You're listening to audio from Ascend Church. For more information about Ascend or to access more Gospel-centered tools to grow as a disciple of Christ, visit ascendkc.org. My name is Tim Yatch. I am our Director of Student Ministry and Connected Ministry here at Ascend. Our family is approaching the seven-year mark of being here in Kansas City and on staff at the church, and one of the many things that struck me when we moved here, other than a passion for the Royals and barbecue, which are two things that are wonderful, certain years, one of the things that struck me is our church's passion for the Word of God and for theology and for doctrine, a right understanding of those things. And I can tell you that this is a rare thing. So many churches are growing more lax, more devoid of biblical truth. They're walking away from the God-given power that the Word of God possesses. So who are we? That's what the series has been about, that we've been unpacking, that Pastor Jeff has been going through over the last several weeks. Who are we? We want to define ourselves as an autonomous church. We want to see what it is that are our characteristics. And I could say that we are biblical. We are biblical. That is our goal. That is the intent of our church more than anything else, truly. This should be the defining characteristic of every church and every believer. True Christians throughout time have long since been defined as a people of the word of God, a people of the book. In fact, a man named Martin Luther, 502 years ago this Halloween actually, he realized the inconsistency of the Catholic Church as compared to the scriptures that he studied so diligently. He saw that inconsistency and then he went and he nailed his 95 thesis to a church door in Germany. The point of that was to spark a conversation. He didn't want to break away, he simply wanted to start a conversation. But as we know, that became the grounds of the Reformation, which is arguably one of the most impactful church movements in history. All of these, uh, reformations that we are, well, the reformation that we're discussing here today, um, birth from Luther was grounded in the Solas. There are five Solas that he, that he coined, which, uh, the one that we're going to look at is Sola Scriptura, which means by scripture alone, by the word of God alone. It's really the basis for the rest of them, truly. And what it means is this, is that a rightful understanding of the scriptures means that they are the source of life. That the scriptures are sufficient for all things. Stephen Yuley, speaking about this idea, he says that, It is sufficient for God's people. It alone is the means by which God imparts his grace to us for this reason. Scripture stands alone at the center of the life of the Christian and the church. That is why we are biblical. And it is with this book that we put our stake in the ground. So if you go and turn to 2 Timothy chapter 3, our ushers are going to come down. They're going to pass out the word of God. And so if you'd like one of those, just raise your hand and they will be glad to give you one of those as we look at this passage of study. Our big idea of the passage today is this. All scripture is from God, sufficient and used powerfully for our sanctification. We're gonna go ahead and pray and then we'll jump in. God, thank you for your word, which is powerful. I pray that you'd use it here today, that you would use me here today. Pray that you'd speak clearly, Lord, and that you would, you'd be working on our hearts as we study your word. Lord, would you convict us of areas that you need to? Would you encourage us where you need to? God, you are faithful and we thank you for this time in your name. Amen. So we're gonna be breaking down verses 16 and 17 here today. So I'm gonna go ahead and read those. It says, So we're gonna be breaking down these two verses. And our first point is this, that all scripture is from God. All scripture is from God. Because all scripture is from God, we need to look at the scriptures surrounding the passage that we're going to look at because we don't want to just cherry pick that one and isolate it and make it kind of say what we want it to say. So we want to look at the context, the verses around it again. Second Timothy was written to Timothy, I said that wrong for service, it was written to Timothy by Paul. He was the teaching elder or pastor at the Ephesian church, and Paul was essentially seeking to encourage this young pastor in his position and in his duties and responsibilities as a pastor within that church. I love 2 Timothy because it is really the, it's the last words of a dying man. It's one of the later books that was written throughout Paul's life, and he was sitting in a Roman prison awaiting his execution. So there's a lot of weight to the words that he is sharing here. We could take that into account as we look at it. He's lived a life of faithfulness. He's, he's lived for him to live as Christ, to die as King. We just, we just sang a song that had those words in it, right? That was Paul's life. So we see here in the context as we look at the beginning of chapter three, he's speaking to Timothy about the last days. He says, but understand this in verse one, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty, where people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceits, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness but denying its power. Times will be hard, right? But I think as believers, we often see the world through kind of rose-colored glasses or lenses where everything is kind of just, we're like, we're okay, everything's good, it's going to be all right. And that's true to an extent. But not only will times be hard, but persecution awaits those who follow Jesus with their whole heart. There's a simple reality here to that, that we see. If you look at verse 12, just a couple of verses before the one