The Importance of Sound Doctrine
Tom Shrader begins a new series called Christianity 101 by establishing why sound doctrine matters for Christian growth and leadership. Drawing from 1 Timothy, he outlines six benefits of biblical knowledge (substance for faith, stability in testing, accurate Bible handling) and six dangers (remaining theoretical, lacking love and grace, idolizing knowledge). He emphasizes that doctrine flows from the gospel and must be lived out, not just learned.
“If you know enough to believe the Gospel, you know enough to share the Gospel.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Christianity 101 (2014)
Recorded: March 20, 2014
Duration: 37 min
Themes: doctrine, faith, knowledge, truth, growth, foundation, teaching, maturity, new believer, christian leader, pastor, teacher, mentor, struggling with doubt, seeking deeper understanding, young adult
Scripture: 1 Timothy 1:10-11, 1 Timothy 3, 1 Timothy 4:15-16, 1 Timothy 5:17-18, Acts 2:22-24, Acts 2:37, 2 Timothy 4, Ecclesiastes 10:19, Philippians 4:13, Matthew 5:16
Theological Themes: sound doctrine, biblical knowledge, scriptural authority, theological foundation, doctrinal stability, gospel centered, biblical literacy, christian education
Full Transcript
I continue to be the absolute stud in rehab. You know how when Mickey Mantle would get in the batting cage and everybody would stop? When I get on the treadmill, they stop to watch me on the treadmill. It's an amazing thing. Rehab is good. Everything's just going well physically.
We're going to Tucson on Friday. Sandy and I, one of us is running a half marathon. My job is to get her to the start line and get my Kindle and get to the finish line. So we're going down. Pray for us. We'll be in Tucson.
Starting a New Series
You have outlines in front of you, and we start a new series today. This is different than what we typically do. You are accustomed to this amazing wit and humor and insight. This series, and particularly today, lacks the humor part. But the insight is strong. The series is Christianity 101.
So if I said to you, where should we start this series? What would you say? Doctrine. You have the outline in front of you. Feels like a U of A alumni meeting here for a minute.
Here's what I would typically say. If we're going to do 101, we want to talk about God. We'll spend three weeks. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. We'll talk about you and the human condition. We'll talk about the world screwed up. How did it get this way? So we'll talk about resurrection, all that.
The Foundation: Authority and Truth
It makes sense to start with Bible. Because these discussions you have are all going to go back to, well, you say, I say, what's our authority? If we take it over into government, we go, here's the Constitution. When we're all done with any argument, if it goes far enough, it goes to the Supreme Court. Once it gets there, that's the end of it. That's the final word. That's the final authority. For us, that's the Bible.
Now, we go back one step prior to that. This is a huge point. You live in a world that is not sure that truth exists. Or if it exists, it's totally subjective. So I'm in a discussion with a lady, and we're talking about Christ, resurrection, and she said to me, "Well, that's your opinion." Well, I said, "I understand that's my opinion. But it's my opinion that two plus two is four. The fact you tag opinion on it doesn't mean it isn't right." So the question is, where do you get that? That's next week. That's the Bible.
The Importance of Doctrine
What we're going to do is spend 45 minutes trying to press upon you that doctrine is important. Now, if I said last week, we're going to talk about doctrine next week, we could have had this meeting in a phone booth. Because doctrine, the idea is it's necessarily boring and dull. My goal today is to not reinforce that, but to have you say, no, it's really essential.
Fighting Two Myths
So there's a couple of myths that we're fighting. One is this. People have a tendency to say, this is 101, I'm way beyond it. My guess is you aren't. I'm not. I just started a study on God. I ordered three books, and they're all old books, Knowing God and Knowledge of the Holy and Your God is Too Small, to come back and to go through that 101 again and again and again.
As the guys in the Midwest start to bust out their golf clubs, they go 101. They go back to the grip, the stance. Spring training, they're a little bit beyond it now. But those first two weeks, they're just drilling, getting the pitcher over to first, cover and first, hit and run, signals, basic coverage. Well, this is our 101. You are not beyond this. You come back to it every year.
