Sola Scriptura: The Formal Principle Of The Reformation

The Reformation, Its Complicated History, and the Need for Fairness

Turn with me, if you will, to the second epistle of Peter, 2 Peter, Chapter 1, one of the texts we'll be looking at in our examination of the Word of God this evening. 2 Peter, Chapter 1. Before we look to the Word of God, let us pray together.

Our gracious Heavenly Father, we would ask that during these few moments, these fleeting moments that we have together, once again you would meet with us as you have this day already, that you will help us to understand that you will strengthen us in our service for Christ in this coming week.

We do pray these things in Christ's name. This morning we recognize the fact that this is Reformation Sunday, that it is, well, the Sunday at least somewhat close to that day when we recognize the beginning of a very complicated process.

It was not a process that led solely by perfect saints of the Lord. It was not a process where everybody involved had pure motives. They were always either all good or all bad. There were people involved with the Reformation who had bad motivations on both sides.

There is no question about that. But we recognize that God acts in history. And when He acts in history, especially in a major way, that there are going to be people involved with that act of God that are going to have different motivations.

In fact, I know that around here we have made it plain over the years that while we call ourselves Reformed Baptists, we don't do so with stars in our eyes. I know as much as I am very thankful, and indeed I am very thankful for the work of God in people like Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli and people like that.

I happen to know, I recognize, they wouldn't have had fellowship with me. If I held the views that I hold today, I undoubtedly would have been banished from Wittenberg. I would have been banished from Geneva, at best, and at the worst of times would have found myself either in prison or maybe getting my third baptism, as they liked to refer to it.

I recognize that. I try to remember that as I look back at people in the past, I try to judge them within the context that they lived. One of the great mistakes, I think, is that we take people of the past and we retransport them into the present, and we judge them on the basis of the standards that we have, the knowledge that we have, and that frequently will result in somewhat of an unfair analysis.

I know that I desire to be judged in the future in a fair way by those who will look at the work that I've done, and therefore I must extend that kind of fairness and maybe even the term grace to others as well.

Sola Fide and Sola Scriptura as the Reformation's Foundational Principles

But we look at this great movement and we recognize in it that God brought to light the gospel with a level of clarity that in many ways had not been seen since the days of the apostles themselves. And given the fact that now you had the printing press, you now had new technologies that would allow these truths to go far and wide, the world has been greatly blessed by what God did at that time in history.

We saw this morning that the material principle of the Reformation, that which was preached, that which grabbed hold of the hearts of men, was that message, sola fide, faith alone, the empty hand of faith, the denial that there is anything that you and I can bring to God that in some way could earn His mercy, earn His grace, earn His favor.

But we did not speak much about the formal principle of the Reformation, and that was the great truth of sola scriptura. And just as there are a plethora of modern denials of sola fide, even amongst those who call themselves Protestants, let's be honest with you, that term is about as useful anymore as the term evangelical is.

All these terms, which can start off having a very defined meaning, over time that meaning decays. That meaning changes, that meaning broadens so much that eventually it doesn't really tell you anything anymore.

And what it does is it brings about a need for a new definition, new terminology to identify the truth in the midst of all the many manifestations of error that mankind managed to come up with over time.

And so just as there are many denials of sola fide today, from what's called a new perspective on Paul, and the federal vision, and things like this that have arisen just over the past number of decades, and the next decade there will be something I can't tell you about because no one's thought of it yet.

There are always these new things, and every generation is called to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. That's what makes it precious to the next generation that they have had to fight for it just as we have had to fight for it.

And if all the battles were won, then you wouldn't have to fight for these things anymore, and what good would that be? Obviously the church, once it becomes complacent in its battles, is on its way to falsehood in and of itself.

But the other truth of the Reformation that was so foundational, that was not what caused Luther to begin preaching what he was preaching. It was not what caused Zwingli to start preaching what he was preaching.

But it did not take either one of them very long to recognize what the true foundation of their proclamation was. And this had already been discovered by Jan Hus in his short life before he had been burned by the Council of Constance the century before.

By John Wycliffe, the great morning star of the Reformation, the one that heralded the coming of that Reformation. He himself had said that if all the bishops and all the friars in the world were to unite in saying something, that would not have the same authority as something that's taught by the Word of God.

He saw that there was something different about Scripture over against tradition. He saw that there was something that needs to be recognized about the nature of Scripture that gives it an authority that all the traditions of men, all the confessions of men, all the creeds of men, can never have anything but a shadow of that authority.

