Living The Way God Wants Us To Live – Embracing A Biblical Worldview In A Fallen World

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Living The Way God Wants Us to Live:

Embracing A Biblical Worldview in a Fallen World

Isaiah 58:6-12

Today, we have an operating system that we use to go through life. This operating system is called our worldview. Our worldview is how we determine reality and make decisions like what is good and what is evil, what is real and what is false, and what is worthwhile and what is worthless. Those distinctions are each derived from our worldview.

WORLDVIEW PROMPTS DECISIONS: Our worldview slowly takes shape through life and dictates most of our daily responses to choices, events, and experiences. As babies, we process the world and start forming our own reality. We go through life from the very start listening, filtering, picking, and choosing.

Parents, the web, TV, media, music, games, school, experiences, religion, and our surrounding culture all blend together to form a working worldview.
When we want something it is because it fits into our worldview.
Whether we watch or listen or participate in anything is driven, in the background, by our worldview.
Whether we want a job, learn a trade, or continue in education are all byproducts of this worldview framework we use.

Rational people, normal people, average people, those without impairment usually choose activities that “fit” into what they believe is right, helpful, and consistent with their reality or worldview.

So for example, the worldview of the Islamic terrorists in the news called ISIS motivates them to capture, kill, and by any means accomplish conquest is what they in their worldview they have been taught and convinced is right. To us they are barbaric. To them, they are reformers returning the Middle East to its rightful order.

WORLDVIEW IS A CHOICE: The power of our worldview as the central processor, or filter that we see life through can’t be understated. Your worldview clearly reveals who you are as a person, more than any other element of our lives. Think for a moment about the power of our worldview. Worldview is what we believe. What we trust. What we consider reliable.

Transcript

As you open your Bibles to Isaiah 58, I would like to add one more note to Dave Scott’s wonderful announcements. He talked about our Summer Home Groups. Summer Home Groups is a time either to continue or for the first time to join in a small, intimate setting, a New Testament Church, small group setting in a home with other believers. But the topic is what…, just that is enough to make it priceless. But the topic this year is perhaps one of the most relevant we could ever study.

The reason I know that is, many months ago, we began studying the materials for home groups as a staff. At first, we were all har harring about the cover. The cover is a fluorescent, yellowish orange. It’s, it has in about 120 point font, gossip. So, we all were laughing and saying, yep, we’re studying how to gossip, until we did the first chapter. It’s a very practical book. For those of you that aren’t going to come out, I’ll just give you the whole study in two points. There are two points to the whole study.

Number one, you should never talk about someone you’ve never talked to. So that, phew! That will cut a lot of phone conversations short and other things. I’m not talking about, we can talk about Abraham Lincoln. I haven’t talked to him since we went to school together, but you know what I mean. It’s talking about people that are in life with us, and we cannot talk about them to someone else if we have not spoken to them about that issue. So that’s the first thing the book is about.

The second thing is, even if you have talked with a person, even things that are true should not be shared in a certain context at certain times. What this book does is, it is a very practical study of one of the things we do constantly, and it’s talking. What it does is it, as it says in the Psalms, it sets a watch, a guard, at the doors of our mouth. Because since we started this study, at many meetings, we have all said we shouldn’t, has anybody talked to that person about that? Okay, we can’t discuss that anymore. Who’s going to go talk to him first? Boy, does that affect everything. Secondly, when someone is talking, say is that something that we should talk about? Is it true, honest, lovely, and a good report? Because usually the things that we love to share are like Mark Twain, the inimitable theologian, he wasn’t. But he said that while truth is tying its shoestrings, gossip has made it around the world. That was his anecdotal way of saying that it’s easier to talk about things that are harmful than things that are edifying and good.

All that to say, home groups are amazing. Going to a New Testament living room discussion of the Bible with a gifted and godly leader and teacher is unbelievable. But add to it this topic, and it’s very impactful. If you’ve never been or are thinking about signing up out in the Fellowship Center are tables.

Start of Lesson 6

This morning, Isaiah 58 in your Bibles. Let me share something with you. The announcement I just made, the description of the people on the platform, and everything else in your life, you and I are processing through a little filter. That little filter is our disposition, or some would call it our outlook on life, or others would call it the way I am. But theologians and philosophers call it this word right here. You and I process everything in life through a window. A filter called our worldview.

Our worldview is how we determine what is good and what is bad. We have a little mechanism that we’ve decided, good and bad, worthy and unworthy of our time. Something we desire and something we don’t like. It’s like your worldview even determines your appetite, your shopping, your entertainment, your investments or your work ethic. Everything in life comes through this filter that we have formed in life, up to this point, of our worldview. It’s how we operate as individuals.

My question to you this morning is very simple. Do you have a biblical worldview? Do you process life, what is good, what is bad, what is worthwhile, what is worthless, what is true, what is false, what is genuine, what is fake? How do you formulate those opinions? Because everything in our life is driven by that. What we’re drawn to, what we love to do, what we are driven to do, what we treasure, what we spend our lives doing and talking about and learning about, and watching, and listening to, and experiencing is all a byproduct of our worldview. The question this morning is where does the Bible fit in that worldview?

The reason I’m asking that is if we want to live the way God wants us to live… Now, if you’re a Christian, that should be paramount. If I’m given another day to live, when I, this morning in the dark, felt the cold floor because the temperature dropped to whatever it dropped to, 46, cold, damp floor because it’s been raining, and when I realized I was alive another day, I realized I had an opportunity to live the way God wants me to live. Did that cross your mind? Do you have a Biblical Bible at the center of your worldview? Or were you thinking, let’s see, what should I do today? It’s raining, I can’t play golf. Oh, how about church? I haven’t been there for a while. Where is the determiner of how you filter life? Is it God through His Word, or is it something else?

