Recovering the Sufficiency of Scripture in the Family, Church
To center family life around anything else but the Bible would lead to destruction, a group of church elders cautioned.
Yet so many families neglect the infallible Word of God and turn to fallible sources, said Scott Brown, director of the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches.
Brown and fellow elders Dan Horn and Jason Dohm at Hope Baptist Church in Wake Forest, N.C., led a two-hour webinar Tuesday night in a living room setting.
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While going over the 17th century Second London Baptist Confession, the three stressed the importance of "family foundations in sound doctrine."
"It's important to understand that all the answers that we're looking for are found in Scripture," said Brown to a live Web audience. "Scripture is sufficient, certain and infallible."
When the family gets this wrong, however, the family ends up splintering with the daughter being led by her feelings and the son being led by his testosterone rather than the Word of God, he warned.
Without Scripture as the foundation, Horn noted that family members start to do what's right in their own eyes and that ends up destroying the family.
Regular Scripture reading in the home is crucial, the three emphasized.
Horn advised against reading just to get it over with. The daily practice has to be done in a way that the children can see the parents' love for Scripture.
Though Brown and his family dedicated a lot of time to studying the Bible, he said looking back, he wish he had done more. Most of his children are now married.
"I really do want to have my home even more saturated with the Word of God," said the NCFIC director.
"The most important asset that your family can possess is a vision of the majesty of God."
He acknowledged the "war" that is waged every day – such as busy schedules – to sit down and study Scripture together. But he encouraged Christian families to go through the entire Bible together several times.
"It's important that you send your children out into the world with the whole counsel of God so that they have a complete roadmap for life," he explained. "It really does give your children a grid, ... a way to understand the world."
Dohm illustrated it this way: "How do you deliver the whole counsel of God? A day at a time. The beauty of having a daily pattern of dispensing the Word of God so that a mighty deposit has been laid down over a couple of decades ... it teaches our children that we trust the Word of God because we're organizing our days around it."
Spilling over into the church, the elders discussed the consequences of the church getting it wrong when it comes to making Scripture the center.
Dohm observed, "I think we have a thousand different manifestations of what happens when the church gets it wrong."
He lamented that many churches follow their own desires, creating anything that seems like a good idea at the time.
"The guy with the idea has the floor in most churches instead of [God's Word]," he said.
Adding to that, Brown also shook his head at the trend in church culture today where creativity is valued greatly.
"The church ends up becoming an invention of man because it's based on the creativity of man which seems to be endless," he said. "The church is either founded upon the sufficiency of Scripture and trusts in Scripture alone or it is off to the winds for the next hot creative guy that shows up."
More than anything else, what the churches and families need to learn is to be a dependent people on God, Horn noted.
"We need to reorganize our lives [so that] our lives are not about our glory but centered on the glory of God," he stressed. "This is how you're happy ... by seeking the glory of God."
The mission of the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches is to, among other things, communicate the biblical doctrine of the family and to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life.
