As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“Faulty Assumptions…Assumption #1: I should start with me and my questions….Assumption #2: The Bible is (primarily) a collection of principles….Assumption #3: The goal of reading the Bible is improving my life.” - TGC
The Fundamentals of Sanctification - Don Johnson
“It’s here that an interpretive principle for narrative passages guides us. Sometimes stated as ‘description is not prescription,’ this principle explains that a biblical narrative’s presence doesn’t necessarily imply approval of its contents.” - TGC
No teacher of the Bible wants to be ineffective. The vast majority do teaching work because they love the Scriptures, care about people, and want to be part of God’s work of growing fellow believers into “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (ESV, Eph. 4:13). They love to see people discover, learn, and improve.
Still, though their hearts are in the right place, many teachers rightly sense that their teaching isn’t as good as it could be. Application problems are a likely cause, for two reasons: First, students who have truly experienced a new birth (1 Pet. 1:3, 23) value good application more than anything else. Second, teachers are commonly not trained to understand and develop sound and effective applications.
The result is that several application problems are easy to find in churches of fundamentalist heritage.
“I think his inability/refusal to read good solid Christian books is a symptom of a much greater problem. And it’s why I’m immediately concerned for someone who, in an uber-spiritual tone, tells me they only read the Bible.” Bible-Only Man
The previous 5 papers in this series, we have focused on the “weak” brother. If you are just now joining the series, it would be wise to start with Parts 1-5. We’ve seen him to be weak in the sense that he is not capable of doing some action without self-condemnation. We have seen his weakness as a gift of God and a conviction from God. We’ve seen Paul take his side and discuss issues in which he himself was unable to act. All of this means that the “weak” brother should not be thought of as immature or lacking in knowledge. For many readers, this is a new way of understanding the weak brother. So, having seen him anew in the light of Paul’s writing, what does this mean for us today?
We are talking about applications, not Bible principles. Principles are truths from God’s Word. No part of Scripture means something different to one person than another.1 But we apply Bible principles differently.
Discussion