Now, for all of us, the something else started at birth, and we started amassing our worldview. But salvation, conversion, the new birth, puts God right in the middle. Whether or not we allow Him to dominate our worldview is the choice. Now the topic we’re looking at this morning is whether or not your biblical worldview causes you, as you embrace it in a fallen world, to operate the way God says we are to operate in Isaiah 58.

Isaiah 58 is an expression of God’s desires. Now, I told first service, I don’t know when in the message, but I’ll tell it right now. Because I try and keep you tandem, so that at lunch, you’re talking about the same things. But, if something is vitally important to you, it dominates your thoughts. When we were saved, God became most important to us, in all the universe. Because, as we were just singing, He died for me. The One who died for me. We keep talking about that the sacrificial substitutionary atonement. For me, from age, about age 10 onward, I realized that I was living, growing up in a dysfunctional family with parents that, that vocally and physically argued all the time. I don’t remember any peaceful quiet times growing up and so when I got to be about 11 and my sisters started dating and falling in love. I thought ooh, if I ever date and fall in love I don’t want to end up like what I’m living in. So, my perennial prayer request was I don’t want to have a marriage like my parents had and so I don’t want to marry someone that’s going to be like that. I just prayed about that, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.

Finally, when I was 18 years old, and my parents let me meet a girl for the first time in my life. I started thinking really a lot about it and I began dating and I dated 741 girls, one time. Because I was scared to death that they were going to be like my parents. I didn’t want to have fights. The one thing I prayed for is don’t let me marry the wrong person, Lord. That continued until I was 27 years old, and a friend of mine twisted my arm. He had already introduced me to John MacArthur, and I’d already gone out on staff with John MacArthur, and the same person came to me and said, there’s one more thing I want you to do. I said, what? I was willing to do anything. He says, ask this girl. I said, No. I had given up by then. 742 was not interesting to me. 741 duds, or I was the dud, and they passed on me. But whatever you want to say. I said, I don’t want to meet anybody else. He said, you must.

So, I called, and agreed one time to meet this young lady. She was a first grade school teacher at this university where I was teaching and serving. I called her, arranged it, said I’ll give you an hour and I did. One minute before the hour started, I knocked on her door, and when the door cracked open, as she was opening the door, I saw her eyes and her smile. That’s all I saw. Inside, my first thought was, [gasps], that’s the person you’ve been praying for your whole life. I only had one hour with her. I watched her. In fact, I was going for a class, and I don’t even remember what the class was about. I watched her the whole night. For one hour. I had to take her back, and I dropped her off, and I waited till the second date to tell her, you’re the one person I’ve prayed for my whole life.

After the whole life came out of my mouth, I thought, Oh No!, she’ll not believe me. But what happened from that point onward is I started listening to whatever she desired, whatever she wanted, whenever she said, oh I wish, or I’ve always wanted to, or if only I could, or I really like, or my favorite this, I wrote it down. In fact, in my Evernote collection, I have the actual snapshot of all these little slips of paper. Wherever I was, if she said, my favorite flavor, my favorite color, my favorite whatever, I wrote it down. Because I became a lifelong student of the one I loved, and I wanted to know what they desired. A worldview is formed around what you love the most. If it’s God, then His Bible has said what His desires are.

Turn to Isaiah 58, and what we’re going to look at this morning is our worldview. As God describes what He likes, prompts our decisions, our worldview slowly takes shape through life, and it dictates most of our responses every day to what we choose, to the events we participate in, and all the experiences we have. As babies, we begin processing the world. We start forming our own reality. We go through life from the very start, listening, filtering, and picking and choosing. We say, I like that, I don’t like that. I want to be like that. I don’t want to be like that. We just, we start forming this little grid. Our parents, the web, television, media, music, games, school, experiences, religion, all of our surrounding culture blend together to form this working worldview.

Part of it’s geographic. Part of it’s ethnic. Part of it is sociological. Part of it is our education. Part of it is everything in life forms this tapestry, this quilt, this framework. That’s how we operate. That’s how we see life and reality. When we want something, it’s because it fits into that worldview. Whether we watch or listen or participate in anything, it’s driven in the background. In fact, our worldview almost is unconsciously, we’re not even conscious sometimes that this framework we’ve formed, the longer we live is dictating everything and it shows us what’s next, what we want, what we desire. Whether we want a job or not is based on our worldview. Whether we learn a trade or not. Whether we continue in education or don’t think education is even important and we don’t even pay attention. Like a whole segment of our society is. Their worldview is education doesn’t matter, so I’m going to go until I don’t have to go and I’m just going to do something else. That’s all a byproduct of our worldview framework we use.

Rational people, or normal people, or average people, those who have no impairment, usually choose, in life, things that fit into what they think is right, helpful, useful, beneficial, desirable, pleasurable. That’s why we do what we do. I have a little Google filter that filters all the web, and it looks for certain words. I keep adding words in there, bioterrorism and Armageddon, just biblical words and biblical sites. This week, boom, it delivered that day’s filtering’s. I saw Palmyra. I went, Palmyra? I didn’t say Elmyra, New York, I said Palmyra, Syria. That’s the site of the single longest Hebrew inscription ever found anywhere outside of Jerusalem. Palmyra was an amazing biblical archaeological site. So, I thought, oh, Palmyra, what did they find now? It was Isis. They just captured it. They went door to door. They rounded up everyone they thought was an enemy, and they put them in the ancient theater of Palmyra, and disemboweled, and beheaded, and eviscerated, and whatever else you want to call it, in public, with all the populace sitting in this massive ancient theater, on the stage, all the enemies. Now, that’s barbaric to most of us in this room’s worldview. If we showed it, we would say that’s barbaric. To kill is bad enough, but to kill horrifically, to kill publicly, to kill disemboweling, this is animal like. Did you know that their worldview, those individuals, has been shaped to the point that they were saying in their hearts, in all I do, I honor you. They were doing that for someone. They were doing that for who they worship, who their lives follow, who their worldview has put at the center. It dominates their life. They’re willing to die for the worldview they have, that we call barbaric.