That indeed, the authority of a creed or a confession is only as great as its fidelity to what is found in Scripture itself. And so, Luther had to discover this as he began to struggle with indulgences and purgatory and the whole doctrine of justification.

He was forced to recognize that the authority behind these false teachings that he was rejecting was an authority that fundamentally overthrew the ultimate authority of the Scriptures themselves. And hence, you had the arising of the controversy at that time over the concept of sola scriptura.

Jesus' Authority Over Scripture and the Challenge of Apostasy

And certainly today, that remains the same situation. Certainly, when it comes to the issue of Roman Catholicism, the single topic I have debated more times against Roman Catholic apologists than any other has been sola scriptura.

Oh, I've debated sola fide. And we've debated the mass and Mary and the papacy and all these things. But it always keeps coming back to sola scriptura. And when I debate Muslims, it always comes back to the sufficiency of the Bible as the Word of God.

Really, in almost every single dispute, it all comes back to, well, the first apologetic question. What was the first apologetic question in all of Scripture? Has God said? That's what the enemy said in the garden.

Has God said? And that really remains the question to this day. In our day, the secular world says, you people are crazy. You look to an outdated book that was written by 40 different authors in different languages over 1500 years in the pre-critical, pre-scientific age.

People who lived out in the desert and didn't know anything about modern science, and you look to that? How silly can you be? And the question remains, has God said? Now, there's no question about Jesus' view on this topic.

None at all. I mean, unless you just simply throw out everything the New Testament says about what Jesus said. And by the way, if you do that, then you have no idea what Jesus said. I mean, you have to become a total skeptic.

We have no earthly idea what Jesus' message was. We don't know why he got himself crucified under Pontius Pilate. We just can't know. You just become a complete skeptic. But if what we have in the New Testament even begins to approximate what he actually did teach, then there is no question of the fact that as a Jewish teacher of his day, he held the Old Testament Scriptures in the highest esteem.

In fact, you remember when he was arguing with the Sadducees and they were trying to trip him up. He said to them, Have you not read? Have you not read what God spoke to you saying? And he quoted from the Laws of Moses.

Specifically from the same book we were just reading from Exodus. Have you not read what God spoke to you? Well, that was 1 ,400 years earlier. And yet from Jesus' perspective, those were the very words of God spoken to these men so that they could be held accountable for what had been written down 1 ,400 years earlier.

Jesus answered any debate with what do the Scriptures say? It stands written. Did not David say by the Holy Spirit? Over and over and over again. He goes to the Scriptures and in arguments of the Pharisees about the role of tradition, he makes it very clear that no matter what tradition you claim you have, including traditions that the Jews said came from God, were given to Moses and passed down outside of the Scriptures in oral tradition, such as the Korban rule, that even those that claimed divine authority in that way had to be tested by what stood written in the Word of God itself.

See Matthew 15. There's no question what Jesus' view was. And when we have people standing in pulpits, we have people standing behind lecterns in schools that were started by our predecessors, people like you and I who believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and gave of their life's monies to found these institutions.

And when we have people standing in those places that deny the authority of the Word of God, they deny its consistency, they deny its inspiration, you know that you're living in a day of great conflict and great apostasy.

And that's the day in which we live. Now, when we think about sola scriptura, we need to remember what it meant then and make application today, because the issues are the same. If it's a religion that's denying it, it's because they want to substitute another authority.

If it's the secular world that denies it, it's because they don't believe that there is a supernatural realm from which God could speak in the first place. Even though they do make the rather odd argument that given what we believe, that God's the one who made us as communicative beings, God made us as individuals who can speak and desire communication with one another.

I'm not sure why God couldn't do it if he made us that way. He must have that capacity. It doesn't make much sense given the starting premises of the argument. But anyways, sola scriptura does not mean that everything that could ever be known about God, every truth that man could ever know, is contained in the limited number of words, just over somewhere between five and six hundred thousand words, I think, grand total.

I'm just going off the top of my head there. There's 187 ,000 in the New Testament and I think it's around 400 ,000 some odd in the Old Testament. Those are not enough words to communicate to us every single truth that could ever be known.

I don't know if Brother Callahan remembers this, but the example he used to use is you can't get the information to rebuild a Borg-Warner automatic transmission, 350 or something like that, out of the Bible.

I remember that. See, people do listen to you, Brother, even decades later. The scary thing is, my son could probably actually imitate Brother Callahan actually saying that much better than I can. It's a very frightening thing to see, personally.

