looking at Proverbs as a way that now that we're Christians, how do we live in every facet of life?

But lest any of us would ever be tormented like our dear brother Luther and mistakenly believe that there's some set of rules that if we would only but follow them, a list of do's and don'ts, that if we would just do well enough, then God would finally accept us.

We have to balance out our look at the Proverbs and at Christian living with the actual root of what Christianity is. We have to connect the obedience of the gospel to the actual faith of the gospel so that we will know beyond a shadow of a doubt how we are saved and to what end we are saved.

So over the next six weeks, we're going to turn from the fruit of our salvation in the book of Proverbs, and we're going to be looking at the root of our salvation in the gospel. And we're going to dig down deeply into the bedrock of our faith.

And we're going to ask the same question that Martin Luther asked in the monastery. How can a desperately guilty man or woman be reconciled to a maximally holy, righteous and pure Almighty God? How can that reconciliation happen?

Is it by man's work or is it by God's? And that question, my friends, is the most important question that you and I could ever ask. It is a matter of life and death. If we get that question wrong, we get the gospel wrong.

If we get the gospel wrong, we have no saving faith. We do not have Christianity. We have nothing more than a damnable, man-made religion that cannot save, but will only condemn, that will only drown, that will only damn.

The Five Solas of the Reformation

And to ensure that we get this question or at least the answer to this question rightly, we're going to study this through the lens of the five solas of the Reformation. Now, if you're not familiar with what that means, I want to tell you in the words of Inigo Montoya, we're not going to explain, but we are going to sum up.

We don't have time to explain, but we will sum up. The church, by the time of the 16th century, which was 1 ,500 years removed from Jesus's resurrection and ascension, the church had become hopelessly and needlessly perverted and corrupted.

The pure doctrines of Scripture, especially the most glorious doctrine of salvation, which scholars call soteriology, had been plunged into the same pig pod that the prodigal son had been drinking in all those years before.

The Catholic Church, mired in ghastly heresies and repugnant traditions, was using the Bible as a tool of manipulation, a weapon against God's people. And they were preaching doctrines that were so contrary to the Christian Scriptures that one may not even call them Christian.

And by the grace of God, a movement to return to the Bible and what it says about truth and doctrine began in what we now know as the Protestant Reformation. And during that Reformation, several key Catholic dogmas were exposed as damnable heresies and were reformed back to the Word of God.

And praise be to God for that. Now, what are the five solas? Well, there's one very common way of analyzing what happened in the Reformation. It's certainly a microcosm of it. It is a helpful mnemonic of it, not the totality of it, but it's simply what we call the five solas of the Reformation.

Sola is the Latin word that means alone. And these five statements, Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, were the rallying call of the Reformation. They were the exact beachheads where the Reformation attacked the heresies that had been brought in by the Catholic Church.

Sola Scriptura, sola Fide, sola Gratia, sola Christus, and soli Deo Gloria became a helpful way for us to remember and for them to remember all the ways that the Catholic Church had erred and what salvation actually is as revealed in Scripture.

Now, I think it's important to remember that the Reformation was not seeking to be another disparate option on Christianity. It was not a new denomination and it was certainly not intended to create a sanctified group of eggheads who are puffed up in their sinful pride and who stuff their churches full of doctrine that is so pristine and pure that they're afraid of visitors.

The Reformation was looking to rescue the church from the doctrines of demons that had crept in and were destroying Jesus's church. In this way, the five solas were not just a slogan that we put on T-shirts, although you can get some great T-shirts and coffee mugs and key chains.

And well, we live in a very materialistic age. But they were five declarations of what God has done to save His people. And there were five battle lines drawn against every false application of the gospel that robs Christ of His glory and leaves the sinner looking at Himself instead of Christ and His, to save Him.

The Reformation was not a quarrel over minor customs. Men were not burned at the stake because they had a difference of opinion on the color of church drapes. Rome had bound the conscience of men to a false authority and a false gospel.

And by the 16th century, Rome was teaching instead of Scripture alone, it was Scripture plus tradition that communicates saving faith, that they had elevated tradition to the same level as Holy Scripture.

They had elevated the words of the Catholic Pope to the same level as Holy Scripture, the creeds and the counsels to the same level as Scripture. Instead of faith alone, it was faith plus your works that guaranteed your salvation so that if you did not have works, you were not saved or at least you could have no assurance of it.