So, there are many worldviews. Some are good and some are not. The worldview of the Islamic terrorists in the news called ISIS motivates them to capture and kill and by any means accomplish conquest in what, in their worldview, they’ve been taught and convinced is right. In fact, to their followers, the Palmyra Theater butchers are founding fathers. They’re like Washington and Monroe and Jefferson and Lincoln to us in this country. To us, they’re barbaric. To them, they’re reformers returning the Middle East to its rightful order. Worldview prompts decisions.

Secondly, worldview is a choice. We’re collecting this. The power of our worldview is the central processor of our life. It’s the filter we see life through. We can’t understate its power. Your worldview clearly reveals not only who you are as a person, but more than anything else will dictate the course of your life. How you process what you think is valuable and right and wrong.

Think for a moment about the power of our worldview. Worldview is what we believe, what we trust, what we consider to be reliable. Each of us looks at life through this framework of what we believe either consciously or most of the time unconsciously, we are slowly building this framework of beliefs. Every human that’s cognizant and functioning operates this way. It frames our reality. How we live, what we do, what we say, how we feel, and the way we live. That’s our disposition, our outlook, our framework, our core beliefs, which are all our worldview.

A worldview is the overarching explanation of all we have learned to this point and understand so that we can make sense of life. When people can’t make sense of life, they check out, they go crazy, they give up, they whatever. People have to be able to make sense of life. Our worldview is the tool. The biggest question for each person in life is, what components have formed your worldview? What is in this quilt, this fabric, this framework? Are the things that you believe trustworthy? How do you know what is true? And the answers to that and every other question comes from our worldview.

By the way, there are so many elements that frame our behavior, that flow from our worldview, that whether or not God is in the center determines everything. So, let me show you what I mean by that.

Worldview frames behavior. Okay, I could use any current world issue, whether it’s ISIS or whether it’s what’s going on in Southeast Asia with the whole unleashing of the Middle Earth Chinese Empire, whatever. All of it is based on the underlying beliefs that each person has. This is what determines our worldview.

Number one, is there a supreme God or not? Now these questions are perfect for witnessing. They’re also perfect for discipling. They’re also an incredible personal inventory. Is there a supreme God or not? If there is a supreme God, who exactly or what exactly is this God? That underlies everything.

Secondly, how did this place we find ourselves originate? That, amazingly is the underlying framework that God gives us. Do you know how the Bible opens? In the beginning, that means before everything else, God, He isn’t introduced, He’s just named, as the only uncreated self-existent one, [who] created. So, there’s an uncreated supreme God who originated the universe. That’s what the Bible says. Anything diverging from that is disagreeing with God. That’s why there’s two worldviews. God’s, revealed in His Word, the Bible. And everything else, the patchwork quilt. Little this, little that. I think this, feel that, heard that, read that. That happened to me. I think this happened. You know what I mean? Where did the universe originate? Is it random? Is it evolutionary? You know what’s so interesting about science? I mean it, I remember when I was in high school, at Haslett, that I entered a project and enjoyed it immensely and had a scholarship to an East Coast Institute of Technology.

I love science, you know what bothered me about science? They operate on laws, like laws of gravity and thermodynamics and a lot of other laws of science. But laws demand a law giver. Someone has to set the law in place for it to be a law. It has to be a firm, fixed standard. You know what science does? They accept the laws, but they reject the One who made them. They say, no, they just happened. Because, see, they don’t believe in the supreme God. They don’t believe that the universe originated the way the supreme God says. They also don’t know where they came from. They think they came from no God, no origination according to the Bible.

Where do humans originate? Even this Christian condescension to secular evolutionists that say we believe God started, but it all evolved. That kind of syncretism, mixing the two together, is not presented in the Bible. God who witnessed it said it didn’t happen that way. But that, even that, begins to affect people when they think they originated by chance, by randomness, instead of being direct. God grants conception. No human comes into existence apart from God granting an immortal life to them. Now, He uses the mechanisms that He has created, but God is the author.

Number four, what happens to humans at death? If you don’t believe there’s a supreme God and how the universe originated, you become like naturalistic evolutionary thoughts that we are just little dots on a hunk of rock and metal out in an enveloping cosmic darkness, and we’re insignificant and nothing and helpless, and we just go out and there’s nothing. Or, you believe what God says happens, that every human is immortal and will eternally exist somewhere forever. That’s just bottom line what the Bible says.

Are there absolute truths? Now science accepts laws of science, but then they get flaky on absolute truth, morals, or ethics. But yet the same God who instituted the absolute laws also instituted truth, morals, and ethics.

Finally, where is human history headed? What is going on here? Is there… all worldviews have to explain origin, then they have to give some word about purpose, and then they have to explain destiny. If you cannot answer those correctly, it ends up in hopelessness and despair. That’s where our world is increasingly getting.