But anyways, the fact is that's not contained anywhere. You can look in your concordance all you want. There's nothing about automatic transmissions. And there are some people who say, see, that disqualifies the Bible from being the Word of God because it is not an exhaustive compendium of all knowledge and that, of course, is not what Sola Scriptura means, and we've never claimed that.

It's also not an exhaustive compendium of all religious knowledge. There are limitations to Revelation. God Himself has said, the things that reveal belong to you and your children forever, but the secret things belong to the Lord our God.

And even this morning, remember what Paul said in the Scripture reading this morning? Oh, catching you now. Brother Boyle's better because he's the one who read it. But what did Paul say? He knows man caught up in the third heaven.

He heard things that men should not speak. So he knew things. They're not in the Bible. Not revealed there. So, Sola Scriptura is not a statement that we know everything Jesus ever said. Because the Bible specifically says that's not recorded here.

There was a day, undoubtedly, when the disciples walked up to a fork in the road and they said, gee, which way should we go? He said, we'll go that way. We don't know which way that was. So I guess that denies Sola Scriptura.

No, that denies a misidentification of Sola Scriptura. We don't know the color of Matthew's eyes. We don't know what size of sandal Judas wore. There are questions you can ask that we don't know the answers to.

But that has nothing to do with Sola Scriptura. It has nothing to do with the Bible's ability to function the way that God intends it to function. When Peter wrote to the early church here in 2 Peter, he talked about his experience on the Mount of Transfiguration.

And he heard things. We don't know everything that was said. Do we? On the Mount of Transfiguration. I mean, the Father speaks out of the cloud. Moses and Elijah are there. Jesus is there. He's transfigured before them.

And there's talking going on. You've got the law, the prophets, the fulfillment in Jesus. Wow, I'd like to know what they were saying, wouldn't you? And is the Bible incomplete because we don't know? Well, only if you think that the Bible's role is to give us an encyclopedic revelation of everything there is to know could you come to that conclusion.

But he's talked about it. And when he says that, verse 19, he then says, so we have the prophetic word made more sure to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

What is that text saying? Well, we have a more sure word than Peter's own personal experience on the Mount of Transfiguration. Because, see, you can't share his personal experience. I mean, you know about it.

Obviously, the Christians knew about it. It's part of the Gospel record. But they weren't there. But what we do share together is that which God has given to us in the Scriptures. And he says that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation.

You need to understand what that means. Many, many times, that's been used by Roman Catholics, for example, to say that you can't interpret the Bible on your own. It has nothing to do with what Peter's talking about.

Nothing whatsoever to do with what Peter's talking about. He's saying that the source and origin of Scripture is not from a prophet sitting around and he contemplates God. This is very much sort of the Hindu way of thinking.

You contemplate the greater universe and you come up with wise sayings and it comes out of yourself and your wisdom. No, Scripture never came about as a matter of one man looking at the world and interpreting what the world is about.

It doesn't come from mankind. Because no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will. There was never a day when David went out on the hillside and he said, oh, what a beautiful day it is. I think I'll be inspired of God to write a psalm that will be a part of the people's hymns forever and it will be a part of the Word of God.

I think I'll be inspired today. No. No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will. Now certainly, Paul decides to write a letter to the Romans. But Paul did not sit down saying, I'm going to write Scripture today.

God, give me the words to say. Instead, the description you have at the end of verse 21 literally is, but men carried along, moved by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God. Now, men spoke. Men spoke. We do not deny that.

My Muslim friends really struggle because they read Paul and Paul says to Timothy, bring the cloaks and the parchments. And they look at something like that and this is just Paul telling Timothy, it's getting cold, could you bring the jacket I left someplace and could you bring the parchments either to write on or to read, one of the two, maybe both.

This is just Paul talking to a friend about travel issues. How can that be the Word of God? Well, interestingly enough, the Koran says that the Psalms were given by God as well. And boy, there's a lot of personal stuff in the Psalms.

My heart is broken, or I rejoice, or my enemies are surrounded. There's all sorts of personal stuff like that in the Psalms. There's inconsistency in the Muslim perspective. But the point is, they're expecting, if it's called the Word of God, it's just simply God in heaven speaking.

But that's not what we have here. Men spoke. And they spoke in their own language. Paul did not know English, and he did not write in English. But I can guarantee you, when you look at the Greek New Testament, and there are a number of you who are learning Greek right now, press on.

