Most of us have heard people say, “Just do what feels right,” or “As long as your heart is sincere, God will accept it.” That sounds kind, but feelings make a poor guide for what God wants. Feelings change. Crowds get things wrong. Traditions can grow until they drown out what God said.
The Bible gives a better starting place. “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father” (Colossians 3:17, NASB95).
Stop on that phrase “in the name of.” In everyday talk we use names lightly. In Scripture, doing something in Jesus’ name means doing it by His authority. Authority means the right to rule and the right to say what is allowed. A police officer acts by the authority of the law. A doctor writes a prescription by the authority of his license. Christians speak and act under the authority of Jesus Christ. If He has not authorized a practice, we have no right to put His name on it.
So the question is simple and serious: how do we know what God authorizes? How do we ascertain Bible authority? Ascertain just means find out with care. We take the Bible as our only guide for faith and practice. We find God’s will through His direct commands, approved examples, and necessary inferences. Those three ways are ordinary. God speaks. God shows. God expects us to draw the conclusions that must follow from what He said. You can remember the three as CENI: command, example, and necessary inference. We will walk through each one slowly.
Why We Need God’s Authority
Jesus did not leave the church to invent its own religion. He said, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18, NASB95). If all authority belongs to Him, then our opinions do not sit beside His word as equals. Majority votes do not rewrite His will. What seems right to us is not the final court.
“There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12, NASB95). That verse is not rude. It is merciful. It warns us that sincerity alone can still walk a deadly road. Worship that feels warm can still be empty if God did not ask for it. Jesus said, “But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:23–24, NASB95). God wants a willing heart that also stays within the truth He revealed.
Jesus also warned that people can honor God with their lips while teaching as doctrines the precepts of men, and that human tradition can make void the commandment of God. He said, “Why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” And He applied Isaiah’s words: “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Matthew 15:3, 8–9, NASB95). That is why we need a method bigger than our preferences. We need what God has already spoken.
The Bible Is Enough
Before we talk about commands and examples, we need to know whether Scripture is finished and sufficient. The Bible has two main parts. The Old Testament is the first major section. It records God’s dealings with the world before Christ, including His covenant with Israel through Moses. A covenant is a binding agreement God makes with people, with terms He sets. The New Testament is the second major section. It records the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the beginning of His church, and the teaching given through His apostles for people who live under Christ now.
“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17, NASB95). Inspired here means God-breathed. Scripture is not a scrapbook of nice thoughts. It is God’s word. Because it equips us for every good work, we do not need a later creed, a church council, or a private feeling to finish what God already finished.
Peter wrote, “seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence” (2 Peter 1:3, NASB95). Jude said believers must “contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints” (Jude 3, NASB95). Once for all means it was delivered complete.
We don’t add to His word, and we don’t take away from it. John wrote, “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book” (Revelation 22:18–19, NASB95). Paul told Christians, “Now these things, brethren, I have figuratively applied to myself and Apollos for your sakes, so that in us you may learn not to exceed what is written, so that no one of you will become arrogant in behalf of one against the other” (1 Corinthians 4:6, NASB95).
The Bible stands alone as the complete and sufficient guide for faith, worship, and living. That is why ascertaining authority starts in Scripture, stays in Scripture, and refuses to go past Scripture.
Direct Commands
A command is God telling us what He wants in plain words. Parents give commands. Teachers give commands. God gives commands too. When He says to do something, that statement carries His authority.
Listen to Jesus’ commission: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned” (Mark 16:15–16, NASB95). The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ. Belief and baptism are not suggestions in that sentence. They are part of what Jesus commanded for salvation.
Matthew records the same charge with more detail: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20, NASB95). Making disciples, baptizing, and teaching obedience are commanded work. Christians do those things because Jesus said to.
Commands also shape worship. Paul wrote, “speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:19, NASB95). He said the same kind of thing to the Colossians: “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16, NASB95). Notice it is “with your heart” and “in your hearts.” The melody comes from within, not from man-made instruments. God specified singing. When God names the kind of music He wants from the church, that command is our authority.