So, worldview frames our behavior. If you don’t think there’s a supreme God, then you don’t care how you live. If you don’t know how the universe originated, you don’t know why you’re even here and live for the moment. I was watching an ad for the GoPro. You live, for seizing those crazy moments. Doesn’t matter if you’re not even going to exist after death? Just go out there into the darkness.

Now, let me just contrast. There’s only two worldviews. Let me just go through really quickly a contrast. Worldview 1 is the dominant view of, I would say, high 90s percent of the world. 90 some percent of the world. Or more, probably more. Jesus said this, broad is the way. So, this is the broad way. This is the wide way. This is the narrow way, difficult, few. So, Jesus said it’s narrow and few, believe worldview 2. Most are here. This one is naturalistic. If you can’t explain it through, a natural cause, there’s no God. It’s just, it’s all matter and energy and it just popped in and we don’t know where it popped from, but who cares, it did pop. It’s evolving.

There’s this evolutionary going from randomness to complexity to even higher and higher complexity. In fact, for in the scale of the evolutionary thought, in all the billions of years, everything got more and more and more and more and more complex until modern times. Now it’s not getting complex anymore. I don’t know why it stopped getting complex, but everything isn’t getting complex, but it got complex all the way through. This is the view that basically is where most people are because they’ve enshrined the talking minds, the Hawking’s and Sagan’s and Einstein’s of the world.

The end result of this, by the way, of worldview 1 is despair. In fact, 19 years ago the biggest televangelist of the naturalistic worldview was Carl Sagan. They got him on TV, on ABC Nightline, three weeks before he died. It was the 6th of December, and he died the 27th. He died right after Christmas. On that day, they said, please, before you die, give us your wisdom. This is what he said. Humans are marooned on a pale blue dot in a possibly endless cosmos. We are unnoticed, insignificant, and on our own. So, he looked out at television audiences and said, so you better work hard and invent stuff. He probably inspired Steve Jobs, or something like that. Because it’s that whole idea that we’ve got to save the planet. So that’s worldview 1. It’s coming out more and more and more. If you’re not saving the planet, and the animals, and the air, and everything else, you are not in step. If you believe that we are unnoticed, insignificant, and it’s all up to us, then you’re right in line with this.

Worldview 2 is, it’s God centered. Salvation puts God at the center of everything in our life. If that, if God is not in the center of all of your thinking, and processing, and feeling, and deciding, then 2 Corinthians 13:5 should be very important to you. You know what that says? Examine yourselves whether you be in the faith, because salvation puts… God…, it’s a new heart, will I give you. God puts a new operating system, which He dominates. It’s God centered. It’s creator based. Now, watch this. I want, let’s see if I can do this for a second.

What’s interesting is, God has put the universe people and life in a box. In other words, everything that we know, God has put in a box. Do you know what that box is? Genesis 1:1. In the beginning, God created. God says, everything that you know of originates from God. God is the originator. Your origin is God. Therefore, once you understand that then you can find out what is your purpose that He puts you in this universe with all those other people for whatever your lifespan is. That all of a sudden, that one focal point puts a perimeter and a point of reference, and you can say yes, I’m in a universe that’s vast, but I am not insignificant. I am not unnoticed and I’m not on my own. I originated at God’s direct creative act, and He has designed me for a purpose. Then we know we have a destiny, and He’s already written that down.

So those three things really are the byproducts of a worldview. Our world that we live in does not accept that. They say it’s natural causes, no divine being, it’s evolutionary, you’re going to rise, and we hope on some planet or some galaxy in a far off galaxy, there’ll be somebody smarter and that’s how people live through life. There’s a lot of despair. That’s why, what’s the new drug? I don’t know how to pronounce it, flakka or Flaca. I don’t know if it’s here yet, but it’s sweeping the nation. One county in Florida had 19 people die because have you read about it in the news? These people are bizarre. One of them stripped all their clothes off and kicked the door down to the local police precinct with a hatchet. That’s bizarre. Did you know this drug only costs $3 a hit? It’s a synthetic hallucinogenic drug. It’s a chemical that makes you go crazy. Why would people take that? Wow. If you don’t know how you got here or why you’re here, and you heard someone said, this is a euphoria you’ve never experienced, wouldn’t you try it for $3? If your worldview is number 1. But worldview 2, if God is centered in, and by the way, worldview 2 is biblically defined.

For example, there are many translations of the Bible in many languages. If you translate the Bible into Arabic, you will find God being translated as Allah. In the sense of translation, you can say, God is Allah, but Allah must be defined biblically, not Quranically. Because the 99 attributes of Allah in the Quran make him what Salman Rushdie got in so much trouble about. Do you remember what he wrote? He said that those are the attributes of Satan, not of God. They’re chasing him all over the world, killing him. Because the Quranic definition of Allah is antithetically, absolutely opposite of the Biblical defined God of the universe. So, what we have to find is…

What’s your worldview? What is defining? If it’s anything but God’s Word, the Bible, the Holy Scriptures, then you are in some form here. But if you believe in a God centered, creator based, biblically defined, held by a few, worldview, the end result is hope. You know what it says? God of hope. 2 Corinthians 1, verses 3 to 8. Now may the God of hope fill you with all hope. Because He can comfort us, because we know how we got here. We know why we’re here. We know where we’re headed. So, no matter how much pain and sorrow and suffering and deprivation and hardship we have in life, we know from the biblically defined God of the Bible, nothing gets into our life that He is not personally orchestrating in our life for good. He is working all things together in our life for good, Romans 8:28.

We believe that we are created beings in a created universe formed by the only uncreated being there is. He is our creator, and that our creator revealed Himself very clearly in two ways. In person, He came, Jesus Christ. In propositional truth, He wrote. He chose forty men and used two processes on them.

