Scripture Alone

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. All right, today we're going to start with a passage from the book of Hebrews, chapter 4. Let's read this together, shall we? Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom he must give account. Okay, this is the third Sola today. Okay, my iPad, come on, work with me. And I'm excited to talk about this today as well. It might be a little different than the other two messages, but I think they all tie together very well. You know, we live in a day and an age where we are bombarded by competing truth claims all the time. Somebody's telling you what to believe and what not to believe, what is true and what is false. And it is incessant, time and again, this is true, this is what you need, this is what you should do, this is what you can do, etc. and so forth, all over the place. Years ago, Friedrich Nietzsche, the guy who said God is dead and talked about all that, he wrote a book called Beyond Good and Evil. I think today's title of a book, if Friedrich Nietzsche might write it, would be Beyond True and False, because everything seems to be true and nothing is true at the same time. Everything is said to be fake news if I don't like it, whatever that happens to be. Whosever side we're on, we're using, and the only truth that seems to be out there now is that power is true. And that it's just a power play to use truth or to use whatever means to get my way and to get whatever's going on. Have you noticed that? Now, postmodernism and that philosophy, which kind of has said, and it kind of unmasks the truth, that many truth claims are just power plays, has been very effective in our world and kind of has also said a lot of other things, and we'll get into that. But many truth claims are power claims to just try to get our way with others. Now, back in the 1500s, when the solas were first developed, the power play that was taking place was the actual institutional church itself that said, we've got the corner on the truth, and only through the magisterium, the teaching office of this church, can you even understand God's word at all. You have to get it officially from us, and only through this one channel. And to that, the reformers said, no, it's scripture alone, not scripture plus the church or plus anything else, but scripture alone. Now, today, churches couldn't even make that claim that, hey, you've got to get your truth from us, but let me tell you, everybody else is doing it. From media moguls to political pundits to politicians themselves to business icons, everybody is saying, hey, I've got the truth. You need to listen to me. Everybody and anybody, including university professors and scholars and even beyond that, I would dare say, anyone with a web page or a Facebook, all they have to do is throw something out there, and it gets into the whole mix, so much so that we're all probably asking with Pontius Pilate, what is truth? He asked that question before. What is truth? We can't even tell. So postmodernism, as I said, kind of has deconstructed all this, said it's all power plays that people are doing all the time, and they basically said there is no such thing as truth. Do you understand they were claiming that to be the truth, that there is no such thing as truth? So that's kind of self-contradictory. And they say, so when you say something is true, it's just your personal preference. It's your social construct. So I can say to you, and I might believe that Blue Moon ice cream, which many of you have never had in your life, but Blue Moon ice cream is the best flavor of ice cream. And let me tell you, that's true for me. And I might say as well, child abuse is wrong. And some people would look at that and say both of them are social constructs. Both of them are just your personal preferences. Hmm. I have a problem with that. I don't know about you. So today, we're going to look at this third sola, sola scriptura that is basically saying there is objective truth that is outside of myself, that comes to me, that teaches me many things. And it is so out of sync with our day and age. And I'm glad it is because of what's going on and being foisted off to us as truth. But it's also been out of sync for the last 500 years, even in the time of the... It's always out of sync to talk sola scriptura, God's Word alone. Because let me tell you, it takes me out of the driver's seat. I'm not the one in control of it. I'm not the one that figures it out. When I read the Bible, the Bible is actually reading me. And when I interpr...