Affirmed in Words, Avoided in Practice
We live in an age of experts.
There’s an expert for everything now, or at least an expert for everything the modern American believes might be wrong with him.
Having difficulties in your marriage? There’s a therapist for that.
Are your children being rebellious? Well, fear not. There’s a parenting psychologist for that.
Are you suffering from anxiety or insomnia, maybe you’re having trouble with your job, or feel that overwhelming sense that your life isn’t exhibiting enough meaning to suit you? There’s literally nothing under the sun that we can’t find a specialist to address.
The class of available experts has grown in our generation in a way no generation before us experienced, and the American Christian has been saturated with those choices for as long as he can remember.
And below that, for the Christian, is a doctrine the church has confessed in substance from the beginning. That would be the sufficiency of scripture, which is simply the teaching that God’s Word is enough for the Christian life.
When I say enough, I mean it in an all-encompassing way. It’s enough for salvation, enough for sanctification, enough for matters of marriage and parenting and identity and suffering and everything else that shows up in the believer’s life. That doesn’t mean Scripture gives the Christian every technical detail for every earthly situation, but it does mean Scripture gives the final word on the heart, the conscience, obedience, sin, repentance, wisdom, worship, and the fear of God. Conservative evangelicals affirm this doctrine and would defend it without a moment’s hesitation.
And yet, when life actually gets bleak, the same Christians who’d defend the sufficiency of scripture will reach out for one of these experts.
Like the husband whose marriage is crumbling will make an appointment with a therapist, much faster than he’ll run to his Bible. Or a mother whose relationship with her teenage daughter has changed and turned cold will buy a parenting book by a clinical psychologist before she mines the scriptures for wisdom.
The pattern is pretty hard to miss. The expert is the first place we tend to turn, instead of the Word we claim to live by.
This has been written about a great deal, and the usual explanation sounds like this. Christians say they believe scripture is sufficient, but their actions don’t line up with their profession. Their affirmation is just lip service, and their behavior is evidence of their unbelief.
The fix typically given is that Christians need a stronger conviction about what the Bible can really do.
I’ve said that before, myself. I believed it for a very long time, but.. I don’t believe that to be a blanket judgment we can make anymore.
I think many of the Christians running to experts believe the doctrine just fine. The problem isn’t always that they doubt scripture is sufficient. The problem, I believe, is that they’re pretty sure it is, and that’s exactly why they go somewhere else.
Allow me to explain what I mean.
The doctrine of sufficiency, when a man takes it seriously, makes specific claims about what scripture has authority over. It says the Word of God has the final word on every matter of the human heart, including the hardest ones a person will face in life. Anything and everything from marriage to parenting, anxiety, anger, grief, suffering, finances, work, hobbies.. The list can literally keep going and going.
And the Bible doesn’t only have a verse or two to quote on these things. It has a specific position that comes with specific demands on the Christian’s life. It may not give the technical mechanics of every circumstance, but it does give God’s moral and spiritual judgment over every circumstance.
That’s a lot to submit to, and if a Christian actually believes the Word covers all of it, then he’s to submit to it. It’s the difference in affirming a verse that sounds good for your situation and submitting your life to what the Bible says about every one of those areas.
That’s the part many Christians don’t want. In conversation with other Christians, sure, they want it. But in actual, fleshed-out reality, they will pray for anything but.
The expert is the way around it. Not the way around the doctrine, because the doctrine stays right where it is in their life. The expert becomes the way around the demand of the doctrine.. The expert can give a man a way to think about his marriage that doesn’t involve repentance. The expert can address the problem without sending the believer back to the Word of God, which is exactly what every believer needs.
So when I say Christians believe the doctrine, and that’s why they run to the experts, this is what I’m getting at. The running isn’t necessarily unbelief, at least not in the way we usually mean it. In many cases, it’s what happens when belief in the doctrine clashes with the cost of obeying it. The believer goes looking for somebody who’ll soften the blow.