Here's the other thing I see, which is the exact opposite, and it kind of stuns me. I'm around a lot of really smart people who either come to Christ later in their life or begin to study this. These are people who can do all sorts of technical things, doctors, lawyers, tech guys, smart people, who when they come to the Bible, though they're afraid to say it, are really intimidated by it and think it's beyond them. So it's neither one of those. And it's absolutely essential.
Defining Doctrine
Look at Webster's definition. It's on your outline. Something taught as principles of a creed or religion. So that's what we're looking at. Tenet, belief, dogma, handed down by authority as true.
You live in a world, get this, where everybody is a theologian. So if we go to Fashion Square today, and we're in the food court, and we're hanging out, and I say, you pick anybody, it doesn't matter, pick anybody you want. And you go, that gal. And I go over and I say, can I talk a second? Yep. You mind if I ask you a couple questions? Nope. What do you think about God?
Now, she may even say, "Well, I'm not a theologian." I say, that's all right. What do you think about God? But out of it comes a theology. I think that He or she or it is this power. It's a distant power. I don't believe in it at all. I'm an evangelical Christian. I'm a Buddhist. I'm all encompassing.
I have a friend that just planted a church in San Francisco. We had coffee yesterday, and he was saying, he said, "I used to say that everybody is tolerant except when you get to Jesus. But this is the most tolerant city I've ever been in. Even when it comes to Jesus, they go like, oh, that's good for you. That's interesting for you." But everybody is a theologian, and we need to understand that.
The second thing is that the doctrine is what brings about or becomes the basis for that theology. So 101, doctrine is important, starting with that principle.
The Foundation in Acts
When we talk about doctrine, and I'm going to tie it closely into Bible, obviously what we're talking about is learning. If you go back into the book of Acts, here's what happens. Jesus has risen from the dead. He's hanging out with these guys. He's making appearances. He gathers them together, and He says, you stay here in Jerusalem. Don't go. And they said, "Well, is this, you're going to set up the kingdom now?" And He said, you don't need to know that kind of stuff. Or as somebody might say, that's above my pay grade. But here's what's going to happen. You're going to get power because the
Holy Spirit is going to come upon you. And then Jesus blows into heaven. They're praying and waiting. The Holy Spirit comes. It's Acts chapter 2. And now, obviously, they have that power. It's the same, by the way, just so you know, it's the same power we now get at the moment we believe. So we're not sitting waiting.
Now, Peter gets up and delivers this sermon. The essence of it is in Acts 2, verse 22, 23, 24, where he says, Jesus was delivered up by the predetermined plan of God. You nailed Him to the cross, but the grave couldn't hold Him. When you're talking about what's the essence of that message, it's the essence of the Christian faith. It's the cross.
Verse 37 tells us the people are listening and go, my golly, this cuts us right to the quick. What should we do? And Peter says, repent. Have second thoughts. Reconsider. Re-evaluate. Turn. They do, and there's 3,000 people that day.
The Foundation of the Early Church
What do you do then? Well, then they organize, in essence, the church, which is about four things. The apostles' teaching, breaking of bread, fellowship, and prayer. So you got the teaching, we'll come back to it. Communion, which is its core, is nothing more than a reminder of the gospel in our community.
Fellowship, which is more than just eating together, because what was happening there, and I have spent 28 years trying to explain this away, and I can't. What they were actually doing was selling material things to transfer wealth to those who didn't have it, not through taxation or something imposed upon them, from an external force. The only thing compelling them to do this was not the government, it was the Holy Spirit. And then they're praying.
What are they teaching? What are they learning? It's the apostles' teaching, and so for us, it's that scripture.
Six Benefits of Biblical Knowledge
Now, I want to give you, and they're not on your outlines, and if you want to write them down, great. If not, they'll be on the tapes. I'll give you six things real quickly that I benefit from learning or from knowledge or from scripture, and then six dangers.