we're studying, it says, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. It's in the midst of these hard times and persecutions that inevitably await the believer that it's interesting what Paul decides to discuss. What does he go to first here? The Word of God. He goes to the Word first. Why? Because we can stand firm on the Word of God in the midst of any struggle, any persecution, any difficulty. We can believe it. We can live it. We can look at it. We can see Christ through it. One question that arises from these verses is, well, what scriptures is Paul speaking of? If you look back just one verse, in verse 15, he talks about the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ. These sacred writings, along with the scriptures of verse 16, are the 66 books of the Bible that we have here today. Each of the authors here of Scripture were either prophets, apostles, their close associates. They were the ones who imparted and did the works of God here on this earth. In one commentary, it says this, There's an authority to these inspired books, to the inspired Word of God. There's a majesty to the Word of God. The primary doctrine that's represented here is that of inspiration, the inspiration of the Scriptures, that God sovereignly and supernaturally inspired these men to write the Word of God exactly as He desired for them to write it, using their own experiences, knowledge, and personality. If you think about the fact that God is using normal people, sinful human beings, to write His Word, without error, all that, it's incredible to think about. There were many books that were written, there were letters that were written that were being passed around that were a great encouragement to the churches of this era, but there was only certain ones through time that rose to the surface as the divine, majestic books that were the inspired word of God. It took some time for that to happen. But the words of the Bible were from God before they were ever part of the canon of scripture or before they were ever part of the council that determined they'd be part of the canon. So how do we know that? Well, because they were breathed out by God. They were breathed out by God. It's like when it's cold outside and you breathe onto a window and there's kind of this fogginess that appears, right? Kind of like when maybe some of you were driving here this morning. This is the only time that this word, breathe out, is used in the whole New Testament. It's theonustos, which means breathe out by God. I love, Sal has used this illustration. You take your hand and you just breathe on it, like you could feel the breath. That's the idea here, that God literally, figuratively, is expelling from his lungs air that becomes the Word of God. It's amazing to think about it in that way. There's a power, there's an authority, there's There's a divinity to the word of God that comes from God breathing it out. God breathing out his word means that he divinely inspired the exact words that were written in scripture, in the original languages, the original manuscripts, down to the smallest letter. Now, we don't have those original copies. We don't actually have the words that were literally penned by Paul or by his scribe. We don't have those. You're not reading those original manuscripts right here and right now. Some would pose that as a problem, but it's mainly those who would denounce the Word of God. They would say, oh, you don't have the original copies, so how could you know it's accurate? Well, we know that there are thousands and thousands of copies of the New Testament from different periods of time. These copies are over 99% identical to each other. There is, and that's, it's an incredible amount of manuscripts and they are incredibly accurate compared to each other. That is rare. Many of the historical works that are considered accurate and true have way less substantial evidence. They were written further after the fact and they're not as accurate to each other. So we have a book that is accurate. And even in that one percent, it's non-essential words of connection. It's minor things that are different. For these reasons and many more, we can be confident that the book that we hold in our hands is the exact Word of God. It's how God speaks to us. It's not through experience, primarily, as the radicals believed during the Reformation. There was kind of some different camps here. You had the radicals who said, well, experience is supreme over Scripture. And then you have the Catholic view, which the authority or the church leaders are the authority over Scripture. But then you have the reform view, the view of Luther, which was scripture is sufficient and scripture is supreme. We must be cautious that we don't elevate experience to a place that is above scripture. It's very easy to do that in our day, but we must be cautious about it. It's not to say that experience or tradition must be thrown out, but they must be funneled through the Word of God. We must be very cautious with the phrase, God told me, right? Because you are determining that God is specially revealing himself to you, which God does not do in the way that he did for the New Testament authors. It doesn't work that way anymore. We must be cautious. Scripture is sufficient for all you need, for your maturity, for your growing in the faith. So here it is in a nutshell. We have a book that has withstood the test of time. It's been scrutinized highly, and it is without error. It is truthful. It's never once been disproven, and you can believe that it's true. Psalm 1830, as for God, his way is perfect. The word of the Lord is flawless. And because it's flawless, it's inerrant, that it is without error. This is actually something that's been debated for hundreds of years. Inerrancy is the idea that the Bible contains no errors. No errors. Wayne Grudem says that God's speech, even when spoken through sinful human beings, is