Number one, the Greek word theopneustos, he breathed out through them. Number two, Peter says, pheromenoi, He led them. So, He breathed out and led them to record exactly His revelation of Himself. If we believe Him, this book becomes the magnet. Did you know every time I heard my first grade school teacher I was dating say anything about what she desired, magnet, out came my pen. I wrote it down. Because she was central to my desire, to please and honor. Which is exactly the experience that every one of us who were born again find out about this book with God.

Next, God states His worldview in the Scripture. It’s 11:32 am in Kalamazoo. So let me just introduce these concepts that we’re going to look at in depth. God says, this is my worldview. If you want to agree with Me, if you want to have hope, if you want to understand life, number one, I want you to know that you are worshipping and following, and God has declared in writing, in the Bible, that He Himself is the only eternal, only self-existent, only creator of everything. He is the only uncreated entity anywhere. Everything else has an origination. He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. Not one sparrow hops along the sidewalk, apart from God allowing it, and through His universe empowering it, keeping it alive, to hop. See, that’s the very start, of a worldview is, who is the originator of everything? Nothing? No one? Random chance? Chaos? Evolutionary something? Or God? Biblically defined God.

Number two, God says, I have revealed My desires in the direct propositional truth of the Bible. Did you know, right here you want to choose a church to attend anywhere? I get letters all the time, people say we’re moving, what kind of church? Find one that believes that God is the eternal self-existent creator. They might say they do, see if they do. Number two, has He revealed directly Himself in the Bible? Is this the direct revelation of God, or is it just what churches in Kalamazoo are saying? A church in our area recently voted and the congregation decided that God was not speaking through the Apostle Paul, that it was some other group, and it was irrelevant to believe anymore what God’s Word clearly said about the role of women and also the role of marriage. So, in other words, they’re going to ordain women, and homosexuals are not going to be talked about anymore, they can just do whatever they want as long as they are nice to each other. They voted that God’s direct communication they don’t agree with. That’s fascinating to me. They’re still considered a church. Founded by Christ? They don’t believe His Word, people still go there unfazed because it’s a political issue and they’re not going to be divisive. They’re going to just love God. You know what I say? Which God is it you’re loving? This one that’s revealed Himself and He has revealed Himself in person through Christ.

Now, here’s another interesting thing. People see a kind of a dichotomy that there’s this Old Testament God, why He’s the one telling them to exterminate all those Canaanites, and He’s a bad one, but Jesus would never do that. Jesus wouldn’t hurt. He says, I don’t condemn you, I forgive you, and He fed everybody and healed everybody, and He wasn’t divisive. When He was, we’re not sure it really is, the Gospel writers might have added that. They see an Old Testament God and a New Testament God. You know what Jesus said? If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father. Jesus said, I and my Father are what? One. Yeah. There aren’t three gods, there’s one. Three persons, one God. If you’ve seen Christ, you’ve seen God, and if you’ve seen Christ, He’s the same one saying kill every single person in Jericho, except for Rahab and her family. That was Christ, because He was the angel of the Lord that came down and told Joshua to do it. He was God, a theophany, an embodiment physically of God. It’s the same God. He has revealed Himself, the exact representation of God, is Jesus Christ. God’s declared His Word, the Bible, is absolutely accurate.

Now, one more thing, let me show you something. Back up, let’s just go right here. W. A. Criswell, one day… He was the pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, where it’s flooding now. Did you know in the last seven days an equivalent of eight inches of rain has fallen on every square inch of the state of Texas? They’re flooding. So, Dallas is a little flooded right now. But W. A. Criswell was pastoring there a generation ago, and he took his Bible, the Holy Bible, and what he said is the Holy Bible is talks about many issues. It opens with creation. It closes with the destiny of the universe and what’s going to happen. In between, it talks about a philosophy of life. It talks about God’s standards of marriage. God’s whole, all of these truths, this worldview is in the Bible. He says, you know what, if you say I am not sure, that the Bible isn’t a scientific volume, although science, scio, the Latin word science comes from, means to know. Who is the ultimate person that knows? Someone that personally witnessed and tells the truth. God witnessed creation and tells the truth. He actually dictated, in fact, the creation account that God created the Earth in six days and rested the seventh, He actually wrote with his own finger in stone with Moses on Mount Sinai.

So this, the creation account, may be the most verified part of the Bible because Jesus didn’t write anything except in the dust on the temple floor. God wrote that He created the entire universe, in the order of Genesis, in six days and rested the seventh. That is a linchpin of everything. That’s how the Bible opens. Do you know what Criswell said, if you tear that out then you’re probably going to have to tear out how it’s going to end because the same God wrote that. You’re also going to have to tear out how to have salvation because the same God wrote that. You’re also going to have to tear out, His rules about marriage and family and sexuality because the same God wrote that. Then you might as well put out all the other morals and ethics.

What Criswell did is, it scared, this was his first Sunday, can you imagine having a pastor like this? His first Sunday, he walks to the edge of the stage, says all those things, as he’s saying them, he tore Genesis out of his Bible while he was talking, his Schofield leather bound Bible. He went, [makes tearing noise] and he took the pages, and he went [throwing motion], 3,000 people were sitting in the audience, there was a gasp. Then he tore Revelation. Then he tore the Gospels. Then he just tore all the rest and threw it. He held up the cover. He said, as soon as you start tearing and saying, it’s okay, even though God gave a gender specific role for men and women, God said that. Paul didn’t invent it. God stated it, and Jesus reaffirmed it. If you say that’s cultural. That’s Jewish. We’re not Jewish. God said that marriage equals man plus woman. Sex is only supposed to be on this side of the equation. Men and women can only have sex in marriage, and they must be one person, one man, one woman for life. So that’s God’s role about sexuality, or rule, truth, and this is His truth about roles. You know what happens? They voted here in Kalamazoo. Those two things are not true.