Remember, Greek without works is dead. Only a few of you got that one, but that's okay. It's alright. Press on in your studies. If you read, thank you very much, brother. I appreciate that. It's almost as good as an amen, but it's a good chuckle anyways.

But if you read the Greek New Testament, then you know that the person who wrote Hebrews did not write 1 John. Now, you can tell that even in the English translation. But let me tell you something. You can really tell it in the original language.

I mean, I can tell the difference between Paul and John and Mark and Luke. And that's why when you ask, so who wrote Hebrews? Well, it's a whole lot more like Luke than it is Paul. I can guarantee you that.

And one thing that's absolutely certain is John did not write it. There's just no question about it. There's different styles. There's different vocabulary. All sorts of things like that. There are differences in what we find.

Men spoke, but what they spoke was from God. God intended us to know that it's important to care for one another and that it's appropriate for Paul to express his desire to Timothy that he bring the cloak and the parchments.

There is nothing wrong with that being the Word of God. We can learn from this. We can understand the importance of these things to Paul as he's in prison and his desire to continue in the apostolic ministry.

There's no problem in that being the Word of God. But you see, they are moved. It's literally carried along by the Holy Spirit as they speak. And therefore, as they speak, the Holy Spirit guides them so that while they are the ones being used as an instrument, they're not just simply an automatic typewriter.

They're not like Dragon Dictate. If you know what that is, I have that on my computer. It's a pretty cool program. It makes some funny errors at times, but it's a pretty cool program. And I can just sit there and I put a headset on and I can just start talking and there it is on the screen.

And most of the time, it's exactly right. You have to keep an eye on it because you can get yourself in trouble, but it's normally just... Is that what Peter was? Is that what Paul was? Just all of a sudden...

Just start writing? There's a lot of people who think that's exactly what Scripture is. That the person was irrelevant. It's not what it says. But it does say, men moved by the Holy Spirit, carried along by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God.

This describes the nature of Scripture and explains why Sola Scriptura must be true. Why? Because the foundational truth of Sola Scriptura is that Scripture is absolutely unique in its origination and nature.

The normal text that people look at, it's either this one or Paul's words, that all Scripture is Theanostos. It is God breathed. And as such, it's profitable for all the things the man of God needs to do in the church.

There is nothing other than Scripture that is Theanostos. Nothing. When my Roman Catholic opponents try to deny Sola Scriptura, they inevitably have to place the quote-unquote divine traditions of the Roman Magisterium on the same level.

They might try to differentiate, but functionally, they're elevating something else to the level of being Theanostos. God breathed. I don't like the term inspired. I've seen a number of translations, but inspired is a Latin term.

Inspiratus, which means to breathe into something. And that's not what we're talking about. It's not that God took human words and breathed something special into them. We use the term inspired. That was an inspired performance.

That's not what Paul was saying. And that's the only place where the term is used in the New Testament. It literally refers to the very breath of God. The origination of this comes from God Himself. And so it is the nature.

Remember what Jesus said. Have you not read what God spoke to you? That's the same thing Paul thinks. That's the same thing Peter is saying here. And that's why you must believe in Sola Scriptura. Because nowhere in the Scriptura are we told that there's anything else that is of equal authority.

In fact, allegedly divine traditions that allegedly come from God are specifically subserviated to the authority of the inspired words of Scripture in the teachings of Jesus Himself. And so unless you're going to call, unless you're going to be honest about it and be like the Mormons anyways and say, well, we have more books of Scripture.

We have the Book of Mormon. We have the Doctrine and Covenants. We have the Pearl of Great Price. At least you're honest at that point. At least the Muslims are honest and we've got a whole new book of Scripture.

We needed something more. Then, of course, you have to ask, well, then what do you teach about Jesus? And you discover that none of them have the truth about Jesus. Because as Jesus is described in Scripture, remember Hebrews chapter 1?

In the olden times, God spoke to the fathers by the prophets, but now in these last days, He's spoken unto us by His Son. So, why would He then have to go back to the old ways? You have to make the revelation in the Son insufficient and lesser than whatever revelation you're now going to put forward.

And so the revelation of the very Son of God becomes inferior, that which comes through Muhammad or through Joseph Smith and the prophets of the Mormon church or whatever else. But at least they're being honest and saying, we have more Scripture.

Most groups are afraid to do that. Most groups recognize, well, boy, if I start saying I'm actually giving Scripture, I'm putting myself on the same level as Paul and John and Jesus. Listen, I might have a hard time with that.

