What is my Worldview?

My husband is doing a series of sermons on having a Christian worldview, and with his permission, I’ll be posting some parts that seem interesting and relevant.  This is the first.

Weltanschauung, it’s a German word that translates into worldview in English.  It refers to how people live their lives and relate to the world around them.  Each of us has a worldview–if we didn’t we would be dead because everyone has to have some way of dealing with the world and some means of understand  what is happening around us.  For example:

How I relate to politics is based on how I perceive the world through the lens of my own personal beliefs about what is good for our nation.  How I relate to my neighbor is affected by how I perceive that person to be.  How I view the opinions of cultural leaders is determined by how I understand what they’re saying or doing based on my deep felt sense of right and wrong.  Each one of us has a basic set of beliefs that operate to direct us in how we behave in the world.  Many Americans have a sense of our nation as filled not with groups of people so much as with individuals, each person seeking his or her own welfare.  We call that individualism and it is an important part of American culture that we find expressed in our movies or in other ways.  That emphasis on the individual may be changing somewhat, but it’s still a pretty potent worldview in our culture.

Right now, I’m going to focus our attention on what we call a Christian or biblical worldview.  How Christians are to perceive and understand the world specifically as followers of the risen Lord.  I’m doing this because social science findings about the views and understandings of Christians with respect to their claimed faith and life are nothing short of horrifying right now.  Indeed, things seem so bad that it makes you wonder how many Christians there actually are, not in the country, but in the Church itself!

To be continued ….