A simple Old Testament picture helps. God told Noah, “Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood; you shall make the ark with rooms, and shall cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you shall make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. You shall make a window for the ark, and finish it to a cubit from the top; and set the door of the ark in the side of it; you shall make it with lower, second, and third decks” (Genesis 6:14–16, NASB95). Noah did not need a second list that said, “Do not use oak. Do not use pine.” The specified wood and the specified plan already shut out the rivals. When God specifies what He wants, that specification is enough.
Approved Examples
An approved example is a practice in the New Testament that God holds up for us to follow and is connected to a command or doctrine. God does not only speak in commands. He also shows His will through the lives of faithful people under Christ, especially the apostles.
Paul wrote, “Brethren, join in following my example, and observe those who walk according to the pattern you have in us” (Philippians 3:17, NASB95). He also said, “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1, NASB95). Pattern here means the shape of faithful Christian practice God wants us to copy.
Look at the church in Troas. “On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul began talking to them, intending to leave the next day, and he prolonged his message until midnight” (Acts 20:7, NASB95). “Break bread” in that setting points to the Lord’s Supper, the memorial meal Jesus gave His disciples. They gathered on the first day of the week. That approved example teaches the church when to assemble for that supper.
Giving follows a similar apostolic order. Paul wrote, “Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I directed the churches of Galatia, so do you also. On the first day of every week each one of you is to put aside and save, as he may prosper, so that no collections be made when I come” (1 Corinthians 16:1–2, NASB95). First-day giving was not a fundraiser invented later. It belongs to the approved practice of the early church.
Baptism by immersion is shown the same way. “As they went along the road they came to some water; and the eunuch said, ‘Look! Water! What prevents me from being baptized?’ And he ordered the chariot to stop; and they both went down into the water, Philip as well as the eunuch, and he baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; and the eunuch no longer saw him, but went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:36, 38–39, NASB95). Going down into the water and coming up out of it shows immersion, a full burial in water and illustrates the command behind the action being followed.
Here is an important caution. Not every story in the Bible binds us as a pattern to copy. The Bible records what happened to Judas after his betrayal: “Now this man acquired a field with the price of his wickedness, and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his intestines gushed out” (Acts 1:18, NASB95). That is recorded history. It is not an approved example for the church. We look for examples God approves under the New Covenant, the agreement now in force through Jesus Christ. Recording a fact is one thing. Holding it up as a pattern is another. If it is a pattern for us to emulate, then it will have a command or New Covenant teaching behind it. Incidental records of things that occurred don’t meet this test.
Necessary Inference
A necessary inference is a conclusion you must draw if you take God’s words seriously. Inference simply means a conclusion. Necessary means the conclusion is required by what God said. It is not a clever guess, and it is not a private theory. It is the only honest reading left once the words are on the table.
Jesus Himself reasoned this way. Some religious leaders denied the resurrection. Jesus answered them from Scripture God had already spoken: “But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living” (Matthew 22:31–32, NASB95). Notice the tense. God said “I am,” not “I was.” From that wording Jesus concluded that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still live to God, and therefore the dead are raised. The inference was necessary. If God is still their God, they are not gone forever.
Baptism works with the same kind of careful reading. “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4, NASB95). Burial implies immersion. You do not bury a person by sprinkling a little dirt on his forehead. Coming up from the water matches that picture. When Jesus was baptized, “After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him” (Matthew 3:16, NASB95).
Other necessary conclusions follow the same path. Jesus tied belief and baptism together: “He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned” (Mark 16:16, NASB95). If belief comes before baptism in the Lord’s teaching, infant baptism does not fit. Where God has given no command and no approved example for church-funded entertainment, we have no authority to invent one and stamp Jesus’ name on it. Necessary inference does not invent new religion. It refuses to ignore what God’s words already require.
Silence Is Not Permission
Silence means God has not spoken for a practice. In daily life we often treat silence as freedom: “Nobody said I couldn’t.” In worship and doctrine, that habit gets people in trouble. When God has already specified what He wants, silence about rival options is not a green light. Silence is not permission.
The book of Hebrews makes the point from the priesthood of Jesus. Under Moses, priests came from the tribe of Levi. Jesus came from the tribe of Judah. Hebrews says, “For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, a tribe with reference to which Moses spoke nothing concerning priests” (Hebrews 7:14, NASB95). Moses never needed a verse that said, “Judah shall not be priests.” His silence about Judah, after he had already named Levi, settled the question. No word meant no authorization.