The first thing, it gives substance to my faith. Most people are, and naturally would be, somewhat ignorant, certainly about the scripture. So I remember a guy coming to me, and he's pitching me on the Bible, and I said, it's filled with errors, and he said, and you all have heard stories like this, but this actually happened to me, and he said, it's filled with errors, and he said, I'm really busy now, why don't you go home, get your Bible, find ten of them, and we'll meet tomorrow morning and talk about it. And I had to admit, number one, I didn't have a Bible, number two, I'd never read it. But it was very helpful to say it was filled with errors, because then I didn't have to deal with it. Well, our faith is not a hope, hope, hope. Our faith is trusting the certainty of what God says. Knowledge does that.
Here's the second thing. It stabilizes us in times of testing. What do you do when you go in today and they say, you know, we're shutting down your department, and you go, well, this is alarming to me because I'm the only person in it. Yeah, I know, we don't know how to say it, but we thought this would be better. Or the doctor calls and says, there's this spot on your X-ray, and it doesn't look good, you need to come in. Bring a lawyer and your spouse, that kind of thing. What do you do in that? How do you flinch in that?
I have sat with people, I think of one couple in particular, eight years, tried to have a baby. She got pregnant, the baby delivered early, pound and a half, foot long, died right away. Dad so convinced God was going to give him a girl that he painted everything in this kid's room pink. It was a girl. And now we're preparing for the memorial service. And they're saying, all we want to do is talk about God and who He is and the attributes of God, His grace and His mercy and His love. How do you get there? Knowledge gets you there.
Knowledge as Defense Against Error
Here's the third thing. Knowledge enables you to handle the Bible accurately. Three is kind of offensive. Four is kind of defend or detect or confront air, defensive.
So somebody comes up to you and they go, you go to that priority living thing, right? Yep. You know, they believe that you take the Bible literally, right? Yep. Well, do you know that in Ecclesiastes chapter 10, verse 19, that Solomon says money's the answer to everything and you take the Bible literally, so money's the answer to everything, right? Well, are you stumped at that point? Or do you say, you know what? Yeah, we need to take the Bible in its totality. It's pretty clear as we look at Solomon's intention there and what he's saying. And as we look at all the scripture that that's not what's happening.
Just like when some guys, some clowns on TV the other night, Philippians chapter four, verse 13, I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. I can make this business work. Well, that's not what that's saying. It says I've learned to live with a lot. I've learned to live with a little. I can survive here in circumstances. Why? I need to know the word with that.
And then that's kind of offensive. Defensive is as air comes at you, it's the fourth thing, you're equipped to handle it. So Larry used to always tell that story that I presume is fictitious, but it's just a wonderful picture story of the time that Valley National Bank was facing. There were some, these $20 bills, counterfeit coming into the valley, and they took all the tellers, Secret Service came in, and they took all the tellers and they put them through this course. And at the end of it, they said, we're done. And they said, well, wait a minute, when are you going to show us the counterfeit? And their answer was, no, we've spent all this time identifying and familiarizing you with what a real $20 bill looks like, that when a counterfeit comes in, you'll know it. Now, I assume that's not a true story, but it preaches really well. Now, in my example, I just can't remember anything. I've never been able to
The Dangers of Knowledge
I retain great chunks of things, but I retain even less. So once I teach a lesson, I'm done with it. If you want to come up and stump me with some question, it's real easy to do. But you won't slide false doctrine by me, because I know the real thing pretty well.
Here's the fifth thing: it gives you a sense of confidence. Not in yourself, but in God and what He says. You can handle this. The last thing is this gives you just a good foundation to filter through—it's very similar to number four—filter through all sorts of these life issues, superstitions, fears, all that goes with it.
Now, I'm going to do something that you wouldn't typically do here. You've already detected we spent a lot of time just setting all this up. There are six dangers I've identified with knowledge too.
Number one: it's dangerous if it remains theoretical. So if all you do is, I've learned this, but I've never applied it. That's why we'll talk about this Bible studies, and we'll talk about it like a science class where I do classroom work and then laboratory work. If I'm learning and it's theoretical, then I have a huge danger in that. Very easy for me to become apathetic, or the flip side, arrogant.
