The Importance of Teaching From A Biblical Worldview | Iron on Iron
Our students are constantly bombarded with a lot of decontextualized information and they need to understand how it all fits into an overall worldview. If they are going to survive when they leave our ministry, they need to be able to have a biblical worldview that they have thought out and live out consistently.
Resources:
- Genesis 1:21-28
Summer Camp
Transcript – Importance of Teaching From a Biblical Worldview
Alright, so we’re gonna talk about the importance of teaching from a biblical worldview. And the main reason I think this is important for us with students right now is because of the way that students are being trained on how to think. I think that our minds are constantly both learning information, but also learning how to process information. And unfortunately, we live in such a technologically saturated world that a lot of our students are learning how to think from the way that they use social media because the, or at least with how they’re using their phone and the internet. Because most people, that’s where they’re getting their information, is from looking at their phone. And a lot of people, they get their information of the world from social media. And so, but the way that social media presents information is less than ideal.
And in reality, it’s very problematic because we’re training people and sociologists have done all the studies to show us, people will say, well, kids today, they don’t have as, I was trying to think of… I can’t think of the word. Attention span. That’s it. [laughter], they’ve got reduced attention span that they don’t know how to critically think. I mean, we say that and it’s easy for, you to look down on kids and be like, Oh man, kids these days dunno how to think. But part of it is really because of the way that they’re processing information And think about it. Your brain, when most people consume social media, you are looking at your telephone and you are getting bombarded with little bits of decontextualized information, you know, 50 times a second.
And then your response is to make a value judgment based on this. So you tell the world, this is either what I’d like or I don’t like, or I’m wanna share that with someone else, or whatever. But that is how your brain is learning how to process. And unfortunately we’re not seeing people communicate in a way that they are laying out foundational principles and then building on top of it towards a conclusion, that’s not what’s happening. What we’re seeing is people are saying, Here, what do you think of this? What do you think of this? What do you think of this? What do you think of this? And you’re supposed to be like, Oh, I like that. I don’t like that. I like that. I don’t like that. Well it’s training our students to one, have poor attention span two, to not have, not think critically, but also they are seeing everything as decontextualized information.
Do you see what I’m saying? Like there’s no frame of reference. You just get thrown, boom, here, this you should… And Spencer talked about some of that stuff today, like, the lies that our students are hearing. Well, love is love and live out your true self and you be you. And it’s like, yeah this is awesome. Yes. Those are all really great. Well, maybe in the right context. ’cause if I say to you, you need to live to be true. Okay? That’s pretty vague. All right. Live your honest self, okay? Sure. Right? Because if the idea is I need to be true to myself, or I’m gonna live a lie, well, you don’t wanna live a lie. Does anybody think it’s great for you to live a lie?
No. Does it see the world? No, of course not. But if you take that out of context and then say, oh, well your sexual identity is what determines who you are. And so if you really believe that you are a woman trapped in a man’s body, then that living true to yourself and not lying is accommodating sinful behavior. That’s destructive. So we need to make sure that we’re training our students to actually be able to think more than just about one line at a time. More than just, here’s a really cool idea, or here’s some sort of click bait. We need to train our students to be able to think of the world appropriately as Christians. And so what I want, and also part of this, and this is just, I am… At the core of who I am, I am not good with contradictions.
I’m just not good with ’em. I don’t like contradictions. I like to make sure I know why something is happening all the time. And I was like this as a child. I annoyed the snot outta my parents because they would ask me to do something and I would of course say why, and I realize how annoying that is because I have children and I just want them to do what I say. But I’ve been training my kids to ask me why, and it’s great. Well, it makes parenting harder. So if you want parenting to be harder, just tell your kids, do the whole, because I said so you can do that. But then again, I want my kids to know why I said so, that’s what I want them to know, because I want them to be able to make well thought out decisions on their own.
