@Nate-Davidson said in Abandoning the Sufficiency of Scripture:

Are there areas in my life where I’ve stopped looking to Scripture, where I’ve stopped being reformed by the word of God? I’m still thinking through these questions. I want the Bible to be an open book, and I want to submit my life, my doctrine, and my ministry to the life-giving words of the King. It’s amazing though, how easy it is to just drift away from this life-giving doctrine in the small, daily decisions of life and ministry. We just stop asking. We just stop looking. We just stop digging. We just stop reading.

That’s very challenging, Nate. I’ve just been thinking about this in the area of parenting boys and girls (since my wife and I have a young son, and are expecting a baby girl early next year). As I’ve thought about doing that, specifically with raising a boy to become a man and a girl to become a woman, I’ve come to feel profoundly ignorant about what Scripture says about the specific roles of men and women. What characteristics should I endeavour to train in my son, specific to his masculinity? How about my daughter, specific to her femininity? What does Scripture say about their adult lives that I should be training them towards? For “the boy is the father of the man,” as the saying goes.

So I’ve decided to do some serious study on this, and I’ll be sharing some results in upcoming FB Lives. It’s just too easy to assume the axioms and thought processes of the world, instead of assuming the principles of Scripture because I’m building my life on their bedrock, and their truths become just “the hum of the gears of my mind in neutral” (to borrow an image from John Piper). But that requires digging and hard work, as you said; we are too often lazy.

How do you live out this doctrine in life and ministry? Have you seen examples of people who know who have lived out this doctrine well? Have you seen examples of people who have functionally abandoned this doctrine even if they still affirm it on paper?

So the way I’m going to try to live out this doctrine is by not just reading and studying the Scripture verse by verse and chapter by chapter, but by exploring specific topics throughout the Scripture.

There was a man in a previous church I was a member in, when I was a teenager, who lived out the authority and sufficiency of Scripture. He would talk about various topics and bring Scriptural principles to bear on them—things I hadn’t thought of before. He helped me see how important it is to live scripturally.