Why Worldviews Matter

You’ve probably never heard of the name Sayyid Qutb. But Sayyid Qutb has had a profound effect on your life. On your family, on your job, on your future, on your travel. Even though he died about forty years ago he has had profound influence on you through his worldview.

How did he do that? Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian radical politician. In fact he was a fascist. He read many of the same books that Hitler read. He developed a worldview of hatred. Hatred and violence. He hated Jews, and he hated Christians. He despised the west. He was such a dangerous man and his teachings lead to so much violence that in the 1960s he was put in jail by the Egyptian government. But even from prison he continued to spread his vile worldview of hatred – recruiting prisoners to his cause when they were released, and fueling violence through letters and contact on the outside. Finally the Egyptian government put him to death. They executed him nearly forty years ago. That’s all you would have heard of Sayyid Qutb except that his brother picked up his worldview. And his brother was named Muhammad Qutb. Muhammad Qutb took his brother’s worldview of hatred and violence and fled back to his country of Saudi Arabia and he began teaching it in a university there.

You’ve probably never heard of Sayyid Qutb or Muhammad Qutb. But you have most definitely heard of their number one pupil – Osama bin Laden. It was Osama bin Laden who took Qutb’s ideologies and moved them into action. Sayyid Qutb’s philosophies and teachings became the emotional and intellectual underpinnings of Al-Qaeda.

Today we live in the age of terrorism because of the worldview of one man. One man! A man who until just a few moments ago you couldn’t even name! Think about it. Forty years after this guy’s death he still effects your life. Every time you go into an airport they search you; they look through all your stuff; they make you take your shoes off. Why? Because of Sayyid Qutb. When I go to Washington, DC, or New York City, and a jet flies low overhead approaching an airport, virtually everyone around me looks up to make certain that it’s at an appropriate altitude and speed. Each day we hear threats of violence against Israel and Christian Nations from places like Iran and Muslim groups without national boarders. All because of one man’s insane thinking. That, folks, is the power of a worldview. (Source: Rick Warren)

Every day every one of us is affected and influenced by the worldviews of other people, the people all around us. We’re not even aware of it. The worldviews of your friends. The worldviews of people you work with. The worldviews of your parents, co-workers, of the media, celebrities, the people you listen to in school, teachers. They have influenced your life in ways that you’re not even aware of. Not only that, but everyday you’re influenced by your own worldview. It determines your contentment and happiness, it determines the level of success in your life, because it determines your definition of success. It determines how you feel about life. It determines your peace of mind, your stress level, your confidence level – all that come from your worldview.

Worldviews matter. Today we are beginning a short series of messages I’m calling “The Best Offense…” You’ve probably heard the phrase that “The best offense is a good defense.” In sports, we say that because winning begins with defense. In football, baseball and in any sport, your ability to put lots of points on the scoreboard will do you no good if you can’t stop the other team from putting up just one more. You’ve got to be able to play defense if you are going to win.

Spiritually speaking, it’s much the same. We are engaged in a struggle that is anything but a game. It is a battle of worldviews, and we must be equipped and prepared to defend and advance a Biblical worldview. We are going to examine, over the next five weeks, life from God’s perspective. We want to see things from His point of view, and we want to examine the error in unbiblical worldviews because they have a tremendous influence in our daily lives. We are going to learn what a Biblical worldview is, and how to defend it against the attack of unbiblical worldviews. And don’t kid yourself, those false worldviews are all around you, even in religious and good people.

Very few Americans have a biblical worldview – even among devoutly religious people. A December 2003 survey of 2,033 adults by George Barna discovered that:

Ø Only 4 percent of Americans had what would be considered a Biblical worldview. Even more disturbing,

Ø Only 9 percent of those who called themselves Christians have a biblical worldview.

The research defined a biblical worldview as having a firm belief in six specific religious views: that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life; that God is the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe, and that He still rules it today; that salvation is a gift from God through Christ alone, and cannot be earned; that Satan is real; that a Christian has a responsibility to share his faith in Christ with other people; and that the Bible is accurate in all of its teachings.[i]

Only 7% of Protestants hold to those six basic elements of Bible teaching! Folks, no wonder the church is in trouble!

Ø God is indeed, loving, but He is also holy – sincerity does not cover up error! Those who refuse His way will be refused entrance into His kingdom (Rev. 20:15)

Ø People are, according to the bible, sinners. We fall short of His glory. “There is none righteous, no, not one.” (Romans 3:10 & 23)

Ø Jesus said, “I am THE way, THE truth, THE life, NO ONE COMES TO THE FATHER EXCEPT BY ME.” (John 14:6)

Ø The Bible says, “He saved us, not because of the good things we have done, but because of His mercy.” (Titus 3:5)

As we begin our discussion of worldviews, there are two important errors that need to be dealt with right away. They are, in fact, two dangerous worldviews that lead many people away from God. One of them is the sincerity myth and the other is the situational myth.

The sincerity myth goes like this: “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re sincere.”

Have you ever heard that one? It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re sincere. There’s only one problem with that. You can be sincerely wrong. I’ve been sincerely wrong many, times in my life. Sincerity is not enough.

I remember reading in Reader’s Digest years ago about a man whose dad was unable to read. After his mom died, dad did all the grocery shopping. One day after dinner, the dad said to his son, “I got us a treat for desert!” He got up and rushed off to the kitchen. The boy heard his dad open a can with the can opener, then silence. Eventually he went into the kitchen and found his dad sadly staring into a can of little, whole potatoes. The dad said, thick with emotion, “ I thought it was peaches, the picture on the label looked like peaches.”