Instead of the grace of God alone and your justification, it was grace plus your human cooperation and your human merit. Instead of Christ alone, it was Christ plus the priesthood, Christ plus the sacraments, Christ plus.

And instead of salvation for the glory of God alone, it became a joint effort between you and God where both of you participated in your salvation and both of you inherited the glory. It was a Jesus plus religion.

Jesus plus, Jesus plus, Jesus plus, Jesus plus, which is not the gospel of salvation at all. It's nothing more than a man-centered religion that sends the sinner back upon himself for his own works, his own merit, his own cooperation, back to the monastery, back to the cold cell, back to the fasting, back to the flagellating, the beating of his self, back of returning to his own vomit in a sense to save himself.

It is a gospel that cannot save, and Luther proved it. There's absolutely nothing a sinner can do by his own merit that will put him in right standing before an almighty and holy God. The harder you try, the harder you fall.

And all of us have fallen short. All of us. Not one of us here is worthy. Not one of us can save ourselves. No, not even one. But the glorious doctrine that Luther discovered, rediscovered, hidden among the ashes, was the one that was almost completely forgotten in his day, is that God does not expect us to save ourselves.

God does not expect us to penance ourself into heaven. God does not expect us to obey our way into salvation or be copious enough in our confession that we've confessed every single sin. If we understood the depth of our sin, we would realize that we have not confessed all of our sins.

There is a litany of an uncountable number of sins that we have not confessed and we never will. We can't work ourself back clean. Luther discovered that salvation taught in the scripture alone was a salvation by faith alone, by grace alone, in Jesus Christ alone, into the glory of God alone.

And that, my friends, is the good news. And that is why we are called a reformed church, not merely because we trace our history back to a grumpy little 16th century Augustinian monk. We are reformed because we believe every doctrine must be dragged back under the authority of the Word of God.

Not with popes, not with councils, not with papal bulls, not with the traditions of men, not with what we believe or what society tells us. We believe that all scripture is inspired by God under the authority of God and must be submitted to by us, joyfully so.

The God-breathed scriptures alone are our final infallible authority for what we must believe to be saved and what we must know in order to live a life in relationship with this God. And that is where the Reformation began.

Introducing Sola Scriptura

And that is where we will begin this morning, looking at the very first of the five solas, which is sola scriptura. Now to do that, we're going to look at what scripture says about scripture, what the authoritative Word says about its authority.

And in case you're wondering, is that circular reasoning that the scripture is going to tell us about the scripture? Well, the scripture is in its own category since it is the very Word of God and there is no higher authority with which it can appeal.

So the scripture is authorized to talk about its own authority. And we're going to begin with what the Apostle Paul says. And we're going to basically be in one, or we're going to be in one passage of scripture for our time today.

If you will join me in 2 Timothy chapter three. Which is where we're going to begin our time, which is where we're going to spend most of our time this morning. And we're going to answer a couple of questions.

What is scripture? What authority does scripture have and why must we be sola scriptura or scripture alone Christians? So I will read 2 Timothy 3, 14 through 17 if you want to read along with me. But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of.

Knowing from whom we have learned them and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction and righteousness that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you so much that you have not left us unaware that you have given us scripture. And Lord, also, there's so many things we could be thankful for. So many things that we're often remiss to even remember that we should be thankful for.

Lord, I think about during the Reformation, the average person could not read. And if they could read, they certainly had no exposure to the Bible, which often was chained to the pulpits that it was preached from so that no one would take it.

And Lord, how wonderful and grateful we must be that now we have more Bibles printed than people. Lord, thank you for that blessing. Thank you that you have spoken to us through your word, that your word elevates human societies out of the squalor.

You sanctify people through it. You sanctify us, shape us, change us through understanding what you have said in your word and your spirit's power at work in your word in us. Lord, we thank you. We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen. That was a good amen. Now, we begin today with sola scriptura because every other question that we could ever ask rests upon one authority question, and that is who has the authority to share with us truth?

The Question of Final Authority

Before we ask how a sinner can be justified or how an unrighteous man can be in union with a righteous God, we have to get underneath that. We have to ask who has the right to actually define what salvation is?

Who has the right to define what the pathway to salvation is? Before we argue about grace and faith and glory and the church, we have to know the voice that actually settles the debate. And the question that we need to be asking ourselves is this.

