Why Is a Christian Worldview So Important?
As I have said over the years, one of our greatest problems in the church today is that we have “saved souls” but “secularized brains.” In other words, we’ve been saved out of Egypt into salvation’s Promised Land, but Egypt remains within the way we think politically, socially, and culturally. Yes, we reject sexual sin, drunkenness, theft, and the “big sins,” but we remain trapped in the world’s left-right political games, the capitalism-socialism economic paradigm, and a host of unexamined cultural attitudes we all caught in our secular education, powerfully reinforced by the contemporary news and opinion-shaping media. It all shows up in a major way in the constant deterioration of our surrounding culture—a culture believers are to be biblically transforming as “salt and light.”
Without an effective and applied Christian worldview, believers will continue to only sporadically and nominally affect the world. Focused on heaven, God’s earth is left by believers to the world system to manage its resources and control its people. We either are too self-absorbed to care about the culture’s captivity and the people’s oppression, or we don’t see the fundamental differences between the world system and the Kingdom of God clearly enough to know how to strategically engage the transformation process. In either case, both world evangelism and church reformation dramatically suffer.
Christian worldview is made up essentially of five major components:
Number One: A faith-based and reason-driven assumption or presupposition that a Creator intelligent enough and powerful enough to create the universe and the complexity of man, is also powerful enough to control His “manufacturer’s handbook,” the Bible, in terms of its content, laws, principles, and historical accuracy.
Number Two: A methodological and analytical process of applying those biblical truths and presuppositions against all other so-called truths or philosophies to evaluate the veracity of their content and application.
Number Three: A comprehensive view of reality and history that interrelates all human endeavors and disciplines as measured against God’s purposes and truth.
Number Four: An assumption based on Christ’s Word that if we will obey Him and submit to the guiding and interpretive wisdom of the Holy Spirit that we can meaningfully interpret God’s Word, the world-system’s fallacies, and discern how God would have humanity truly live, both personally and socially.
Number Five: A Spirit-led drive to strategically apply the implications of this Christian worldview to both our personal lives and social activities, especially in terms of the nature and purpose of the church and its relationship to “seeking first the Kingdom of God” and praying for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.”
We all must press further into the ongoing process of renewal of our minds and a maturing Christian worldview. Likewise, may we share our quest with others to see more people set free! We must have a Christian worldview in order to truly be salt and light. And that, my friends, is…