Sound Doctrine: Endangered Species, Essential Structure

All a man, a church or a denomination needs to guarantee deterioration of doctrine is to take everything for granted and do nothing. The unattended garden will soon be overrun with weeds.
 -A.W. Tozer

I once heard a wise Rabbi say, “It’s no mystery how things happen. They’re allowed to happen, that’s how.”

As a father I know how that goes. The house doesn’t naturally get clean; the yard doesn’t automatically get greener; homework doesn’t get done on its own. Let things go their natural course and it’s all downhill, no mystery there. And more often than not, it went downhill because I allowed it to.

So it is with sound doctrine, a phrase we hear too little of and a concept we could take much, much more seriously. If our very lives are staked on certain truths, then we need to know what they are, which ones are essential, which ones are negotiable, and how to tell the difference. Neglect a tenacious hold on truth and you can expect a steady drift towards error until, like the garden overgrown with weeds, you see individuals and even entire denominations chipping away at the divinity of Christ, the Genesis account of Creation, or the definition of the family.

So a solid doctrinal foundation, shown by a working knowledge of the Bible and an ability to rightly divide the Word, is Ground Zero for Christian maturity. It’s not everything, I know. Where there’s spiritual maturity there’s also agape love and self-discipline, among other building blocks. But proper handling of the Word is right up there among them, and here’s how I think that plays out in today’s church: we need to Know the Word, Live the Word, Express the Word, and, as needed, Defend the Word.

Know the Word

When I was a sixteen year-old new convert, I joined a thousand of my closest friends three to five times weekly to sit under Pastor Chuck Smith at Calvary Chapel. Armed with nothing but Bibles and markers, we listened to expository teaching, verse by verse, often lasting 90 minute or longer. No videos, no warm-up games, no bells and whistles. There was, and remains, a deep hunger to know the Word, so 44 years later I guess I get impatient with the ongoing question “How do we get young people into our church?”

Granted, that’s a challenge in post-Christian America, but I can’t believe human need has changed so much that people aren’t still as hungry today as they were in 1971. And even if the numbers in our congregations don’t go up when the Word is taught, the maturity of our people surely will. If we are to have any measure of stability in the Body, it can’t come without a deep and even passionate re-commitment to teaching, and studying, the Scripture.

Live the Word

Let’s close shop if we’re not willing to apply and live out what we’re learning. This is especially true today, when hypocrisy among believers is a prime reason many people report being turned off to Christianity altogether, opting instead for the vague label Spiritual over Christian. Knowing the Bible is crucial, but when there’s a marked difference between the truth learned and the life lived, then the truth learned becomes quite irrelevant. God deliver us (today, preferably) from the horrendous sin of standing publicly for one thing while privately indulging something quite different. If we don’t practice what we preach, let’s at least have the decency to shut up.

Express and Defend the Word

I doubt that it will be enough to teach the Bible to our young people, if we don’t also prepare them to have what they’ve been taught challenged, refuted, ridiculed. It’s not enough for them to know; they also need to express and defend. That calls for preparation to articulate what they’ve learned, reasoning with people who disagree, defending Biblical concepts, and maintaining composure and respect in the face of an ever-more hostile culture’s withering cross-examination.

Surely there are enough apologists within the modern church who can rise to that challenge, because the need couldn’t be greater, and the fields sprouting our future evangelists, pastors and teachers couldn’t likewise be whiter for harvesting.

“Tell me what the world is saying today,” the late Francis Schaeffer once said, “and I will tell you what the Church will be saying in seven years.” Hate to say it, but I’ve found most of Schaeffer’s predictions about the church to be true. Our willingness to re-apply ourselves to a respect for the Word, evidenced by the way we study and live it out, will probably determine whether or not Schaeffer got it right on this one as well.

I so want to say, probably for the first time, that he was wrong.