never false and never affirms error. It's interesting because in many ways, those that struggle with inerrancy are more so struggling with, what do you think? Authority. They struggle more with the authority of Scripture than the inerrancy of Scripture. Why? Well, if you say that the Bible has no error and that it's God's truth, you either follow it or you live in disobedience. It removes the gray area that we all seek to live in. Recently, I can give you an example from my own life, I began watching a show that though it was popular, it was known to be sensual. And after I watched it for several episodes, I realized that this isn't good for me. It's not causing to set my mind on things above. I don't have a biblical basis. I can't find a biblical justification for me to be able to be entertained in this way. So I had a decision to make in that moment. Will I be faithful to what I believe the word of God had for me, right? Like to be setting my mind on things above, or will I disregard that for the sake of entertainment? This book is all or nothing. That's why we must understand it rightly, study it diligently, and live it out faithfully. Not only is all Scripture from God, but all Scripture is profitable. It's profitable. The Word of God is profitable, but for what? Well, let's look. It says right in the passage, it says, for teaching, reproof, correction, and for training in righteousness. The word profitable could be defined as this, useful, accomplishing good or pertaining to value. We all seek to do useful things that are valuable things, right? Like people work out, they try to eat wisely, not myself so much. They put money away in profitable areas. Some people even, this is crazy, they even run for fun. People do that, did you know that? In fact, Ben, he's not here today, he is running his second half marathon, not of his life, but of the last two days. It's just crazy in itself. So he ran one yesterday. He's running one here today. Praise the Lord for him. The goal of all of these activities is to enhance well-being, right? Like to grow in well-being. That's the defining characteristic of profitability. And scripture brings enhanced well-being to our spiritual lives. How does it do that? Well, let's look at four different ways that we see here in the passage. It's kind of a progression, if you will. Number one is this, teaching. Teaching, providing instruction. Scripture tells us what to do and how to do it. The Word provides guidance. I love, Warren Weersbe has kind of four subcategories for what these four words mean. The first, the first for teaching is this, Scripture tells us what is right. That's what he means by teaching. Scripture tells us what is right. As a parent, it is my constant job to tell my kids or to provide biblical instruction to my children. You know, like, don't stop your brothers from breathing, don't hit each other with bats, things of that nature. And I often think, well, boy, like, I have to keep telling them the same thing over and over, right? But are we any different? Many times we have to hear or be taught the same scriptures 15 times before we start to actually realize, like, how God is trying to apply to our hearts. Like, we're no different. It's just, the Word of God constantly provides instruction telling our needy hearts what is right and what is true. So why am I telling you this? Well, there's a simple reason from the book of James. That's because we have a tendency to be hearers of the word and not doers. Hearers, not doers, James 1.22. But be doers of the word, not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. It's an interesting verse that means this. If you only hear the word but you fail to put it into practice, you are deceiving yourself. You might even be deceiving yourself into thinking that you are actually a believer. Like, oh, I hear the Word. I hear the Word. I don't do it. I think I'm okay because I hear it. We could deceive ourselves. Spiritual maturity is shown in your life by your ability to hear God's Word, you know, take it in, be convicted, understand it, and live differently because of what it says. Even if the Bible doesn't tell you an exact way to handle a situation, there are principles for every situation. Let me give you an example. I spoke about this at our student ministry last week, but we talked about social media or technology. And as far as I can tell, there's no specific biblical texts that relate to that topic. But what does the Bible give us? What does the word give us? It gives us principles by which to guide our usage of social media or technology. You know, how we're supposed to speak to one another, being gracious. How we're supposed to forgive. How we're supposed to not be quarrelsome. How we're supposed to be seasoned with salt in the things that we say. The Word has a principle for every situation, but the question always is, are you willing to receive it or are you choosing to be willfully ignorant? Many times the teaching that is received through the word leads to reproof. That's our second word, reproof. It's an intent to correct fault. Whereas teaching tells us what is right, reproof tells us what is not right. What is not right. It's the refuting of error. Romans 1 talks about how we exchange the truth of God for a lie. Reproof happens when we start exchanging the lies that we believe about ourselves, about our sin, about our God for the truth, for the truth of his word. God's word cuts to the heart where we are in error. Hebrews 4, 12, that the word is living and active. It's sharper than a two-edged sword. It pierces the division of soul and spirit. It discerns the thoughts and the intentions of the heart. It gets to the motive of why we're doing what we're doing. It's a painful process when this happens often, being cut often is, but as God uses the mirror of his word to reflect what it is that you, like that's motivating you to be doing what you're doing, something begins to happen. Like there's this process that's happening inside of you, right? And that's correction, hopefully. That's repentance, hopefully. Write down 2 Corinthians 7.10. 