Let me give you an example. Of course, this is to illustrate my point, not to say this is true across the board.
Let’s consider a husband and wife who have been having trouble. They’ve been arguing for months, and the arguments have been escalating. As a matter of fact, the arguments have escalated into increasingly long stretches of ignoring one another. Finally, the husband suggests they see a marriage counselor, and she agrees. They find one with a master’s degree on the wall and the right kind of books on the shelf.
The counselor sits them down and starts asking questions about their communication patterns. He has them figure out each other’s love language. He uncovers a lot about their family-of-origin issues that might be affecting how each of them deals with conflict. By the end of their time with this guy, their marriage has been outlined as a problem of conflicting needs. The homework he gives them is a list of activities designed to strengthen their communication.
None of that is nefarious on the surface. There are actually things couples can learn from some of those exercises. But let’s pause and ask what the Bible would’ve said to this man that didn’t come up in the session?
The Bible would’ve told him that his first calling, as a husband, is to love his wife the way Christ loved the church. The Bible would’ve pressed him on whether the harsh words and tone he’s been using are sin in need of repentance, rather than communication issues that need polishing. And the Bible would’ve called him to confess his sin of failing to lead his home before he ever asked anything of his wife.
The counseling session with the expert never touched on any of that. The husband walked out feeling better, because no one told him he was sinning against his wife. He was told he had a communication issue, and that’s a much easier thing to fix. He bought a workbook on the way out the door and felt like he was doing the work.
But the work the Bible would have him do isn’t the same work. The Bible would have him repent, while the workbook will have him learn techniques.
And I want to be fair to the counselor in this illustration. He's competent at what he’s trained to do. His training was built on an anthropology that has no category for sin and no place for the regenerating work of the Spirit. So when a Christian husband walks into his office, the counselor doesn't have the tools to see what's actually going on. He sees communication patterns and family-of-origin issues because those are the categories he knows. His job was never built to address what the Bible says is wrong with this man.
And here’s the kicker in this scenario. The husband didn’t drive home, confused about what the Bible says about his marriage. He drove home relieved that he’d just spent ninety minutes in a room where the demands of the Word never came up.
This is what I’m trying to put my finger on. A lot of Christians have figured out the Bible can be affirmed theoretically, while being kept out of the particulars of their life. The Bible has authority, in general. Meaning it’s sufficient, in principle. But in their specific circumstances, they’ve learned to set the Bible to one side and consult someone else.
The mistake is to call this only hypocrisy.
It really isn’t, in the technical sense. The believer isn’t denying anything he’s affirmed. He’s willing to affirm the doctrine as long as it stays in the category of belief and never becomes a matter of obedience. That’s a different problem than open unbelief. Unbelief denies the doctrine. What I’m describing keeps the doctrine intact while ensuring it never touches the areas of his life that demand obedience. It’s still hypocrisy, but it’s a more subtle kind than the obvious kind. He hasn’t denied the doctrine with his mouth. He’s protected himself from the doctrine with his habits.
Scripture has a name for that. James calls it self-deception. A man hears the Word and walks away from it. The same letter says a faith that produces no obedience is dead. That's a harder question than the one I've been asking, and Scripture puts it to every one of us. A man can hold the doctrine in his head and still find himself outside of what the New Testament calls living faith. I'm making no assertion on any particular soul. The point is that the pattern is serious enough that we shouldn't comfort ourselves with the idea that the doctrine is intact when our lives keep saying otherwise.
Paul wrote about something like this in 2 Corinthians 10, he says,
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
(2 Corinthians 10:3-5)
Paul’s describing spiritual warfare, and notice where he places the battle. He places it in the realm of speculation, in lofty things raised up against the knowledge of God. The fortresses Paul wants the church to destroy aren’t only out in the unbelieving world. They’re inside the believer’s own mind, where ways of thinking have been welcomed in and given a seat they were never supposed to have.
