Imagine you decide to navigate through a life-size maze. Personally, I have no sense of direction and easily get lost, confused, and frustrated. In fact, I would rather just sit alone for an hour and think and do nothing than try to make it through a maze alone. But if you had to go through a maze, what would make it easier to navigate? I guide would be helpful. It would help us know what steps to take as we try to get through the maze. A compass would be really nice. In fact, a compass would probably prevent us from getting lost which is probably what would happen to me. Or a map would be super helpful because a map would help us to know exactly the path to be on from beginning to end. Essentially what we would be looking for is someone or something to help us make it through the maze successfully.
We constantly make choices every day based on our worldview—choices about how we treat people, how we spend our money, how we spend our time, whether we believe in God or not. And these choices lead us on a certain path, and in the end, we find ourselves at a specific destination. Now there is not a physical map for the maze of life, but we all have a mental map—a worldview which is a set of beliefs that we have that help us interpret and live in reality.
We constantly make choices every day based on our worldview—choices about how we treat people, how we spend our money, how we spend our time, whether we believe in God or not. And these choices lead us on a certain path, and in the end, we find ourselves at a specific destination. Now there is not a physical map for the maze of life, but we all have a mental map—a worldview which is a set of beliefs that we have that help us interpret and live in reality.
Here is the critical question. How accurate is your mental map of reality—your worldview? When you think about it, if the physical map doesn’t match up, you are going to get lost and confused. But if you map does match up, you can make it through the maze successfully. We all carry around ideas which are part of our worldview which shapes our daily choices. Whether you are a Christian, atheist, Buddist, or Hindu we all have a belief system that shapes the way that we live. The question is not, “Do we have a worldview?” The question is, “What is our worldview, and where did it come from?” From friends from tradition, from family, from culture? Where does our worldview originate? With all these influenced on our worldview, it’s going to be critical to take a moment and examine our belief system more carefully.
There are a lot of different ways to examine the concept of a worldview and our own worldviews in particular. Perhaps most helpful would be to consider four big questions that every worldview has to answer.
First, what is real? What exists? Is reality only the physical world that you can touch, taste, see, and feel? Or is there a spiritual realm beyond the physical world. Is the human being just a body, or is there also a soul?
Second, what is man? What does it mean to be human? Are we the product of blind evolutionary forces within nature? Or are we part of the larger god consciousness and interconnected with all of reality? Or are we a personal creation of the loving God who made us in his image?
Third, what happens at death? Where do we go, if anywhere, when we die? Maybe this is all there is, and death is final? When your heart stops beating—that’s it and maybe you enter into some state of reincarnation until you finally reach Nirvana. Or maybe when you die you face judgment before God and go to either heaven or hell for eternity. Every belief system has some claim about what happens when we die.
And fourth, what is the basis for right and wrong? Where does morality come from? Some believe that reality is relative—that there’s no absolute standard outside of us, and right and wrong comes from the individual or society. Others would point to Karma, that we get rewarded or punished from actions we’ve done in the past, and they carry on into the future. Whereas others believe that there is a standard outside of us, an objective standard that comes from either God’s character or God’s Command which determines right from wrong.
So why bother to think so deeply about our worldview? As Christians, isn’t our worldview already set? Well, interestingly, and very importantly, studies show that people who describe themselves as Christians, in other words, who check that box on a survey, live no differently than people who do not. But there is a segment of people who describe themselves as Christian that live differently. It’s the Christians with a Biblical worldview. So that means if you want to live with the power of the Gospel in your life, you need to see the world through the lens that Jesus saw it. If you see the world as Jesus did, in terms of our four big worldview questions and more, you will be far more likely to live like Jesus. And if you live the way that Jesus wanted you to, you’ll be far more likely to experience the freedom that He promised to those who follow Him on the path of life.
https://awanaym.org/journey-curriculum/advocates/journey-advocates-worldview
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