What is left? If God got it wrong about how He created things in six days and rest of the seventh, and men and women’s roles, and how the world’s going to end, how do we know what’s true? Back up. To right there.

God has declared absolute morals. What’s right? What’s wrong? Absolute truth that you can believe in. His worldview is I have absolutes. He said salvation is unearnable and undeserved. It’s not following the five pillars of Islam. It’s not following the sacraments of works of Rome. It’s not going to Salt Lake City and being, baptized into the Mormon Church and putting your hand through and shaking and wearing holy underwear and following the uninspired writings of Joseph Smith. It’s not going door to door every Saturday as Jehovah’s false Witnesses. It’s not that. It’s a salvation that’s unearnable and undeserved offered by the Creator Himself, who has His arms outstretched. It says in 2 Corinthians 5, to it God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. While Christ’s arms were stretched out on the cross, He was saying, come unto Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you a salvation you can’t earn, and you never will deserve. I’ll give it to you as a gift. It’s a free offer of salvation.

The pictures Jesus gave of people getting saved are very picturesque. Remember the publican and the Pharisee? The publican wouldn’t even lift his face toward God. He says, I’m unworthy. God, be merciful to me, the sinner. You know what Jesus said? The guy who said, I’m not as bad as him, went home as lost as he came, the Pharisee. But the publican went home justified. What does justified mean? God offers a salvation that only God could have invented. It’s a salvation that the Creator Himself bears the sins and suffers like He committed all the sins of every creature that would ever receive Him for their salvation. That’s what Jesus did on the cross. That’s the only truth. That’s the heart of worldview 2. It really should be worldview 1 because it was the original one. But it’s the minority view that God became sin for us in Christ, offers us a gift that we don’t deserve and we can never earn by joining, baptizing, giving, working hard, trying hard, going and having a couple more masses said for us, or going to Mecca.

God, the same God that did everything else plus these four has described the absolute span of history to the end.

What we have is, if we are to follow God and love Him, we should embrace, as the center of our worldview, what the Bible says. What does the Bible say?

God has spoken and we should listen to Him. What is God speaking? It’s the Bible. What is one thing that He has said? Just one of the 1,189 chapters in the Bible is in Isaiah. What does Isaiah say that we need to do? It says, if you have a worldview that is dominated by God’s Word in the Bible, it will produce, because remember, your worldview is how we respond to life. If your worldview is dominated by God through His Word, it produces compassion.

Now wait a minute. When God revealed Himself in human form, Jesus primary emotion was compassion. God already told you God is love. Whoever is born of God, loves. So, God is a love filled compassionate person. When we have His worldview, we become that way.

Isaiah 58, this is where we’re going to pick up on Communion Sunday, if we’re alive next week. God desires us to, number one, in Isaiah 58 and verse 6. This is the verse Jesus quotes from when He launched his ministry in Nazareth. In Luke 4, Jesus quotes from Isaiah 58 in verse 6. He said, I came to deliver and liberate people captivated by enslaving sins. You know what the Lord says? We should have a compassion when we look at these flakka, flica whatever these people taking their clothes off and running around with knives and kicking down doors on this hallucinogenic drug, we should have compassion for them like Christ did, and see that they are bound by an enslaving sin. The only way they can be delivered from that, when they, when the flakka wears off, is by telling them the Gospel.

Did you know that’s why we’re here? When you see someone that is, you know that at work, that they’re an alcoholic, or they’re a drug addict, or they’re a sex addict, or they’re a bitterness addict, or whatever they are, in the compassion of Christ say, did you know that the God of the universe whom I serve can deliver you, captivated by your enslaving lusts, or anger, or hatred, or bigotry, or whatever you are enslaved by, your materialism? Could I share with you the Gospel? You know what someone told me this morning after first service? They were sitting in a drive thru, fast food place, and you know how you’re talking to that thing, that post? And my kids said I talk too loud to the post. They said, Dad, do you realize you don’t have to speak loudly? You’re not talking all the way into the building. You’re just talking to the post. But most older people are trying to talk into the building. They’re not sure the post is hearing.

So, our Calvaryite was sitting in a car behind someone in the front, and the person in front turned their car off, which is a bad sign because they were slowed down in the restaurant. So, they started talking through the machine to the person. They said, hey. Do you go to church anywhere? They said, I don’t know. They said, do you have a Bible? And the person came back through, no, I don’t have a Bible. Why? Do you give away Bibles? And they said, better than that, I can tell you about Christ. They said, you mean getting saved? The person inside said to the person in the car, you mean getting saved? And the person in the car said, yes, I could tell you how to be saved. Here’s our Calvary person sitting behind him hearing this back and forth at the fast food place. So, finally they pull up and they give him a tract and they drive away.

The Calvaryite comes right behind them and says, by the way, are you still interested in that Bible? Because I have one in my car. They were just stunned. What they told him is, I serve the God of the universe who can deliver you and save you. They shared the Gospel with them. That’s number one.