Every thought has to be taken captive. Every category the believer is using, outside of scripture, to understand their own life. Paul doesn’t make an exception for the categories that come from the experts. He says every one of them is subject to the obedience of Christ. The believer who imports a category from a therapist or a podcast, without ever asking whether that category fits with what the Word teaches, has failed to do the work Paul calls every Christian to do. Paul’s not only interested in behavior. He’s after anything that would resist the rule of Christ.
Paul makes the same point in Romans 12. Transformation comes through the renewing of the mind, and a mind renewed by Scripture has been refusing the categories of the world for a long time. The renewing is the daily work of letting Scripture set the terms for how a believer thinks about his own life.
Now, I want to be careful here, because what I’m saying can be misread, and I realize that.
I’m not saying every counselor is dangerous, or even that medication is forbidden. There are physical conditions that require physical care, and there are people who walk through hard situations with believers, under the authority of Scripture, and serve the church well. There are also Christians who run to experts because they’ve never been taught how to bring the Word of God to bear on these areas of their lives. Some of them are confused, and others are exhausted. Then there are those discipled by churches that say Scripture is sufficient, while still sending the hard cases somewhere else. That has to be said, too.
Also, good biblical counseling exists, and a counselor who sits under the authority of scripture and a local church is doing real ministry. Proverbs speaks of safety in a multitude of counselors, and the New Testament assumes believers will be helped along by other believers who know the Word. The argument isn't against counsel. The argument is against the kind of counsel that asks Scripture to step aside while the “real” work gets done.
So what do you do with this?
First, pay attention to where you go when something hard hits. Not what you’d say if your pastor asked you, but where you actually go. If your friend is the first person you call, or a therapist is the first appointment you book, and the Bible doesn’t come up until everything else has already been tried.. That pattern is telling you something true about where Scripture actually sits in your life. Where you go first is a more honest confession than anything you’d say out of your mouth.
Second, do the harder work of letting scripture do its job before you bring in anyone else. This doesn’t mean you can never call a counselor, it means the Word comes first. Not in a five-minute devotional, but in an honest way where you sit with what God has actually said about the thing you’re facing, and you let the Word press on you the way it was given to press. The Christian who does that before he picks up the phone to schedule a session is being shaped by the right voice first. Whatever comes after that, however useful or unuseful, will land on a foundation scripture has already laid.
The third one is the hardest, and I’m saying it carefully. If you’ve spent the time in the Word and you know what God is saying about a particular issue in your life, don’t go shopping for a voice that’ll tell you something different. That’s most of what this whole article has been about. Often, Christians aren’t running to experts because they’re confused. They’re running to experts because they’re not confused, and the word they have from God is one they don’t want to obey. Receive the hard word when it comes. The hard word from God is always for your good, even when obeying it costs you something.
Fourth, do this work in the local church, not alone with your Bible at the kitchen table. The New Testament knows nothing of sanctification in isolation. Christ gave qualified elders to shepherd His sheep, and Hebrews tells us we're to provoke one another to love and good works in the gathered assembly. When a Christian gets serious about letting Scripture press on his life, the place that happens is under the preaching of the Word and around brothers and sisters who'll speak the truth in love. If your pattern has been to handle things outside the life of your church, the issue isn't only what voice you're listening to. It's where you're listening from.
The sufficiency of Scripture, finally, isn’t a doctrine to argue. It’s a posture toward the Word of God. You either let the Word do its work in your life, or you find a way around it. And when you find a way around it while still saying you believe it, you haven’t evaded the problem. You’ve only made the disobedience harder to see. Most of the Christians I know who say they believe the doctrine actually do believe it, in the sense that they know what it teaches. What the issue comes down to is letting Scripture speak with authority in the areas they’re afraid to surrender.
That’s the work in front of us. All of us. Letting the Word have its say in the areas of our lives where obeying will actually cost something.
The Word is sufficient for those areas. It always has been. The question is whether we’ll submit to it there.
In His Service,
I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.
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