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Living The Way God Wants Us to Live:

Embracing A Biblical Worldview in a Fallen World

Isaiah 58:6-12

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.

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.

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.

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