Who is the final word over the people of God? Is it man? Is it popes and councils or is it God? And this is a critical question because the church in her weakness has often been tempted to answer this question wrongly.

In the long ages of the church, that's 20 centuries that she's been on earth to this point, she has repeatedly listened to other voices instead of God to define who she is and what she believes. At times, she's cowered to the voice of kings and wicked despots.

At other times, she's cowered to the halls of academia and cultural pressures. Recently, a Christian apologist, Frank Turek, has been on the news with a little debate and skirmish that he had with Ken Ham because Frank Turek finds the young earth creation hard to believe in light of what science has said.

Ken Ham asked him, then who is your authority, science or God? It's a good question. Sometimes the voice that we've cowered to has been the voice of the world. But needless to say, this temptation has been struggled with throughout the church.

And perhaps there's no better example of how the church has cowered to the wrong voices than how the church struggled in the 16th century and the events that were leading up to the Reformation. And that day, Rome controlled the Word of God.

They still preached out of the Latin Vulgate, which no one actually spoke so that no one could understand what they were saying, so that when you went to church, you just sat there and listened to the mumblings of the man in the funny vestments up front.

And with that, the Roman Catholic Church treated the Bible like a whip that they got to braid however they wanted so that they could use it as a whip against the backs of God's people to manipulate and control them according to every whim and fancy from their immoral Pope.

Luther's Monastic Discoveries

And into this world, we meet the German monk, Martin Luther. After that lightning storm and in the subsequent years in the monastery, Luther had discovered three essential facts about reality. The first one is that God is unimaginably holy, that no one may approach him unless they too are equally holy.

The second fact that he learned is that man is not by nature holy, that we are not righteous by any stretch of the imagination. We are conceived in iniquity and we have the condition of being unable to escape from it, which led to the third discovery that Luther made, which that man is so utterly incapable of pleasing God that there is nothing he can do, no litany of religious activities that could ever cleanse his soul or assuage his guilt.

Luther discovered that God is unimaginably holy, that we are not and there is no path forward for us by our own strength and effort. He was haunted by the constant nagging sense of his own repugnance, that his duties were never good enough, that his repentance was never sincere enough, that his confessions were never complete enough, that his behaviors, his thoughts, his actions, his affections were never righteous enough to bridge the chasm between him and God.

And after years of agonizing in this state, paralyzed by his own mortal fear and awful guilt and an almost last ditch effort, Luther traveled on a sacred pilgrimage to the holy city, Rome, in order to find some way, some route, some hope that he could make his way back to God.

Now, according to Luther, what he found there was a carnival of religion instead of faith in God. He was instructed when he got there to climb the Scala Santa, which is supposedly a holy staircase that Christ himself had to climb before Pilate.

And he purported that as he went up from it, he had no hope. His drudgery was even worse. It was on that staircase that Luther questioned the custom, even wondering who had the authority to tell him he had to climb up this staircase.

Who was it that said that? Was it God or was it man? And if it was by the authority of man, sinful man, then Luther had no hope because that man was just as bad off as he was. Luther also found the same kind of madness and confusion in the reliquaries all across Europe, which were purported to hold sacred items that if you could just get in their presence, then they would bless you.

Relics of the faith. Luther himself remembered that while he was in Rome visiting these holy relics, he had found so many splinters from the cross of Christ that were supposedly held in churches that you could reassemble Noah's Ark.

And it wasn't only in Rome. All across Europe, churches claim to possess all kinds of holy relics. For instance, a few of my favorites. One church purported to have the breast milk of Mary. One church, Jesus's baby teeth.

One church, a piece of his umbilical cord. And about four churches all at the same time said that they had the holy foreskin at the same time. Apparently, it must have been fruitful and multiplied. Beneath the comedy of all of this set something tragic and grotesque.

Mary. In the scriptures is the one who pointed away from herself and pointed to her servants to look to her son, look to him. Don't take your eyes off of off of him and put them on to me. And yet Catholic Church was doing just that.

It was the apostles who likewise preached Christ, that he was the one who was risen and reigning. And yet the people of the 16th century were being taught to believe and to seek resurrection power through relics whose stories could not be substantiated and whose blessings never came.

