How Do We See the World?
21st Century Theology: Finding Biblical Truth • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 41:25
0 ratings
· 234 viewsFiles
Notes
Transcript
Series Intro
Series Intro
We are in a tough time.
There is so much going on.
But there are things that are going on that aren’t making the news, or rather they aren’t directly making the news.
How are we to make sense of all of this?
We are to think through things.
Ideas matter.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind!
We are not supposed to check our brains at the door
But also ideas shape the world around us.
We are always dealing with ideas and their consequences.
In this four-week series, going to look at some serious and potentially heavy topics,
moral theism
individualism
human value
But these are all going to be evaluated in light of Scripture
This series is mainly for believers
Help beleivers understand how to see the world - baisics
This series encourages the Christian to interpret the world around them through the lens of God’s Word, doing so humbly and in realization of the coexistence of good and evil in society.
This “lens” is what we call “worldview” or how we see the world.
But there is also always an invitation to nonbelievers
“Come and See!”
See what a Christian worldview looks like
If it makes sense, maybe its an invitation to you to come and follow Jesus with us
and if it doesn’t make sense
Remind them of these things, and charge them before God not to fight about words. This is useless and leads to the ruin of those who listen. Be diligent to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who doesn’t need to be ashamed, correctly teaching the word of truth. Avoid irreverent and empty speech, since those who engage in it will produce even more godlessness, and their teaching will spread like gangrene. Hymenaeus and Philetus are among them. They have departed from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already taken place, and are ruining the faith of some. Nevertheless, God’s solid foundation stands firm, bearing this inscription: The Lord knows those who are his, and let everyone who calls on the name of the Lord turn away from wickedness.
Scripture
Scripture
It is important to remember that we are not the first group of believers that have had to deal with a set of conflicting worldviews.
The first believers had to just like us.
Greco-Roman world was awash with all sorts of philosophies, cults, religions, and ways of seeing things.
It is easy for us to forget just how complex the first century world was!
Especially as the Gospel was taken by Paul out to the gentiles, it encountered the fully chaos of the Roman world.
Paul is writing this personal letter to Timothy
Timothy is one of Paul’s main companions on his missionary journeys.
As Paul has been imprisoned, Timothy is continue the work of preaching and teaching
This is what the letter is about, instruction to from a mentor to a mentee about how to continue the work in the face of all sorts of problems, including the confusion that was coming from the culture.
For the Christian, there should be a strong emphasis on studying the Word of God in a diligent manner (2 Timothy 2:15),
not casually or flippantly.
This means the Christian is not afraid to ask the tough questions and search for answers.
When Paul was writing to his young preacher friend Timothy, he knew that the world Timothy would minister in would be a skeptical one;
thus, he emphasized that searching for the truth was necessary to avoid error.
In 16-18 we see the kind of damaging speech that Paul is concerned about with regards to scripture.
“irreverent and empty speech”
Using the bible not to “correctly teach the of truth” but for some other purpose.
Think of the false preachers on the TV that use the bible to prop up their false teachings
Quoting scripture isn’t proof of orthodoxy!
Even Satan can quote scripture to his twisted ends.
This sort of speech doesn’t draw people to God, in fact it produces even more godlessness
If people think they are being biblical and godly when they are not, it runs counter to God’s desires for us.
False, empty teaching spreads like poison
gangrene comes in in a week point, a wound, but then poisons the whole body.
It isn’t an all at once death, but one that comes over time.
Hymenaeus and Philetus (calling them Hym and Phil)
false teachers
Already disciplined by the church and removed from the fellowship for false teaching, but still apparently with a great deal of influence.
Abandoning biblical teachings to reach the culture in never a good idea!
This is what Hym and Phil had done
Gotten rid of the bodily resurrection.
This was not a very palatable idea to the Greeks, so Hym and Phil probably just did a way with it to “reach the culture”
In the process, they haven’t reached the culture, they have just ruined someone else’s faith.
