Audio

TranscriptHow do you define “sufficient?”

I hope you have your definition, your usage of the word sufficient, in mind. Let me tell you why this is important. Several Sundays ago I was sitting in my church listening to the pastor speak. He was talking about how at our church we believe that scripture is sufficient. It is what we need. It is everything that we need from God to know about him and to live a life of holiness.

I reflected on that because I often try to think how what is being said is going to be understood by other people. Now I think the pastor at my church does a wonderful job communicating or I wouldn't go there, especially communicating the Gospel, or I wouldn't go there.

Nonetheless, I think it's interesting, as someone who speaks and communicates, to think about how certain phrases are going to be understood by other people.

There is a doctrine in Christianity called the sufficiency of scripture. This is what my pastor was talking about. He was saying scripture is sufficient. It is all we need from God for certain things.

I sat there and I thought, "I don't know that that's actually going to communicate to people in a younger generation, or maybe just people living in America today, in the way we would expect." Now I would have said it exactly like he said it. This is not a criticism at all. My point is this doctrine called the sufficiency of scripture may not communicate.

If you were to ask someone, outside of talking about the Bible, or scripture, or Christianity, how they think of the word sufficient, it probably doesn't have fireworks going off in their mind when they think about it. It's kind of like if you were to ask someone after a meal, "How was that meal?" Let's say that you cooked for them, and they said, "Oh, it was sufficient." That's not really a ringing endorsement, is it? You're not going to be thrilled, and they probably weren't thrilled either if they said it that way.

"How was the preparation you had for that test?" "Well it was sufficient." Even the way we say the word sufficient kind of has a tone that conveys that it's lacking something we would have wanted. It may have been what we needed but it's not what we wanted. I think there's the possibility for people today to bring that kind of concept and tone and color to mind when we talk about the sufficiency of scripture.

The sufficiency of scripture is the doctrine that the scriptures are complete. They are lacking nothing in terms of what we need from God to live lives of holiness, to know the Gospel, and to know he expects about us, and to know him.

Now it's not the teaching that the scriptures are all we need to know. Period. That wouldn't tell me how to fix a car. It wouldn't tell me how to do my job and it wouldn't tell me how to turn the AC on in my house. There are other sources of knowledge we need. The question comes, which one is the ultimate authority? Which one is the ultimate source? More than that, what are the sources that are able to tell me about God authoritatively?

Let's go to scripture and see what scripture says about itself. In 2 Timothy 3, we see that

The sacred writings are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

They're at least sufficient for that. They're sufficient for telling you the Gospel, what you need to know to be saved, and bringing you to have faith in Christ. That's a huge thing. There's nothing else that can do that besides the scriptures.

It continues:

”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 competent and equipped for every good work."

There's a lot of in there. In fact, it's saying that the scriptures are all we need to be capable and e…