2 Corinthians 7.10. This verse talks about how it's God's kindness, or excuse me, that worldly sorrow leads to death, but godly sorrow leads to repentance and life. That's what it should lead to. That's what this reproof should lead to. So you got teaching, which is what is right. Reproof, which is what is not right. And the correction is how to get right. How to get right. It's to find the right course of action to bring improvement in an area of life. It turns into correction when your actions truly begin to change. You can think about it this way. Think about driving down the road and you miss your turn. Has anybody ever done that? Yes. I do that all the time. It doesn't even matter if I'm staring at directions, which I shouldn't be as I'm driving. I still always miss a turn. I did it yesterday. I literally just drove right by something and it said turn left. And I'm like, oh, I don't know. I don't know what to tell myself here. But if I kept driving down the road, and I just continued down that course knowing it was the wrong way, I'm still in the reproof stage. I'm still in the area of knowing, okay, this is not right, until I turn the car around and go the other way, right? Until God grants me the ability to turn the car and go the other way. That's when correction starts to happen. This is the process of repentance. the Holy Spirit prodding you regarding an area of life, sometimes a very subtle area of life. And this process of repentance happens as we put sin to death and we put on righteousness. As we do that continually again and again and again, that is repentance. So God forgives your sin during that time. You put to death those things in your life through the power of the Spirit. You put on righteousness and then growth begins to take place. The word cuts to the heart. And the amazing thing is that God's kindness leads us to repentance. Have you ever thought about that verse? Have you ever thought about the fact that God doesn't just give us all of our sin right here and now. He's like, here you go. There it all is, deal with that, repent from that and you'll be good. It doesn't work that way, right? Like it would be too much for us to bear. But in his kindness, he gives us what we can handle, right? A lot of times what we can't handle. He's like, work on this, work on this, work on this as life goes on. We repent, we turn, we change. It's a process. So it doesn't just end there though, right? It's not just the turning of the car around and going the other way, because you have to kind of, you have to train yourself. There's a process of training in righteousness. That's our last step to this. Training in righteousness, which means to how to stay right, as Wiersbe says, how to stay right. It's discipline towards right action. It's discipline to put on and put off. Now, all disciplines are hard at first, right? They take perseverance. It's an unwillingness to quit. And I would say that nowhere is this better illustrated in American movies than in Rocky Balboa, who is the greatest character in the history of movies. Just kidding. He's great. He's the Luke Skywalker of boxing movies. If you haven't seen any of the Rocky movies, I'll explain it. He was a tough Philadelphia-bred boxer who gets a chance to fight the heavyweight champion of the world. And Mickey, his old cranky coach, in a voice that is impossible to imitate, he says, for a 45-minute boxing match, you've got to train hard for 45,000 minutes, which is 10 weeks of training at 10 hours a day. Pretty intense, right? To be trained in righteousness is truly no different. There's a discipline to it. It takes time, it takes energy, it takes commitment, it takes help along the way from other brothers and sisters in the faith. There's an accountability to that. Paul gives us a running analogy in 1 Corinthians 9 of training yourself for godliness. This idea of training is doing things again and again and again, right? They become second nature. J.R. Vassar says it this way, he says, So where are you nourishing the flesh rather than the spirit? Are you actually training yourself to be ungodly? Are you training yourself for unrighteousness? The profitability of scripture is absolutely astounding. I mean, praise the Lord truly that we have his inspired word that he uses in this way. It's amazing. So the Word is doing all this teaching, all this reproof, all this correcting, and all this training in us, but to what end? What is the point of it all? Is it a means just to kind of stop there? Is it supposed to end there? We just kind of grow and change, we're in the Word, it's great, it's like it's all me, me, me, it's all great. No, we are equipped for something. Well, it's for equipping. All scripture is equipping. Verse 17 gives us the point. He says that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. So teaching plus reproof, plus correction, plus training in righteousness brings completion and equipping for the works that God has for us, for the good work that he has, right? It's the process of becoming complete, of being fitted for battle, that's the idea here, furnished with every necessary component for the task or for the purpose. Think about a soldier. A soldier has his battle plans, he's got in his pocket, he's got his camouflage on, he's got his weapon, he's got his communication devices. He has all these things that make him a soldier that's ready to go into battle. That is what we are given through the word of God. We are given the task for the purpose. So let's look at two areas of equipping. The first is this, maturity. We are equipped for maturity. You have everything that you need in the word for life and godliness. You do. But the problem here, the disconnect, the disconnect is that we don't