Number two. It’s 11:47 am. This is it. God desires, a worldview that God has given us, God desires us to not merely tell people the Gospel, but God also wants us to show Christ’s love and compassion. Did you know Jesus didn’t just preach to them, say, hope you can find a meal on the way home. You’ve been with Me three days, a long service, almost as long as today’s. I hope you don’t starve on the way. What did He do? He fed him. This is what we need to get into. Christianity has thought that you separate body and soul. Christ ministered to both. Primarily soul. Never neglecting the body. That’s only the beginning of the worldview from Isaiah 58, but it’s time to go. So, let’s all stand up.

As you stand, I would like you to remember one thing. The only thing I talked about today is, do you have a biblical filter you’re looking at life through? If you have a biblical one, God is in the center. Everything radiates about what God thinks of that, what God wants, what God feels, what He desires, what He has revealed in His Word. This should be like a magnet. You should read this to say, God, I want to know what pleases You, what displeases You, and how I can live my life Your way. I want a biblical, God centered worldview. That’ll make us want to tell people the Gospel. Not because we’re supposed to or we’re having a campaign, we just want to. We’ll want to show them Christ’s love and compassion. Wherever we are around us, those people.

Let’s bow. Father in Heaven, I thank you for revealing Yourself as the uncreated, eternal, infinite source of all hope and life, our future destiny, as well as our present purpose, You originated everything. We love You. I pray that in the tapestry of our worldview that we would look and see what’s in the middle, what’s driving us. We would repent of any source being higher or more dominant in our life than Your Word, Your truth, Your revelation. Thank You for revealing Yourself to us. In the name of Jesus, we pray, and all God’s people said, amen. And God bless you as you go.

NOTES

Each of us today has an operating system we use to go through life. This operating system is called our worldview. Our worldview is how we determine reality and make decisions like: What is good and what is evil. What is real and what is false. What is worthwhile and what is worthless. Those distinctions are each derived from our worldview.

Worldview Prompts Decisions

Our worldview slowly takes shape through life and dictates most of our responses each day to choices, events, and experiences we have. As babies we process the world, and start forming our own reality. We go through life from the very start listening, filtering, picking, and choosing.

Parents, the web, TV, media, music, games, school, experiences, religion, and our surrounding culture all blend together to form a working worldview.

When we want something it is because it fits into our worldview.

Whether we watch or listen or participate in anything is driven, in the background, by our worldview.

Whether we want a job, learn a trade, or continue in education are all byproducts of this worldview framework we use.

So for example, the worldview of the Islamic terrorists in the news called ISIS motivates them to capture, kill, and by any means accomplish conquest is what they in their worldview they have been taught and convinced is right. To us they are barbaric. To them they are reformers returning the Middle East to its rightful order.

Worldview is a Choice

The power of our worldview as the central processor, or filter that we see life through can’t be understated. Your worldview clearly reveals who you are as a person, more than any other element of our lives.

Think for a moment about the power of our worldview. Worldview is what we believe. What we trust. What we consider reliable.

Each of us look at life through the famework of what we believe. Either consciously or unconsciously we have slowly built a framework of beliefs. Everyone alive operates this way. It frames our reality: how we operate, what we do and say, how we feel, and the way we live. That framework is called our “worldview”.

A worldview is that overarching explanation of all we know and understand, so we can make sense of life. The biggest question for each person in life is what components have formed your worldview? Are the things you believe trustworthy? How can you know what is true? The answer comes through a worldview, and there are really only two worldviews.

Worldview Frames Behavior

Today your actions and mine are prompted by our worldview. So are everyone else’s actions around us. Everyone alive has some sort of worldview. It can be a Secular Humanistic worldview, a Hindu worldview, a Marxist worldview, an Islamic worldview, and so on.

Worldview answers the foundational questions of life, such as:

1. Is there a Supreme God or not?

2. How did the Universe originate?

3. How did humans originate?

4. What happens to humans at death?

5. Are there absolute truths, morals, or ethics?

6. Where is human history headed?

Each worldview answers those questions.

The way we behave is prompted by what we believe about the origin and purpose of life, who we are as a person, and the direction and destiny of the Universe around us. For example, Eastern religions and tribal peoples often have a circular view of life, heavily influenced by their ancestors. Life is often just a spiral upward or downward.

The Bible however presents a linear view of everything: our origin in the Universe, our purpose in history, and our destiny. Every person, culture, and society in history has had a worldview. There are many published worldviews, but only one Biblical Worldview.

A Biblical or Christian worldview is a framework or window or lens through which a born-again believer can understand everything in the world, and all of reality from God’s perspective and thus be able to discern and follow God’s will for every choice in life.

Worldviews Contrasted

The starting point for every worldview is the question of origin. After determining your origin your purpose in life can be established. From our origin also flows our destiny. But everything hinges on the answer to where did we as humans originate.

There are two answers for our origin: the chance/random/naturalistic/evolutionary origin vs. the origin by the Hand of the Divine Creator that is Almighty and the only Uncreated thing in the Universe. From the answer of origin flow all other elements of a worldview. The contrasts between the two worldviews could not be more stark.

Worldview-1 is naturalistic, evolutionary, and most widely held.

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking are two well-known spokesmen for this naturalistic worldview.

When Sagan expressed what he and other naturalistic evolutionists had as their worldview, he stated just three weeks before he died this conviction:

We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one of billions of other galaxies, which make up a universe, which may be one of a very large number—perhaps an infinite number—of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering. (ABC News Nightline, December 4, 1996). Sagan went on to say in the book he was writing that was published after his death:

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves” (Pale Blue Dot, New York: Random House, 1994, p. 9).

If a person takes worldview one (naturalistic evolutionism) the end result is despair. Sagan said we are marooned on a pale blue dot in a possibly endless cosmos. We are unnoticed, insignificant, and on our own. Humans have huge problems and may not be able to overcome them.