Balancing Truth with Love and Grace
There's a second danger: if I don't balance this truth with love and grace. One of the problems with guys like me, and people who hang around guys like me, and churches like ours, is that we really do feel we know where the truth is. If that truth is not communicated and lived out amidst love and grace, it becomes very arrogant, very repulsive. It is not winsome.
It is our responsibility, privilege, as followers of Christ, to present the truth in such a way that it is winsome to the people around us. I know a lot of Christian guys who are angry at the world that's lost. They're lost. They don't know. You're mad at them, and God loves them, and your responsibility is to love them, and to present the truth in love and grace.
When Learning Becomes an Idol
Here's the third danger: if I've got this teaching, and the whole goal is simply to learn. So I begin to idolize the Bible, the knowledge. This used to happen to us all the time. We'd go to people's houses, and they'd say, "You know, ten people were going to play games." And I'm not a big—you know, I don't know, whatever. Then they'd always pull out this Bible trivia game.
Well, I hated that game. On two counts. One, I didn't know any of the answers. Two, the guy who brought the game had spent all day studying the cards, obviously. There's no way you know this. They'd have some obscure thing that I couldn't even find with a word processor and computer. But if I go, "Oh boy, I know this, and I know this, and I know this, and I know this," and I study, study, study, study.
I meet these guys all the time. They study, study, study. Listen to Christian radio. Study, study, study, study, study. They know all of that stuff, but it didn't make any difference in their life. The whole goal is to study. That's a danger.
Confusing Knowledge with Maturity
Here's the fourth thing: if you measure your maturity by your knowledge. So I'll say, "How are you doing spiritually?" "I just read Martin Luther's Bondage of the Will." Really? Well, that's really interesting because I didn't ask what you read. I asked how you're doing spiritually.
We have to be very careful if we begin to equate learning and knowledge with maturity. It's to grow in knowledge and grace and love.
When Learning Becomes an Excuse
Here's the fifth thing. Danger of learning: if it tells up to a certain level, it becomes an excuse to do nothing. So somebody will go, "Oh, I'd love to go do that stuff, but I don't know enough." So some of you have had your lives changed, and you've got family members, friends—you know the list—and it's now a responsibility for you to go and to share that with them, and you're going, "Well, I can't really do that because they're going to ask me questions, and I don't know the answers."
Well, that's your pride that's in the way. So fundamental, elementary, basic truth: if you know enough to believe the Gospel, you know enough to share the Gospel. If you know enough to believe it, you know enough to share it. So if I elevate learning to such a level that it's learn, learn, learn, all of a sudden, I just don't know enough. I'm not going to say anything.
I'm telling you, there's great freedom in this. Just simply say, when they ask you those questions, just simply say what? "I don't know." It's really freeing. "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." He knows. I mean, just say it.
Knowing About God vs. Knowing God
Here's the last thing, and then we've got to get after this: knowing about God can keep you from the real thing, from knowing God. In J.I. Packer's classic work, Knowing God, one of the points he makes at the beginning is just that. We can know a ton about God and not know God.
There was a guy that was at our church. His father had written four or five books on theology. I can't remember how many. This guy would say to you, but there's no way he's a Christian. He knows a ton about God, a ton about His attributes, but he doesn't know them at all.
So as we set up this whole discussion on knowledge and doctrines and tenets and beliefs, there are these six benefits, but there are these six risks as well.
Paul's Letters to Timothy
In this book that we're looking at—and I'm going to have you open your Bibles, if you would, to 1 Timothy—we studied, ironically, when we stopped last time, 2 Timothy. In these two letters, Paul's writing to, I would argue, his favorite person on the planet, this young man, his protege. He's writing him, in essence, a manual on the Christian life and how to nurture others in that life.
There are 10 chapters in these two books, all of them contain the word instruct or teach or doctrine. It's really important. A couple other things, by the way, about Timothy: he ends up being the pastor at Ephesus. Here's what's kind of speculative and these are the things that you love. These are just, because you kind of go, "That'd be cool if it's true," don't know that it—
Sound Doctrine and the Gospel Connection
But tradition says that John, who wrote the gospel, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, Book of Revelation, actually attended church there in Ephesus and that even Mary, the mother of Jesus, attended church there. I don't know that. Can't build that argument. But that's tradition. There's a key guy communicating key things to Him.