And on top of all of this was perhaps the most grotesque example of Rome's harlotry. And that was the practice of indulgences. Rome taught that after a man's guilt was forgiven, temporal punishment would remain for him in the afterlife and a made up magical place called purgatory where they would have to agonizingly atone for and work off their sins as if the blood of Christ were ineffectual to save them.

And yet Rome claimed that it had the authority that if you paid the right price because they're so gracious that they could remit some or all of your temporal suffering and purgatory by dispensing extra grace to you from a treasury chest, metaphorically speaking, called the treasury of merit.

Essentially, what happened was that the saints had done more good than they needed to get into heaven. Not you, but the saints. And because the saints had additional extra merit, God in his grace had placed it into a treasure chest and put none other than the Pope over its dispensation so that if you paid money to the church, which just so happened to be raising money to build St. Peter's Basilica, no connection whatsoever to those two events.

If you paid money to them, then you could have your loved one sprung out of purgatory. Johann Tetzel at the time had the little quip that he would say as he walked through the German towns, a coin in the copper rings a soul from purgatory springs.

They were manipulating the people. And in that world of religious shenanigans and manipulation on October the 31st, 1517, 499 years ago, Luther nailed his 95 theses on the castle door in Wittenberg. Those 95 theses were, which an entire lecture could be given on them.

And we could go into much more detail, but in a sense, those 95 theses represented Luther's 95 biblical reasons why the prophet had to be killed. Why the practice of indulgence was sin and how it was a sin against the very authority of God.

He asked the question, who had the authority to declare blessings? Who had the authority to promise heaven? Who had the authority to alleviate suffering and to confer grace and to bring salvation? It was not the man in the funny hat.

It was Christ and Christ alone in his word alone. And it's precisely here that the Reformation fires were set ablaze and the first great soul of the Reformation was unleashed. And that is that God alone and his revealed word alone has taught us how we may be saved.

Scripture's Divine Authority and Inspiration

Luther discovered then what we need to discover afresh today, that it is Scripture alone, which is our final authority, Scripture alone. And we know that because 2 Timothy 3 teaches us that Scripture comes from God and Scripture bears the authority of God.

This is what Apostle Paul says again in 2 Timothy 3, 16 through 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.

The word translated inspiration there in this passage is theonoustos, which literally means the breath of God. What Paul is saying is that Scripture comes from the breath of God, comes from God himself.

He's not saying that the Bible originates as man's highest collective thoughts about God or the musings of some eccentric guru in Nepal. He's saying that Scripture is breathed out by God. It proceeds forth from God.

It carries the weight and the authority of God. In the same way that my breath carries both my words and my authority with it, so the breath of God carries forth his words and his authority as well. And that is the question that Luther's story has been pressing us to consider.

Who actually has the right to declare faith and life and blessings and pardon sin and to bring sinful man in communion with God in answer to Job's great question? According to the 16th century Catholic church, the Pope could assure a sinner.

The holy staircase could bring you blessings. The magical multiplying foreskin could bring you happiness. I'm so sorry. That's not what Scripture teaches. Scripture teaches that God alone has the authority, that God alone has spoken through his word, so that we never need guess how we come into blessings, how we're to have life, how we're to be saved, how we're to be pardoned, how we're to be in union with this God.

The same God whose power and holiness terrified the trembling Luther is the same God whose unrivaled authority is displayed in the word in which he breathed out, which tells us that if you want to know what God requires, if you wanna know what he forbids, if you wanna know this very God who has chosen to bestow mercy upon us, then you have to know his word, not the silly, stupid opinions of men.

Human Agency in Scripture's Communication

Now, that does not mean that God has spoken his word independent of men. God did chose to speak through real human people using their own words and proclivities and memories and circumstances and personalities.

You can read David and it sounds like David. You can read Paul and it sounds like Paul. Luke investigates and carefully arranges his account like an educated man of science. And yet through these messages, God by his own breath supplied his word over their personality so that in fact, it was God himself speaking through men.

That's why Peter says in 2 Peter 1 21, holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. The human authors were not erased in the process. They were carried along by the breath of God so that their words were not truly theirs, but they were by God's miraculous power, truly his.

And because scripture proceeds forth from God, it not only bears his character and his quality, but it bears his supreme authority, which means the very first question that you and I ought to ask whenever we sit before the word is not, do I like this or do I agree with this or does this passage fit with my opinions or how does this make me feel?