Worldview-2 is God-centered, Creator-based, Biblically-defined , and held by very few.

The Lord Jesus Christ is the best spokesman for this view, and His explanation is the Word of God that is actually one of His Names, the Word (John 1:1).

When Jesus was asked to explain His understanding of reality, or His worldview He flatly stated: “I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6).

Anyone who embraces the worldview of Christ comes to the settled conclusion that humans are created beings in a created Universe, formed by the only uncreated being there is, our Creator: and that our Creator has revealed Himself in the Scriptures called God’s Word the Bible.

God States His Worldview in
the Scriptures

The choice each believer has to make in life is whether they are going to be a spiritual smorgasbord of little bits and pieces of philosophies, beliefs, opinions, observations, and ideas or a confident follower of God through His Word. For just a moment, listen to the definition of the worldview presented by God.

1. God declared Himself as the Eternal, Self-Existent Creator of Everything.

2. God declared that He has revealed His Desires in the direct communication of the Bible.

3. God has revealed Himself in Person through Christ.

4. God’s declared that His Word the Bible is absolutely accurate.

5. God has declared Absolute Morals.

6. God has declared Absolute Truth.

7. God has offered Salvation as an Un-earnable, and Un-deserved Gift.

8. God has declared the Absolute Span of the History of the Universe from beginning to End.

A Biblical worldview means we are defining reality using God’s revelation of His Word. Those who embrace God as revealed in His Word have a very clear view of those big three elements that shape our worldview. Each person must decide what they believe about their origin in life, their purpose in life, and their destiny in life.

Embracing A Biblical Worldview in a Fallen World

Today, what you believe dictates your behavior.

What do you believe about your origin? Did you just happen? Were you an accident? Are you just a biological anomaly in an endless evolutionary process? Are you just a nameless, faceless part of the river of humanity living through this endless struggle of life?

Or are you a divinely fashioned creature, made by the Creator Himself in His very image? A Biblical worldview explains to us that we are significant above all the rest of created things (that means everything from sub-atomic forces to the largest galaxies and forces in the Universe. Only we humans out of everything else were made in the image of God and given immortal souls that will exist forever. The Universe will be destroyed by fire and renewed, but we will never cease to exist.

The first step in embracing a Biblical or Christian worldview is to start carefully:

Listening to God

God is love.

Jesus said that His love reflected through us would be the way people would know we are His disciples.

The Spirit of God overflows us with love from God.

God wants us to be kind and tenderhearted and compassionate like Him.

One of the most well known attributes of God is Love. God explains His character in 1 John when He said: God is love. God loves us. We are to love oneanother. When God explains to us what He desires to be our attitude towards the world He demonstarted it by His ministry: Jesus who is the exact image of God the father showed such tender compassion for both saved and lost people. He felt for their needs and extended compassion towards them.

God wants to have us reflect His love in this world. Jesus said that the badge of love would be how the world would know that we are His people. God wanted Old Testament Israel to live in such a way that the world around them saw, and felt the love and compassion of God.

God Spoke in Isaiah 58

One of the many times that God explained His desires for the worldview of His people is in Isaiah 58, as we turn there think again about this question. Are we Living The Way God Wants Us to Live by Embracing A Biblical Worldview in a Fallen World?

That is the content of Isaiah 58. God says this is what I want you to long for. This is what I want you to discipline your personal appetites and desires to accomplish. Please stand as we hear the way God wants us to operate while living in our fallen world:

Isaiah 58:6-12(NKJV) “Is this not the fast that I have chosen: To loose the bonds of wickedness, To undo the heavy burdens, To let the oppressed go free, And that you break every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; When you see the naked, that you cover him, And not hide yourself from your own flesh? 8 Then your light shall break forth like the morning, Your healing shall spring forth speedily, And your righteousness shall go before you; The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. 9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; You shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’ “If you take away the yoke from your midst, The pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, 10 If you extend your soul to the hungry And satisfy the afflicted soul, Then your light shall dawn in the darkness, And your darkness shall be as the noonday. 11 The Lord will guide you continually, And satisfy your soul in drought, And strengthen your bones; You shall be like a watered garden, And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail. 12 Those from among you Shall build the old waste places; You shall raise up the foundations of many generations; And you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach, The Restorer of Streets to Dwell In.

Biblical Worldviews Produce Compassionate People

In Isaiah 58:6-12 we can find that God explains what He wishes to see happening inside of us as we live and work in a sin-stained society. He wants us to not get hardened or insulated from the needs of fellow humans all around us.

The first impact that God wants to have in our lives through fasting is to stir a longing in us for the needy people living in the darkness of sin all around us.

1. God desires us to Seek Biblical Deliverance for People Captivated by Enslaving Sins around us, by telling them the Gospel.

Isaiah 58:6“Is this not the fast that I have chosen: To loose the bonds of wickedness, To undo the heavy burdens, To let the oppressed go free, And that you break every yoke?

Remember that Jesus used this verse as He launched His public ministry in Nazareth, as recorded in Luke 4. Jesus used this verse with a spiritual application.

Jesus was not advocating emptying all the jails and prisons. He was not advocating for liberation for the occupying Roman Army. Jesus said that this was primarily about humans needing the power of God to be set free from the bondage of sin.

2. God desires us to Seek to Feed the Needy and the Hungry around us, by showing them Christ’s love and compassion.

Isaiah 58:7a Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

Is Your Worldview Biblical

Just a closing question we all need to answer.

Is your worldview Biblical? If so, you embrace God’s revealed will of compassion for the poor, needy, and afflicted around you in life.