Well, that’s what we’re doing with these students that God has entrusted to us like we need. And in fact I’ll get this at the end, but we need to challenge our kids to ask why. And we need to challenge them to ask why, by asking them why. And that’s where, I mean ’cause with my kids, my kids, I’ve got four kids, 14, 12, 10, 8. And, and so now I’m at the point where I’m asking them why all the time. Oh, well, they’ll make a truth statement and I’ll be like, okay, cool. Well, why is that? Oh, this is just what I like. Mm, time out. Nope. We need to, I need a reason. And we need to be training our students to be doing this because in a very short time, your students are gonna be going out from underneath the ministry that you have with them, and they’re gonna be going into a hostile world.
I mean, we’ve been talking about in Jude. Like, we are contending for the faith because this world hates us. And so this world wants to destroy your students. And if they can get a foothold, if this world can get a foothold in the way that your kid is thinking and pervert the whole process of thinking through things, well they’ve won because your students don’t have an answer for anything. So what I wanna do is I wanna walk through what a biblical worldview is. If teaching from a biblical worldview is so crucial, then we need to have an accurate understanding of what the Bible teaches about how we should view our world.
I wanna talk about five basic worldview questions that are all interconnected.
I want us to understand how interconnected our thoughts are. Anytime you say something about something. You’re saying something about everything because it’s all connected. And you can’t just change one aspect. Think about blueprints for a building.
If you have blueprints for a house that you wanna build, then you decide, Oh, I wanna make this one room bigger. You can’t just make one room bigger. That doesn’t happen. Because it’s so interconnected. And I want us to understand that when we are making truth claims, it affects what we believe about other things. And we wanna make sure that we are training our students so they have consistent worldviews that aren’t contradictory. So let’s look at two definitions. This one says yeah, what is a biblical worldview?
Anyway, I’ll read this. It’s pretty Nerdy. And it comes from James sire. James Sire has written a bunch of stuff about worldviews. This is from a book called Naming the Elephant. Worldview as a concept. And he says this, A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions assumptions, which may be true, partially true or entirely false, which we hold consciously, subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently about the basic constitution of reality that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being. Look at the distinctions he’s making here. We have this set of beliefs that could be true or not true. ’cause everybody has a worldview. Everybody has a worldview. Some of them are really bad, some of them are super flimsy.
But everyone has a worldview.
We’re all like… We all believe something about who we are in the world that we live in. We do. Okay, now, I love the these distinctions because they’re either true or true, not true, partially true. That might be conscious, they might be subconscious, they might be consistent or inconsistent, but we’re all holding to a specific worldview. Okay. Now, the challenge of the next one, ideally a worldview is a well reasoned framework of beliefs and convictions that help us see the big picture, giving a true and unified perspective on the meaning of human existence. That’s from Phil Reichen. Okay. So see, the idea is that we need to challenge our students to be thinking through what they believe, but in a way that it is conscious that they’re actually, I’m intentionally thinking through this, that it’s consistent and that it’s true.
So why is it important?
Well, because of what all, everything I said just a minute ago, but also because our beliefs don’t exist in a vacuum. It’s, you can’t just say, well, I believe this and I believe this, and I believe this, and I believe this. And none of it connects to each other. Well, that’s not the way it works. Because if you are, and this is, again, this gets me personally. ’cause I don’t like contradictions, I don’t like inconsistency. I don’t, and again, having kids that force you to explain things is really sanctifying. Because my kids will say stuff like… They’ll say, well, yesterday you said this, and today you’re saying this. And sometimes it’s, I have to say yes, that’s because I’m being selfish. So there, that’s not how I’m supposed to act. But sometimes it’s like, oh, oh, yeah.
And it’s sometimes super helpful. ’cause I’ll say, oh, well, you’re just looking at this out of context. Yesterday I said this because this was happening and we were doing this today we’re doing this. You understand? Okay, great. You know what I mean? So I dislike inconsistency. Well, what we need to understand is for our students is that we are all holding these worldviews to varying degrees of consistency. And what we should be challenging our students with is to know what they believe and why they believe it, so that they can hold this unified true perspective on the world. And the truth of the matter is this just gets me so excited, is that the Christian world view, the Christian view of the world is the only worldview that is externally and internally consistent. It’s externally consistent, meaning it corresponds to the truth about reality, about the world that we live in.