And so what they do is they find more subtle ways, I would say, less honest ways to bring in an external authority. And they're not going to want to say it's Theanostas, it's God breathed, but in reality, that's what they're saying.

Because that's the only way that you could undo the final authority of Scripture. It's the only way you could do it. Bring in something that has the same nature as Scripture. Now it's interesting, probably the most common argument that is used by those who try to deny Sola Scriptura today from the Roman Catholic perspective is they'll say, well, you can't believe in Sola Scriptura because that way you don't know what the canon is.

You can't believe in Sola Scriptura unless you have an infallible authority that defines what the canon is. Now they get away with this because, let's face it, I mean, we're weird, and if you show up, I see some of you smiling, you took that as the loving compliment that it was meant to be.

We bear that title well. We have discussions of this. We have discussions of the canon of Scripture, and we've talked about the apocryphal books, and we've talked about what the canonization process was, and all the rest of this type of stuff.

And I've preached on this very subject in the past, and so it is something that we talk about, and I would hope that those of you who have been here for a lengthy period of time, you've heard the pastor preaching, you've heard me preaching and teaching, you've heard Brother Callahan teaching in the Sunday School class, that you would have some knowledge of how we understand the issue of the canon of Scripture and the fact that it's not some external revelation to that.

It is a part of God's inspiration of the Word. The canon, in fact, comes into existence because God is the author of it. In other words, as soon as God writes one book, a canon exists. He infallibly knows the nature of that canon.

God infallibly knows what He's inspired and what He has not inspired, and since it is His purpose that we as His people know what He's given to us, then He communicates that to us with sufficient clarity so that we can know what the Scripture is and is not without making that another revelation.

We don't need a 28th book in the New Testament called Index or Table of Contents or something like that. But most Christians, Roman Catholic people, most Christians, whether they be liberal Protestants, don't even think about this, it's just sort of a tradition, it doesn't matter, but evangelicals who might engage with Roman Catholics on the subject of this issue, that's just not something that's talked about a lot.

I mean, you've got 66 books, and your books, you've got a book called Bell on the Dragon? Wow, that's pretty weird. And that's pretty much the depth of the discussion that people have had. And so they get away with it.

They get away with it despite the fact that it actually refutes their own position. I will never ever forget, in fact, it's really funny, just a few years ago I found a picture that my host took of me at this very moment while this was happening.

But one of the most interesting experiences of my apologetic life took place in Massachusetts. I had done a debate at Boston College with Jerry Matitix on the subject of the Apocrypha. And he and I had both thought, man, we're going to put people to sleep with this one.

It ended up being one of the most interesting debates we ever did. One of the rowdiest debates we ever did, actually. I mean, it was Boston College, there was a bunch of monks sitting out there, and monks, you know, get excited about things.

Anyways, I had been told that a radio interview I was supposed to do, I think the next Monday morning, had been canceled. Well, I had been given wrong information. And so I and my host were driving around out in Southbridge, Massachusetts, and we happened to turn the radio on, and there is the program, and they're wondering where I am.

So we go zooming back to the house and jump on the phone, and I call in, and there was still plenty of time. That was supposed to be like a two-hour program. And so Jerry and I start going back at the very same subject.

And out of the blue, I had not thought of this, it was not prepared. As I said, I had just run into a house from a car and jumped on the phone, and all I, you know, I was trying to grab luggage and pull Bibles out and stuff like that, sitting on the edge of a bed.

And in the midst of all this, I came up with a question for Jerry. And this question has been repeated so many times now that I actually heard it on a Roman Catholic apologetics program in 1996 called The White Question.

I've got a question named after me. That's pretty good. I suppose that's some accomplishment in life. But all of a sudden, I said to Jerry, Isaiah and 2 Chronicles were Scripture 50 years before Christ.

And that's exactly what happened on the radio too. Now I'm an old radio guy. Dead air is not a good thing. People start changing the station as soon as you get dead air. You don't want that to happen.

Even in an interview, it was silent. What was the question again? How did the believing Jewish man know Isaiah and 2 Chronicles were Scripture 50 years before Christ? Now why would that be relevant and why was he stumped?

And why is any meaningful, fair Roman Catholic stumped to this day by that question? It's real simple. If their argument is you need to have an infallible guide, an infallible external source to define the canon for you, well, what was the infallible external source 50 years before Christ?

I've had some Roman Catholics say, it was the Jewish Magisterium. Really? Well, there's no question about the fact the Jewish Magisterium rejected the books you've canonized in 1546 called the Apocrypha.