It should be what has God said. For when God has spoken, the Lord of all reality has spoken. The one who created universes and flung them into motion out of nothing has spoken. And it's his unparalleled word, unrivaled authority that is Lord and authority over your life.

Sola Scriptura and Subordinate Authorities

This is where sola scriptura begins. Scripture alone has the authority to tell us how man must be saved. Now, notice I'm not saying solo scriptura in that there is no legitimate authority that we may consult apart from the Bible.

I would not tell you to go home and fix your car by opening up to Leviticus. God has given his church faithful teachers and evangelists. He's given us throughout history, faithful creeds and catechisms and confessions.

He's given us men who are brilliant in the discipline of law and medicine and astronomy and cosmology that those are good things in order to read. We read in the Belgic Confession, other books exist. They just don't carry the same authority as the Bible.

Their authority is real, however, but it's subordinate authority. It must be always tested by the word of God, corrected by the word of God, kept in service to the word of God, which is why Ken Ham could rebuke his brother saying, what authority have you been trusting in?

The apostle Paul says, all scripture and how Timothy has known the sacred writings from his childhood, which would have been the scriptures of the Old Testament. I find that fascinating because the Old Testament is the part of the Bible that we're most tempted to throw away.

And Paul says that it is scripture that Timothy was raised up on from the moment he was a child. And he's going even as far as saying that apostolic writings of the New Testament are on the same level as the Old Testament scriptures.

Peter teaches this very same principle when he places Paul's letters alongside the rest of scripture in 2 Peter 3, 15 through 16, saying that Paul is writing holy scripture, which is a fascinating thing for him to say and a true thing for him to say.

And we know that God continued to speak through his apostles until the entire canon of scripture was completed. And from that moment forward, the canon was closed. There is no more revelations from God.

There is no more books that are going to be written that are going to be added to the Bible. God has given us a faithful word and the canon is closed. The church simply received and recognized the books that God wrote.

And now those are our authority. Now, that's the first thing that we ought to know is that the church or is that the scriptures itself carry God's own authority, not the popes, not the councils. The second thing we need to know is that scripture is all sufficient for everything God requires.

The Sufficiency of Scripture

Paul says wise. It makes Timothy wise for salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. It teaches, reproves, corrects and trains in righteousness. And it's stated purpose is that the servant of God by reading it may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

And in its immediate setting, Paul is preparing Timothy to stand firm against the rising tide of false teachings that was occurring in the first century. He doesn't send him searching for a relic. He doesn't say, Timothy, if you could just find the breast milk of Mary, then you could complete what is lacking.

He sends him back to the holy scriptures, to the ones that he's known since his childhood, the ones which will make him wise for salvation through faith in Christ and will equip him for every good work.

Notice that Timothy's childhood scriptures were the Old Testament. But even more than that, Paul is not pretending that the entire New Testament has already been written here and or that it's been finished here.

Paul is saying that the teaching spoken or written word of God that was even being written in the first century is carrying the same authority as the Old Testament scriptures. And it is the word of God and it can make you wise into salvation.

The point is that God's word is the source and the measure of all Christian faith and that the apostolic witness was still being delivered by God's appointed messengers and the church received it. Once that foundation was laid, the church never again could claim revelation.

Christ, the word of God, was the cornerstone. The apostles and prophets formed the foundation and we, the church, have been built on top of that and nothing else. Since then, we receive the truth, we guard the truth that was once for all delivered to the saints.

Jude, verse three. That is what is meant by sufficiency of scripture. There's so many churches today that will say that God's word is infallible, which means that it cannot err or that God's word or that it has no possibility of being wrong or that it's inerrant, which means it has no error or that it's inspired, which means it's breathed out by the breath of God.

Amen. But how many churches hold to the sufficiency of scripture that it is his scripture alone that is our authority in God? I remember being in the big Eva megachurch and how they would affirm with their lips that scripture is the final authority and yet every week they would muster up these grand performances to affect the emotions of people so that they could create an environment of worship because it's not the scripture that's sufficient, it's our performances.

I remember even as a new believer at a church, you may have heard of it, called Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, where we first heard this and were shocked by it. We were in a volunteer role called the bullpen, where we were taught that our job is to raise our hands on purpose in worship so that other people will feel comfortable to worship because when you have an experience, you're more likely to experience God.