I think most Bible-believing Christians espouse the supreme authority of Scripture in their lives and the world. But, “the devil is in the details” as the cliche goes. Our doctrinal statements on this topic are usually just fine. Where we err is in daily practice. There are subtle ways we functionally abandon Scripture’s authority. In the first installment, we looked at abandonment practice #1: appealing to selective texts while ignoring others. Today…
Way #2: Sidestepping “hot topics”
For the sake of peace or the approval of a select group of people, we offer innocuous treatments of hot topics. Issues like poverty, racism, homosexual marriage, hell, male/female distinctions, etc. We avoid talking about these in the futile hope they will just go away. The problem with avoiding these, of course, is that our natural drift is to pick up the culture’s thinking on those topics.
The best antidote to avoid these errors is systematic, expository preaching of the Bible. Topical preaching, typically, allows the preacher to preach the topics that most interest the preacher. That list of topics is almost always narrow and the result is many topics are never addressed. Systematic, expository preaching forces the preacher to preach on the plethora of topics God gives us in his Word.