So if they were infallible then, why aren't they infallible now? I think Jerry knew that. The only other option is you don't need an external authority to define these things for you, but that's what he was arguing was his whole argument against the whole Scripture was you need the Roman Church to tell you what Scripture was.

The problem is the Roman Church didn't tell you what Scripture was until 1546. So evidently until 1546, nobody could know what the Bible actually taught. And yet all the great doctrinal controversies of the Trinity and everything else had already been worked out by that point in time and evidently was done so without the Scriptures, which of course is an absurd view of church history.

So no matter which direction he went, he would have to blow a hole through the center of his own argument with whatever answer he gave. And you may say, haven't they come up with any other answers since then?

It's been a long time. Yeah, that was 1993. Coming up on the 20th anniversary of that particular instance. Wow, you know you're starting to get old. There was one. Someone actually said, well, they could have applied to the Urim and the Thummim.

Remember the Urim and the Thummim? The stones in the breastplate? And they could have cast lots to find out what the books of Scripture were. Now of course, 50 years before Christ, not sure that those were even still around.

They may have been lost during the Babylonian captivity. But you're really saying to know that Isaiah 2 Chronicles of Scripture, they would have had to have gone to the high priest and cast lots to find out this was divine Scripture.

That's what you're telling me? So when Jesus preached and held people accountable to these things, they could have literally said, I don't think that it's proper for you to hold me accountable for that because I haven't gone to the high priest to find out that's actually Scripture.

Remember that happening in Matthew? Yeah, it's in Matthew chapter 32. Think about Matthew for a second and you'll realize why that was somewhat funny. It's impossible. So he had no answer. Sola Scriptura is simply the recognition that God has given to us in His written Word what He intends us to have.

We may sit around and go, oh, I wish this was clearer. I wish that was clearer. But everything that we need to live a life of godliness has been given to us in Scripture. And much of what causes us to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ is struggling with these very issues.

I don't know about you, but I don't think just simply having an encyclopedia that you can just look it up from A to Z and say, oh, okay, here's the entry. This tells me how to do this. That's not how you bring people to maturity.

You have to think things through. You have to struggle with things. You have to make applications. That's how we mature. And God has given to us a clear Word of God. And He has preserved it for us down through the ages.

Scripture as the Sole Infallible Rule of Faith and the Call to Stand on It

But remember, what was that first apologetic question? Has God said? Has God said? And that same question is asked of you every day. The young people in this congregation, when you go to school, when you talk to other people your age, you end up in university or college, whatever the context might be, you're going to be challenged because they don't believe God's spoken.

They have this weird belief that God creates men. And even though God speaks, He doesn't. Weird thing when you think about it, isn't it? God makes us as communicative beings and then the heavens are silent.

That's not what Jesus believed. You're going to be challenged on every level. You're going to be challenged about the consistency of this book. And I believe that we should be people who take seriously those challenges.

And if we've demonstrated anything by the fact that Brother Broyles was reading about labors for washing of feet this evening, and the fact that for almost 10 years we've been working through synoptic Gospels, we could have gotten through the Gospels a whole lot faster if we didn't bother stopping and talking about those little synoptic problems.

It'd be so much easier. Easier on me, believe you me. You see, we demonstrate by how we handle the Word of God in this place that we do take those things seriously. There's a reason for it. I love the fact that Brother Callahan, Brother David Callahan, the little littler Callahan, comes back from college one day and he says, Hey, remember when you'd talk about X, Y, and Z all the time?

Now I know why you talk about X, Y, and Z all the time. You told us that we'd be challenged in that. I was challenged in that in a Christian place. Yeah, I know. I know. I actually do teach out there once in a while.

We need to know this because we want to be people who are ready to engage our society. We want to be ready to be salt and light. And that requires of us things it didn't require of the generations before us because of the context in which we live.

Sola Scriptura. The Scriptures are the sole infallible rule of faith. We maintain that against those who present other rules of religious authority. We maintain that against those who deny that there is any revelation from God whatsoever.

And God, by His grace, may He continue to make us strong in our stand upon the inspiration, authority, and sufficiency of Scripture. Let us pray together. Indeed, our gracious Heavenly Father, we do thank You for the Word of God.

And we thank You that You have established it forever, that You have preserved it for Your people. You draw our hearts out to memorize it and to study it and to love it and to stand in awe of it. We thank You that it unites us together.