This week, Pastor Luke continued on with week two of our series “how to follow Jesus into today’s world” with the topic of Worldview. He broke his message down into three parts:

1. What is worldview?

Worldview is the funnel or filter through which we see the world. It is a combination of our ideas, attitudes, beliefs and basic assumptions about life. It determines how we think and act in the world.

Whether we know it or not, we all have a worldview, and for most people, it’s subconscious; a belief system that we only notice when it gets bumped (such as when we travel, or relate to people from a different country or culture).

The thing that should bump our worldview the most should be putting our faith in Jesus, and consequently reading and applying the Word of God. The Bible tells us that when we put our faith in Him, we are taken out of the Kingdom of darkness and placed into the Kingdom of light. This should entirely change our worldview.

The four pillars of a Christian worldview are:

The Bible. It is the final authority.
God is real. He is personal and powerful. He determins what is right and wrong.
Satan is real, as is the spiritual realm.
Jesus is the only way.

2. Our World Today

The world we live in today globally connected, ethnically diverse and postmodern in thinking.

This postmodern thinking:

a) Provides a new way to understand words. There is no final meaning to words anymore, and an author’s intent no longer matters. The reader is sovereign and determines the meaning of a text. All interpretations are equally valid or meaningless.

We can contrast this with Gods Word in 2 Peter 1: 20-21. There is an author’s intent to the Bible, and it is not about our interpretations. His intent is all that matters.

b) Relativism is the way forward. We live in a world with no absolutes. What is morally right or wrong depends upon an individual’s beliefs. “The real world exists in shades of grey”.

We can contrast this to basically the whole narrative of the Bible, but one example would be Titus 1:10-13. Here at Waypoint we teach sound and unchanging doctrine. We teach absolute truths. We teach rights and wrongs. There is a true and a false; and they are all determined by the Lord.

c) The world has pluralistic views on “truth”. Universalism reigns, and we can pick and choose what spiritual things we want to experience. We build-a-god based on our own specific thoughts, needs and desires.

Contrast this to John 14:6 where Jesus says He is the way, the truth and the life. It is exclusive in nature.

We are fish swimming in the waters of our age and if we don’t stop to intentionally see the water around us, we will mix the worldview of our culture with that of Scripture.

3. How do we follow Jesus into today’s world?

We need to start following Jesus into today’s world rather than following the world with Jesus. When we follow Jesus, that truth needs to be a root level thing within our lives. It needs to determine everything else we do, think and say. We need to self-evaluate and ask: are we actually fully surrendered to Jesus? God wants and requires full surrender.

In order to do this, we need to think and act.

“Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right.” — Charles Spurgeon

We need to wrestle with the questions of life, and we need to think through our faith. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it. We need to have intellectual ground to stand on, as our world is desperate for culture shaping leaders.

We also need to be bridges. As Christians we are a colony of heaven, an outpost on earth. Our job is not to shut out the rest of the world, but to be a bridge between the Kingdom of heaven and the Kingdom of this world.

We were put here to be salt and light, a city on a hill. We need to take up that mandate, and go into the world.