Nadab and Abihu learned that the hard way. They were priests, sons of Aaron. “Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took their respective firepans, and after putting fire in them, placed incense on it and offered strange fire before the Lord, which He had not commanded them. And fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord” (Leviticus 10:1–2, NASB95). Read that carefully. The text does not say they offered fire God had forbidden by name. It says they offered what He had not commanded. Unauthorized worship cost them their lives. God cares how we worship Him.
So when someone says, “The Bible doesn’t say not to,” ask a better question: Did God authorize it by command, approved example, or necessary inference? If He did not, putting Jesus’ name on it still goes beyond what is written.
We speak where the Bible speaks, stay silent where the Bible is silent, and call Bible things by Bible names. Filling silence with human ideas divides the people of God. One standard keeps us together: what Christ has authorized.
The New Covenant and the New Testament Pattern
Remember that a covenant is God’s binding agreement with people. God made an old covenant with Israel at Sinai through Moses. That covenant had a priesthood, a temple, animal sacrifices, a Sabbath, and forms of worship that belonged to that age. The New Testament teaches that the Old Covenant ended and the New Covenant began in Jesus Christ. “Having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross” (Colossians 2:14, NASB95). In plain words: the Old Law was nailed to the cross with Jesus.
Romans declares we must be dead to the Old Covenant. We know which covenant it speaks of, for it names one of it’s commands. “Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter. What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “You shall not covet.” (Romans 7:4-7, NASB95)
That matters when people reach back to temple music, Levitical priests, or Sabbath rules to authorize practices in the church today. Those things belonged to the earlier covenant. They are not our authority for the assembly of the church under Christ. We live under the new covenant. We look to the New Testament for what He wants His people to do now.
God has always given patterns. He told Moses, “See that you make them after the pattern for them, which was shown to you on the mountain” (Exodus 25:40, NASB95). Hebrews repeats the same warning: the earthly priests “who serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things, just as Moses was warned by God when he was about to erect the tabernacle; for, ‘See,’ He says, ‘that you make all things according to the pattern which was shown you on the mountain’” (Hebrews 8:5, NASB95). God is the designer who put into place the form we must shape ourselves to. Under Christ, that form is the New Testament pattern for salvation, worship, leadership, and daily life.
That pattern includes singing from the heart, prayer, preaching, the Lord’s Supper on the first day of the week, and free-will giving, and even leadership. Local elders shepherd the flock among them. Paul told the Ephesian elders, “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood” (Acts 20:28, NASB95). Peter wrote, “shepherd the flock of God among you, exercising oversight not under compulsion, but voluntarily, according to the will of God; and not for sordid gain, but with eagerness; nor yet as lording it over those allotted to your charge, but proving to be examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:2–3, NASB95). Christians abide in the teaching of Christ: “Anyone who goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God; the one who abides in the teaching, he has both the Father and the Son” (2 John 9, NASB95). The pattern reaches all of Christian life, not the building hour alone.
Why This Method Matters
We use command, approved example, and necessary inference because Scripture is complete, Christ has all authority, and unity needs one standard. Feelings are a poor compass: “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12, NASB95). Tradition can make void God’s command: “But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Matthew 15:9, NASB95). “The Bible doesn’t say not to” treats silence as permission after God has already spoken.
Some will say, “Well, that is what it says, but I do not think that is what it means.” God doesn’t play games with our souls. He speaks plainly because He loves us. Let us choose today to believe the Bible exactly as God gave it.
Jesus said, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15, NASB95). He also said, “He who rejects Me and does not receive My sayings, has one who judges him; the word I spoke is what will judge him at the last day” (John 12:48, NASB95). “And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation” (Hebrews 5:9, NASB95).
Come Under His Authority
Christ has all authority. The Bible is enough. We ascertain His will by command, approved example, and necessary inference. When He specifies what He wants, we do not treat silence as permission.
If you have never obeyed the gospel, begin where the first converts began. “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38, NASB95). Repent means turn from sin toward God. Be baptized means be immersed in water upon faith in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins. Then do all you do in word or deed in the name of the Lord Jesus, by His authority, under the covenant that is in force now, just as Colossians 3:17 already told us: “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father” (Colossians 3:17, NASB95).
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