The solid foundation of the Scripture still stands, still proclaims the Truth
What is Worldview?
What is Worldview?
In a very real sense, each Christian is to be a theologian.
Not all Christians get formal theological training, but all Christians should be theologians.
Theology is just the study of God
It’s God talk
I would hope that al believers are studying about God, learning about God, and talking about God.
We are all theologians.
Theology has historically been called “the Queen of the Sciences.”
Until recent times, it was assumed that you could not know anything about anything apart from how it related to God.
Even those who denied God felt they had to justify their godless conclusions theologically.
Critics would call this progress;
Christians call this a decline in intellectual and biblical literacy among those who are part of the church.
The thought to “just give me Jesus and not theology” should have no place in the church.
Theology is what tells us about God.
The decline in theological literacy in the broader culture has resulted in a decline of absolutes; thus,
people operate as if there is no absolute standard against which to evaluate truth.
As society and culture change, the view is that truth does too.
This, of course, leads to grave error in understanding truth as it was meant to be understood.
The Christian would say that apart from God, truth does not exist.
Some in society would say that what is true for you may not be true for me.
While they are only confessing what they have been taught (though falsely), this can cause great confusion and division in understanding reality.
Worldview matters.
Hym and Phil might not have thought that it mattered what they were teaching.
After all, they were reaching the culture, right?
But they were poisoning people, poisoning the church, and ruining people’s faith, all because they had lost scripture and the truth of it!
World-views are like puzzles
World-views are like puzzles
Puzzles are a great way to view worldviews, especially because they’re made up of many individual pieces.
When all the pieces fit together, you’re able to clearly see the big picture.
Of course, to get the picture exactly right, you have to work with all the right individual pieces.
If you are missing pieces, or if you have mixed puzzle pieces, you can’t and won’t get an accurate picture.
Here’s the bigger problem, though. If someone were to dump a puzzle box at your feet, it would represent where some Christians are in their theology and worldview.
It’s a box full of pieces that have never been put together.
It’s just a pile of pieces.
These individual pieces can be made up from your church upbringing, what you’ve learned at home, perhaps a Christian school environment, discussions with friends, podcasts, and other spiritual influences.
But it’s possible you’ve never taken the time to put the pieces together.
Furthermore, you can’t see if you’re missing any important pieces.
You also have never figured out if you’ve got pieces of the wrong puzzle in with yours—bits of other worldviews—mixed in by accident that don’t fit picture on the box.
Or, you might get confused when others take some Christian pieces and fit it in with their worldview pictures.
Even with all the right pieces sitting in the box, few Christians have assembled their puzzle in order to make sense of the whole thing. The result is a skewed reality.
We all have a worldview
We all have a worldview
Every single person born into this world has a worldview.
That’s important to understand when dealing with any culture and society.
When a person becomes a Christian and embraces the study of theology to strengthen their worldview, the way that person sees everything changes.
As Christians, we enjoy many of the same things those who don’t know Jesus enjoy, but we look at them through a different set of lenses.
We see the arts differently, we listen to music differently, we think about sports differently, we view business differently, we view ethnicity differently, we view money differently, we view sex and marriage differently, we view food and drink differently, we view death differently, we see the world differently … because we filter everything we encounter through the right perspective of God’s nature—or at least we should do so.
Have you ever tried watching a 3D movie without a set of 3D glasses?
The movie is flat and unimpressive; that is, until you put on a pair of 3D glasses.
The glasses then begin to take effect and make the overall experience not only more enjoyable but immersive.
Our worldview is a set of lenses that only makes sense of the complicated world around us when we have them on.
Without the glasses, we are living in a false reality.
Until we have the correct world-view, we aren’t going to see things the way they really are.
As Christians, if we are going to fully serve God, we need to make sure we are seeing things the way they are
If you aren’t a follower of Jesus, don’t you want to experiance reality, to see things, the way it was meant to be?