actually believe that the promises of scripture are true. We kind of functionally live as if they're not. Let me give you a couple examples. Matthew 5, 6, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. Do you hunger and thirst for Him, believing that you will be satisfied? Do you claim that promise? How about the section Matthew 6, 25 to 33, Jesus tells us not to worry about the future, but rather seek first the kingdom and His righteousness. Are you living in this constant state of worry and anxiety? Are you trusting Him with your future knowing that He holds you close? How about 1 John 1 9? If you confess your sins, He is faithful to forgive and to cleanse from all unrighteousness. Do you really believe that you've been forgiven? Or are you living in the past struggling with who you were when you've been forgiven? Do you really believe that you have been? James 4, 7 says, submit yourselves therefore to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you. Are you resisting the evil one knowing that God grants victory? That he will flee from you. That's a powerful verse. I think too often we simply read those verses or hear those verses and refuse to actually believe that they're true. It's almost as if they're for somebody else, but they're not for us. Like, well, I know somebody else will experience that. I know somebody else will have victory. I know somebody else will be forgiven. But well, for me, I, I, that's not me, right? That's not believing the promises of scripture. That's living in functional unbelief. The question is always this, are you growing more mature in your faith? Do you see change from a year, two years, three years ago to now? And praise God through his word, he does. He sanctifies us to be more like Christ. He grows us. He calls us to himself. So that's the first area of equipping. The second is this, we're equipped for mission. Equipped for mission. What is our mission? To make disciples. That is the goal of our church. Lost people saved, saved people matured, matured people multiplied. All of that is discipleship. That's who we are. But that's not reserved for those that are paid to do it, or those that have positions in the church, or those that are small group leaders, or whatever title you want to put on it, that's for everybody. It's for everybody. There's three ways that I'll give you that to make disciples that we all can be a part of in some form, and evangelism is one of them. Evangelism is essentially discipleship. You're just seeking to present God's word to somebody and let him do the work, right? Like we reason, we try, like we work, we pray, but it's God doing the work through his word. Discipleship relationships. Let's say you're meeting with a group of people, a small group of people, one or two men or one or two women, and you're seeking to passionately grow in your faith. And you're using God's word to do that. How about biblical counseling? That's also discipleship. All you're seeking to do is to present God's word, to help each other on this course of life, to grow and to change, to become more like Christ. All three of these are done in the power of Christ through the teaching of Christ and his word. His word equips us for this mission of discipleship. And there's an ever-present reality that I could not escape as I was preparing this message, as I was thinking about it, as I was thinking about the application, and it's this. If scripture is from God, breathed out by God, if it's profitable, if it is sufficient, if it equips us for the mission, then why do we struggle to read it so much? Why do we just leave it on the nightstand next to the bed? We get to read, we are privileged to read the very words breathed out by God. That's powerful. What I found in nearly 20 years of ministry to students is that many just, they just don't read the Bible and they really don't have any interest in it. Does that characterize your life too? Biblical illiteracy is a rampant problem in our culture. the church. The Barna Research Group does a study every year on Bible engagement, and they survey thousands of people, and their results for this year were interesting. It says, among the thousand surveyed, 35% are completely disengaged from the Bible. 35%. No interest in reading, nothing at all, want nothing to do with it. Overall, the results of the study tell us that those who would consider themselves Bible-centered people, this is more telling, this is the results of people that are more Bible-centered. So on the other side of the pendulum, that they are growing in skepticism. Like, that's our culture, that even people that mildly read the Bible are growing in skepticism. Does that characterize your life? Does that characterize your children's lives or your friend's life or your neighbor's life that used to go to church? Are they growing in skepticism? I want you to hear me when I say this, the more disengaged that you are from God's Word, the more likely it is that you will grow skeptical of His Word. The more disengaged you are from his word, the more skeptical you will grow of his word. Go ahead and bow your heads. If we are going to be a church body defined by God's word, then we must be in his book. How could we seek to defend our faith? How could we seek to talk to people about who Christ is if we simply won't read the words of scripture ourselves? It's so easy to have excuses. You know, I don't have time. I don't understand it. But what does that all boil down to? I just don't want to do it. Maybe that's the place that you're at here right now. Maybe, as I've been talking about the word of God, you've been realizing how you don't even have a relationship with Christ to begin with. We can know Christ. His word defines how. That we are lost in our sin, we were dead in our sin, yet but for Christ. He came, he died, he offers us life. He grants us repentance, but we must surrender to him. We must give him our all.