The boy said he looked at the can, and yes, the picture did look like peaches. The dad was sincere, he wanted to give his son a little treat – but all the sincerity in the world couldn’t change canned potatoes into canned peaches.

Truth is always true. Sincerity is not enough. If I sincerely believe that God’s highest goal is for me to be happy and do what I want – regardless of whom I hurt, or what damage I do – I am simply, and sincerely, wrong! If I sincerely believe that all roads lead to God; or that I can get to heaven by being a nice guy; or by being good to my family and the planet, then I am sincerely going to be a nice guy who spends eternity separated from God in hell. The truth is that salvation is through Jesus Christ alone – that’s the truth for nice guys and rotten guys all the same.

The other myth is the situational myth. The situational myth says you can believe one thing in one situation and believe another thing in another and another in another.

A lot of people like to pick and choose. They say, “When I go out with on date, I’ll have ‘this’ worldview. But when I sit in church I’ll have ‘this’ worldview. When I’m talking to my three-year-old, I’ll have one set of values, but when I go to work and I’m closing that deal I’m going to have a different worldview. It doesn’t work that way. You want to use what’s convenient for you. But all that does is create confusion and stress and all kinds of negative emotions in your life. Truth is always true – in every situation. Doing the right thing is not always the easy thing, and doing the easy thing is seldom the right thing – but it is right!

This gets people into all sorts of trouble. They know what they should believe – but they are not willing to allow those beliefs to interfere with their lives. This is how a person can call himself a Christian leader, and pastor, and preach against homosexuality, and then be caught paying male prostitutes. It’s how a person can be a pastor in a main-line protestant church, and preach about Jesus – but believe that there are multiple roads to God. It’s is how a person can claim to be a Bible-believing Christian, and yet hold political views that somehow defend abortion, or evolution, or divorce. They say things like, “I can’t allow my personal religious beliefs to influence my political opinions.” HUH??? They compartmentalize their “religion” from their “politics.” They compartmentalize their “religion” from their “work.”

Last weekend Pastor Dave Mobley, from one of our churches in Milwaukee, shared how he had a couple in his office that had been active members in his church for years. Then the husband found out that his wife had a boyfriend. He had them in his office for some counsel. The wife kept saying, “I’m sorry, I know I have to choose – I have to decide what to do, but I just don’t know what to do.” Dave asked the husband to step out for a few moments, and he said to the wife – “Listen – you don’t have a choice! You say that you are a follower of Jesus, and as a Jesus follower, you are bound to your husband – period!”

It’s the situational myth that gets people into that kind of mess. We know what the Bible says, it’s crystal clear, and we claim to be disciples of Jesus, but when the words of Christ crowd our personal agenda, we backpedal. There’s only one problem with that – Jesus doesn’t share his sovereignty with the world. You either believe Him, and allow Him to impact your life and your decisions, or you don’t and He impacts none of your life – there is no way to be “sort of Christian,” just like there’s no such thing as being “sort of pregnant.” You either are, or you’re not. It’s the situational myth that has made the church so hypocritical to most of the world.

That is why we’re doing this series. We’re going to reject the sincerity myth by learning the absolute truth – we’re going to call error “error,” no matter how sincerely that error may be presented. And we’re going to reject the situational myth by living according to that truth, even if it means personal pain or discomfort.

That’s what the next five weeks are about. The Bible says, “Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts.” We need to know what we believe and why we believe it because it shapes our lives.

So how do we do that? The first step in building a strong, biblical worldview is to learn the truth. We reject the sincerity myth by learning absolute truth. Jesus concluded His most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, with a story. He said two guys go out and they build houses. One builds his house on the shaky foundation of sand. The other builds his house on the solid foundation of rock - solid rock. When the storms come along, the winds blow, the waves rise and everything crashes in He said the guy who built his house on the shaky foundation of sand, it collapses. But the guy who built his house on the solid foundation of rock stands the test of time.

Then Jesus says, “Here’s the point. You’re going to either build your life on what I say, on the truth, on what God says is the truth, or you’re going to build your life on popular opinion. What other people say. If you build it on sand, it’s going to crumble when times get tough. But if you build your life on rock-solid truth that never changes you will stand up under the most difficult circumstances.”

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Listen to that verse from the Message. It says “Don’t become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit in without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Unlike the culture around you always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you and develops well formed maturity in you. His good, pleasing and perfect will.” THAT’S the goal of this series!

We’ve got two choices. We get our advice on life from God’s word, which is eternal, or the world, which is nothing more than contemporary opinions. Proverbs 15:14 “A wise person is hungry for truth while the fool feeds on trash.” We’ve got two options on what to build your life on – truth or trash. I know people who claim to be followers of Christ but they spend more time reading People magazine than they do reading the Bible. Do you spend more time reading truth or trash? Do you spend more time listening to truth or trash? Do you spend more time at movies watching truth or trash? What you put into your mind is what’s going to come out in your lifestyle. If you want to change your life you’ve got to stop feeding on trash and start feeding more on truth. How many of you believe everything you read in the newspaper? How many of you believe everything you watch on tv? How many of you believe everything in the Bible is God’s word is true? Then why do we spend more time watching and listening something we don’t believe than something we do?

My goal for each of us in this church is found in 1 Corinthians 14:20: “Stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.” What we need today in our world more than anything else are people who have a clear, biblical worldview. They know what they believe. They know why they believe it. They can explain it to people in the world who haven’t the slightest clue what they believe. And most important of all they live it. They live what they believe. When the church knows what it believes, can defend what it believes, and lives what it believes, we will indeed change the world.

[i] Article from The Sword of the Lord, January 30, 2004: “Few American Christians Have Biblical Worldview”