Kootenai Church Sunday School

What makes the Bible the right place to go for Christian ethics? Before addressing how source material can be misused in moral reasoning, Dave Rich steps back to answer a more foundational question: why is Scripture authoritative in the first place?
In Lesson 24 of the Christian Ethics and the Old Testament series, Rich grounds the authority of Scripture in the doctrine of verbal inspiration — the biblical teaching that the words of the original autographs are God-breathed. Working through 2 Timothy 3:13–17, 2 Peter 1:16–21, and John 10:34–36, he demonstrates that Scripture claims for itself the status of God's own words. That claim, he argues, is what makes it binding.
Rich also examines what inspiration does and doesn't mean — distinguishing the biblical concept from the common English sense of the word — and surveys how Jesus himself appealed to single words and even verb tenses to settle disputes, showing that verbal inspiration is the only view the Bible's own use of itself supports.
The lesson closes with a brief look at the doctrine of preparation: how God's sovereignty over every detail of an author's life and background ensured that what they wrote was exactly what He intended — fully human, fully divine, and fully authoritative.
For anyone asking why the Bible should govern how we live, this lesson builds the foundation.

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Christians are called to obey God's commands — not merely to know them. But what happens when Christian ethics slides into error, minimizing the obligation to obey? In Lesson 23, Dave Rich continues the survey of antinomian ethical ditches, finishing Christian pragmatism before turning to free grace theology and a topic he calls "Sovereign Constraints and the Death of Choice."
Christian pragmatism reduces ethics to results — the end justifies the means. Rich traces this error from secular teleological systems (utilitarianism, situationism, Ayn Rand's egoism) into the church itself, where seeker-sensitive ministry and personal excuse-making share the same root: a goal pursued without regard for what God actually commands. Uzzah, Saul, and Pilate each illustrate the point. Good intentions and desired outcomes never override obedience.
Free grace theology then comes under examination. Rich explains how the non-lordship position severs repentance from saving faith, and how in practice this licenses the false convert to remain in unrepentant sin while dismissing biblical confrontation as legalism.
The final and most searching topic is sovereign constraints — the tendency to treat addictions, disorders, and psychological conditions as though they override the Christian's ability to obey God. Rich draws a firm line: struggles shaped by repeated sinful choices are moral problems requiring repentance, not diseases requiring only treatment. No constraint, however powerful, is sovereign. God is.
For every Christian engaged in the hard work of sanctification, this lesson is a reminder: you are not helpless, and you are not hopeless.

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What happens when Christian ethics goes wrong — on either side of the road? Lesson 22 of the Christian Ethics series covers the final rigorist errors and opens the antinomian ones.
Dave Rich finishes the fundamentalist ethic from the previous lesson, drawing a clear line between biblical separation and the error of letting the world define the church's ethic in opposition to it. He then addresses scrupulosity — moralism with an emotional edge. For those prone to a hypervigilant conscience, Rich offers a grounding corrective from 1 John, Psalm 103, and Hebrews: God is greater than your heart, your guilt is addressed in Christ, and you have an advocate when you sin.
From there, the lesson crosses to the other ditch. Christian universalism, traced through James Rellie and its modern expressions, removes any ethical stakes entirely. Licentiousness treats the gospel as a license to sin — a position Rich addresses plainly: if that is your view of salvation, you are not saved. The lesson closes with the opening of Christian pragmatism and the seeker-friendly movement's "end justifies the means" approach to church ministry.
A clarifying lesson for anyone thinking carefully about where Christian ethics goes off course.

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What does it look like when law overrides grace? In Lesson 21 of the Christian Ethics series, Dave Rich identifies a class of ethical errors he calls "rigorism" — a broad category of views that elevate obedience to law above its proper biblical place, sometimes to the point of outright heresy.
Rich walks through four distinct expressions of this error. Pelagianism, the most extreme, denies grace entirely, insisting that human beings are inherently capable of meeting God's standard on their own — a direct assault on the gospel. Legalism, defined narrowly here, adds works as a condition for justification, making it equally damning. Moralism stops short of heresy but displaces the gospel from its rightful center, making ethical obedience the heart of the Christian faith rather than union with Christ. And fundamentalism, rightly understood in its historical roots, can drift into boundary-making for its own sake — creating rules where Scripture gives none.
Throughout, Rich keeps the gospel firmly in view. Obedience is real, required, and pleasing to God — but only in those who are already justified by grace through faith in Christ alone. The righteous deeds of a believer are not filthy rags. They matter. They please God. But they are the fruit of union with Christ, never the ground of standing before him.
A clarifying and gospel-anchored lesson for anyone who wants to think carefully about how Christians relate to the law.

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The truth isn't out there — it's already here. That's the claim Michael Anderson brings to 1 Timothy 3:14–16 in this Sunday school message, setting up a sharp contrast between the world's fruitless search for external meaning and the life-transforming revelation of the gospel.
Working through what he calls the constitution, commission, and confession of the church, Anderson shows why Paul found these three things urgent enough to put in writing. The church's constitution — the household and governing body of the living God — matters because God alone determines how it is built, ordered, and inhabited. Its commission, drawn from the striking image of a pillar and buttress, calls the church both to hold the truth high and to actively resist the side loads of distortion and false teaching. And its great confession, likely a well-known hymn of the early church, makes clear that the mystery of godliness is not a doctrine but a person — Jesus Christ, manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, taken up in glory.
Anderson closes with a practical challenge: does our individual conduct in the church reflect the transformative truth we confess? The good news is that faithful obedience to these commands doesn't rest on our own strength — it rests on the same resurrection power that raised Christ from the dead.

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