God’s Glasses

By: Rev. Terence Little, Associate Pastor at Church of the Atonement

For believers in Jesus, and to be absolutely clear I mean the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, God has provided a pair of glasses through which we are to see the world, read reality, and navigate life.  God’s glasses are the Scriptures of the Holy Bible.  God has given his Word to his people to shape and inform our worldview.  Dr. James N. Anderson defines worldview as “a network of ultimate beliefs, assumptions, values, and ideas about the universe and our place in it that shapes how a person understands their life and experiences (and the lives and experiences of others) and how that person acts in response.”

There are many worldviews at work in the world today.  In fact, there are many worldviews at work all around you and me in our neighborhoods, on our jobs, in our schools, and on and on.  Worldviews are everywhere.  Worldviews are influential.  People make life decisions based on their worldview.  Every religion on earth is a worldview.  Other worldviews you may have heard of are: deism, naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, pantheism, the New Age, Postmodernism, and Secularism. As a pastor of God’s Word, the Holy Bible, I am greatly concerned about worldview.  All worldviews say something about God, people, knowledge, right and wrong, and salvation.  All worldviews make absolute statements about what reality is and what existence is about.  They are each different pairs of glasses through which people interpret everything.  What we must remember as Christians is NO WORLDVIEW IS NEUTRAL.

Each of the aforementioned worldviews represents a spiritual issue, a spiritual problem that does not accurately address what reality is all about.  Ravi Zacharias says that humanity wrestles with four major things: Origin, Meaning, Morality, and Destiny.  Jesus taught his disciples that “He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6).  Dr. Philip Ryken helpfully summarizes the Christian worldview.  Ryken says,    “What unifies the Christian worldview, however, is not merely an idea, but the being and character of almighty God.  The Bible does not present God as the conclusion to some logical proof, or as a mystery beyond our comprehension, but as the basic premise upon which everything else in the entire universe is built.  God is always our ultimate frame of reference, the supreme reality at the center of all reality—the be–all and end–all of existence.  By denying the existence of God, atheism gets it wrong from the beginning.  So does secular humanism, or any other worldview that puts the self at the center of the universe.  We do not begin with ourselves, but with God, whose existence and nature are the independent source and the transcendent standard for everything.  We work from God up” (What is the Christian Worldview, Basics of the Faith Series).

In discipleship, with emphasis on evangelism, Christians teach non-Christians the Christian worldview. We want to challenge the darkness of unbelief with the light of the Christian worldview, and we want to invite the unbeliever into the only worldview where the God-man, Jesus Christ, willingly dies to reconcile us to our Creator.

May we be a church who begins, not with ourselves, but with God, in all our thinking and living, for as Paul teaches in Romans 11:36, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.  To Him be glory forever. Amen.”  Let us diligently wear God’s glasses so that we see the world from God’s perspective and live accordingly.  Grace and peace.