Seven points that are all in your outline, the scripture's there with them, let me just fly over and make sure we hit them. Sound doctrine, in essence, is including, so not limited to, but including and flowing from the gospel. Verse 10 and 11: whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, that is, that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God which He entrusted to me. Sound doctrine and the gospel go hand in glove.
The gospel's this: you and I sinned, we're separated from God, God remedied that by sending Jesus to come and to die, if we believe. Jesus rose from the dead, if we believe that, we're saved, if we don't, we aren't. That's the essence of the gospel.
But one of the things we do at church is we take communion every Sunday. That flows from the idea that we see that model a lot in the early church. The essence of communion is, do this in remembrance, remember me. Go back to the cross. Go back to the death. Go back to the resurrection.
The Past, Present, and Future of the Gospel
I look at the gospel itself and I see past, present, and future components to it. I go back to the cross and I see how Jesus solved my sin problem in terms of my heart, which is a heart of stone, can become a heart of flesh, and my destination is changed from hell to heaven. That past is taken care of. And also in this, I know my future is secure.
I know that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. I know that in the midst of whatever this is that happens in my life, however bad and awful or even good it gets, no matter how bad it is, it can only last a lifetime, and then I spend eternity with Him. Past, present, but now the future component or the present component, He gives me the strength to live daily. How do I get through this day?
That's why we say, I need to preach. I'm talking of somebody who's walked with Christ for decades. I need to preach the gospel to myself every day. That sound doctrine flows from this idea, the gospel.
Sound Doctrine is Essential to Lead
Here's the second thing. It's really interesting. It's essential to lead. In 1 Timothy 3, Paul's writing to Timothy and he's saying, you need these guys called elders in your church. Now, he tells them very little about what they do. The massive amount of literature is about what kind of guys are they? They ought to do this and they ought to do this and they ought to do this and they ought to do this.
In the midst of this, he slides in because he also creates another role in here called deacon that are more busy guys, that are guys that are doing the work so that elders are really focusing themselves on the teaching and dealing with the spiritual condition and spiritual issues of the church. They're not trying to fit an ideal world. They're not trying to figure out buildings. They're not trying to figure out how to do this stuff. We got spiritual problems in the church. You guys handle this. We got other guys to do it.
The only qualification we see in there that separates the elders from the deacon is the ability to teach. Now, I'm going to make a leap here that I'm comfortable with. You can't teach what you don't know. If you're going to lead, and I don't even mean lead a church or a group of 50 or 500. If you're going to be the leader God has you be in the family or at work, you got to know this stuff.
Leadership in the Home
I had a meeting, wonderful meeting yesterday with a mother and her daughter and her daughter was visiting. She's from out of state. And just talking about how difficult it is in their town to find a church, how she's involved in the church, but how she's really struggling with the leadership in the church. And also how her husband, who she says is a believer, just doesn't want to lead in the home.
In fact, he just said, listen, I'm fine. You go ahead and lead it. I'm fine with that. And we just had to remind her that's not really an option. Your role in the home is not to lead it. Yours is to submit to him, even though he's right now not giving you a very good leadership.
But every person who's a follower of Christ should aspire to have those qualities in their life. And they flow from sound doctrine.
Sound Doctrine is Necessary for Spiritual Growth
Here's the third thing. Sound doctrine is necessary if I'm going to grow spiritually. Now, this is really important. I don't know if you need to write this down, but you need to understand it. Sound doctrine itself doesn't guarantee growth, but it's necessary for growth. Just because you know, it doesn't mean you'll grow. We've made that point earlier.
I'm going to tell you something here right now. This is a huge deal. I'm going to connect point three and four. If sound doctrine means really biblical literacy, I'm going to connect these two.
Walking and Talking with Our Children
You can do this. Probably, I don't know. We're living in the old house. It had to be six, seven years ago. Because I get guys all the time. I can't get my kids to talk to me. Well, here's the thing. Here's how you get them to talk to you. Take them for a walk. You don't go in the car and let them put on any radio they want.
