Your Word is sufficient

If you talk to me on a pretty regular basis, then one thing you will find out is that one of my most influential teachers is a man named David Powlison. He is editor for the Journal of Biblical Counseling, a biblical counselor and faculty member at Christian Counseling and Education Foundation (CCEF), and also a professor of practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. I first found out about him through a message he delivered at the 2005 Desiring God National Conference - "Christ's Grace and Your Sufferings." (I actually posted an excerpt of that message on my blog back in my I-never-write-and-only-quote-others days.)

In his introduction, Powlison spoke of how Christians often know the right answer without truly understanding it because we treat biblical truths like a quick fix. That often times, the richness and fullness of the Word is sapped by a single qualifier: "just," ie, "if you just ... (fill in the blank)." That when we think of the Word as some kind of easy formula, magic bullet, or pat answer with "just", we ignore all the beautiful and detailed contours of the Bible. And then it becomes something overly simplistic, and then we find it unhelpful and irrelevant. How are we to approach the Word and be blessed by this divine gift instead of treating it like some evangelical amulet?

By God's grace, I have always been taught that the Bible is true, authoritative, and sufficient, so I wanted to study it and obey it. But what that actually looked like wasn't always clear to me, and it's in this that Powlison has helped me profoundly. For instance, knowing (and affirming) the doctrine of God's sovereignty is one thing, trusting God when the future looks uncertain and bleak is another. Doing that isn't easy, but it's exactly in those situations when my true beliefs and the limitations of my finiteness are revealed, and I am then forced to wrestle with who God is, why He matters, and who I am in the light of that reality.

It's easy to treat the doctrines of systematic theology (God, man, sin, Christ, salvation) as obscure, abstract, and irrelevant to the daily grind of our lives - but that is far from the truth. God has used Powlison's teachings to show me that these doctrines are the very lens through which I should view life in this world, and why these truths matter more than anything else we could come to know.

I think the best introduction to David Powlison that you can read is a short article titled "Do You See?" I can't find it online except a pretty thorough collection of excerpts on a post from Justin Taylor's blog. I highly recommend that you read it -- and anything else you can find by Powlison.