All my girls know all the oldies. Why? Because we always said, if you're going to listen to music, it's going to be our music. We're not going to listen to that stuff. So, it's fine. But we just better turn it off, so we talk.
So, one of the girls, I wanted to talk to him, and not much is happening. So, I said, well, let's go for a walk. So, I grab a cigar. We head out. We're walking. I came back. I said to Susan, I saw something tonight. Not once, not twice, three times. I can't believe it exists. She said, what was it? I said, I'm walking through the neighborhood. We're gone an hour. I said, I saw three guys in their garage working on a car.
I can't imagine this. And she said, "You know what, Slick? You have no clue how people live. I mean, people do this. They work on their cars. Why would they do that?"
So, the next night, I go for a walk, and any guy that's out working on his car will talk to you. He won't talk to you about anything, but he'll talk to you about his car. So, I just went up and I said, "Hey, man, I'm walking by. I saw you working on your car. What are you doing?" Some carburetor, I don't know, something. Here's what I said to Him. I said, "How'd you learn to do this? Are you a mechanic?" "No, computer programming." "How'd you learn to do this?"
Every guy, almost every guy tells the same story. When I was a teenager, my dad and I bought an old jalopy, and we tore it apart. And then we just put it back together again. And the first one, we had a whole bucket of parts left when we were done. I didn't know where they went. And I just did it. I said, "Oh, come on. You had to take a class." He said, "I didn't take any class. I've just torn apart 1,000 carburetors. I've just done this 1,000 times." And I almost said, "I could never do that." He said, "Oh, you could do that if you just played with it."
Learning Scripture Takes Practice, Not Just Classes
I want to take that illustration and bring it right to the study of scripture. Because I hear all the time, "Oh, I could never do that. How did you do that?" We have a class at church once a month. Everybody new, come in, and the whole thing, they eat, somebody talks to them about the church, and then I come in for a Q&A, ask any question you want. Every time, they'll ask this question: "Where'd you go to seminary?" And I'll say, "Well, I didn't go to seminary. I esteem it, I value it. It just, in my life, the way it was, I didn't go there."
"How'd you learn how to teach?" Here's how I learned how to teach. I went to Larry Wright, and I said, "Larry, how do you put together a lesson?" And He said, "I don't know." That was my preparation. That's the preparation I had.
We just graduated a class, training men, like three or four years ago. And my problem with that group is I didn't think they had any guts. How do you learn to teach? Well, how do you think you learn to teach? What do you do? Yeah, teach! There's nothing new. There's some tools. Taking a class or even getting a degree, that's a great thing. If you've got time, energy, effort, money, you want to go to seminary, I can see all that, that's great stuff. But you got to do this.
Listen, I'm telling you right now. If you will spend one hour a day for the next year, just in terms of information, you can be in the top 10%, knowledge-wise, of Christians in the whole world, if that's your goal. There's no way you're going to do what you don't know. And the more you know it, the more you learn it, the more you spend time with it, you will see that you have answers at your disposal to these incredible questions of life. Who am I and why am I here and where am I going? Meaning of life, all of it. You got them right there.
You Cannot Separate Doctrine from Living It Out
Here's the fifth thing. You can't separate the doctrine from the modeling it, from the living of it. In 1 Timothy 4, verses 15-16, tucked in there is this little sentence. "Be diligent in these matters. Give yourself wholly to them so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely." It's Matthew 5:16. "Let your light shine in such a way that men see your good works."
That's why I'm not blowing off life change and works and all those things we talked about earlier. I'm just saying those aren't the essence of Christianity. It's because these things are true, I begin to live this way.
I did a Major League Baseball conference. I don't know what it was. Six or seven years ago. And my opening talk was "God Hates Free Agency." And what I meant by that is not as it deals with baseball, but God's not looking for a bunch of free agents. You're not a free agent of Jesus Christ. You're a follower of Jesus Christ. You're not your free guy to do whatever you want to do. There's great freedom in Christ. But if I say Jesus is Lord, I'm supposed to be able to look at your life and you're supposed to be able to go bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. There's the difference. It's visible.
Can I read it again? "That everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely." You are a role model. They are watching you. James says it this way, "Don't be just a hearer of the Word, but a doer also." There is doing all over our life.
Those Who Teach Are Worthy of Support
I'm going to mention the sixth thing real quickly, and I put it in here not in a self-serving way, but conscious that so many of you are involved in churches. And especially smaller churches you see more of an abuse of this. Those who teach are worthy to be paid. 1 Timothy 5, verse 17 and 18: "Elders who direct the affairs of the church, those who teach, preach, they're worth double honor, especially those who are preaching and teaching."
My fear is, and it may not be as prevalent now as it used to be, but it certainly was in churches for a long time, smaller churches in particular, that every elder or council or deacon meeting began with the chairman praying, "God, you keep Him humble, we'll keep Him poor." And those guys are involved in a worthy task. And I say this to you, so that if you are one of those people who are in a church, who have a staff, who have people around, compensate them.
Sound Doctrine Is Confirmed by Scripture and Experience
Here's the last point and then you go. Sound doctrine is confirmed by scripture. And what the scripture teaches. Same thing is true of experience. Larry Wright, in this room, probably more than any study we do, you all know Larry. Larry died October 10th, 2001. So we're coming up on the seventh anniversary of that. Larry's my hero. Get my family out of the discussion. Nobody on this earth I've ever loved more than Larry. Nobody I've ever, I mean, just Larry is the man. Larry is the guy. Never going to be another one of those in my life. He's the man.
I said that, there was always one thing Larry would say that would drive me nuts. Every time he said it, I would go to him and say, "I don't think you should say that." And he just kept saying it. He would say this: "I know this is true." And he'd maybe plow into his Bible or talk about the gospel. "I know this is true because I've put it in the test tube of my life and it works."
I would say, "Larry, that's a very dangerous statement. Because the next guy is gonna say, 'I know sticking an orange peel in your ear and standing on one leg is true because it works in my life.'" We know it's true because it's true. Scripture confirms our experience, not the experience confirms our scripture.
Does this stuff work? So I meet guys all the time. Don't know Christ, don't know anything about Him. And they got this great family. You know what's interesting? As you unpack it, almost always, you'll find that they're following these biblical principles all the way through. They didn't know it.
Standing for Truth in a Postmodern World
You need to be very careful in this whole idea because what we're going to talk about today—doctrine—and next week, the Bible itself, is us saying to the world, "We know." You live in what people would describe as a postmodern world. In this postmodern world, at its essence, here's what they believe: there is no absolute truth. There may be other components to it, but at its core, it's that. There are no truths anymore. I don't know what they do with gravity, but there are no truths anymore.
We're coming along and saying, not only are there truths, we know what they are, and here they are, and they're timeless truths. So you see how you better gird yourself for the battle that unfolds in that. Do you see why you need to bathe this whole conversation in love and grace?
When Paul is writing to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4, he told him, "Look, last days, love of self..." People aren't going to like this, man. They're going to want to have their ears tickled. But doctrine, teaching—preach the word in season, out of season, reprove, correct. And then what's he say? With great patience and love.
The Heart of Our Message
Here's our message: There is truth. You can know it. We'll talk about it next week. But in 40 minutes—and you're probably saying, "Should have done it in 60 seconds"—here's what we're saying: You can know the truth, it's important, and what we believe is absolutely essential.
When we talk about doctrine, it's not something dry, dreary, and dull. It's knowing God and who He is and how He works in your life. It's the most exciting thing that I could ever begin to say.
Next week, it's important that we have these tenets. Where do we go to get them? Is that Bible reliable? Look at that next week. Can I remind you, our whole strategy here in these 23 or 24 weeks is for you to consciously know we'll be talking about these kinds of fundamental important things ongoing. So man, if you've got people in your life who you feel need to hear them, this is a great place to invite them.
Father, thank you for this wonderful truth. Will you take it, make it real in our life, bring it to our hearts. Let us feed on not the milk, but on the solid meat of your word. God, thank you for that. We pray in Christ's name, amen.