And it’s internally consistent, meaning not contradictory.
That’s why if you’re someone like me and you’re like, Man, I hate inconsistency, Christianity, it’s really cool, but you could teach your kids that too. We learned this weekend that Christianity is super cool and it’s not cool to be a Christian. That’s the problem anyway. But so what we need to help our students be able to think through these things, and for us, it actually is, it requires more work for us. Because, and this is what’s really fascinating. I really appreciated this morning when Spencer was talking about these false prophets. And some of it was a little obscure, like he’s choosing these kind of obscure Bible passages. But isn’t it fascinating that when Jude was writing 2000 years ago, that he’s still attacking the exact same things that are happening in our culture today.
People being drawn away by sex and money [laughter] Did you know that that happens today also? And especially when you start studying, like it can be really intimidating right now to be a Christian who is in college because they’re being fed a bunch of stuff about the nature of reality that’s just not true. And it can be difficult for us who are trying to help our students navigate this because it sounds like there’s these all new arguments that we’re not smart enough to deal with. Well, these are, they’re all the same thing. These are the same arguments have been leveled against Christianity for the past 2000 years, and Christianity continues to answer them. And Christianity doesn’t just answer them because it’s a consistent worldview. But because it’s true. And I think that’s so important. And again, so our students are in, they’re in your ministry right now.
They’re in a safer place than some of them next year. Some of them in like eight months. Well, you need to be helping them ask really difficult questions now. And at least if we can help them have a framework. ’cause a side note, I think I talked about this in the fall at the men’s conference, but there’s a couple that’s been coming to our church, and they’re atheists. They say they’re atheists. They are so close. I mean, Joseph and I had lunch with ’em this week. They want to be Christians so bad. But they claim they… They’re still saying that they’re atheists. And that one time he said something to me, and he’s like, Man, I don’t wanna, I can’t ask you all the questions that I have. I don’t wanna make you doubt. And I was like, Well, if it’s not true, I don’t wanna believe it. And he said, Yeah, sometimes I think that Satan sent me to you so that you’ll leave Christianity. And I said, I think that God sent you here so that you become a Christian and [laughter]
And it’s awesome because I mean, they’re the oddest couple who’s ever existed because they’ve been coming to our church since the summer and still love and love it. They’ve… Time out. They volunteer to help set up for our church and tear down. They’ve been active in a small group and they’ve been giving financially [laughter] And it’s really funny. I wish that some of our church members were as faithful as our atheist visitors. It’s like, after he’d been coming to church for like a month and he said we’re a weird church. We don’t pass a plate, we just have boxes. We have four of… Your mom’s right there. She’s right there. You can go right there. I’ve got kids. I don’t get distracted. You guys know what this is like? You guys live in the middle of distraction. But we’d been meeting for like, he’d been coming to our church for two months and he said, So how is this funded? And I said, Oh, well, you know what, people, our members give, and we actually we teach on how this is part of discipleship is by giving financially to the church. And he said, Yeah, we wanna, we want to help. And I was like, Man, you’re just, you’re ridiculous. But I mean, [laughter]
But it’s so funny because he’s fallen into this same trap because he will tell me, this is what’s so fascinating. He will say, Oh, well, I believe all of the same stuff that you guys believe. And I’ll say, and what he means by that is that he’s a pretty conservative person who sees that there’s evil in the world and thinks that there’s gotta be something good to live for. That’s basically what he believes. And I’ll say, yeah, but you don’t have a right to believe those things because I have a foundation for what I believe. And you believe something completely different. And it’s so funny, even the first time we had a conversation, he said, I want to hang, I wanna talk to you, but you gotta understand I’m so committed to reason. And I said, me too. [laughter]
And what we found out is that he doesn’t have adequate reasons for the things that he believes. And again, I mean, he’s being trained by this culture because in this culture, it’s like, you can just say, oh, well, I believe in this person’s right for this. And that’s awesome. And again, our culture’s just recycling things. So right now, there are people that are there. We have certain groups of people that are being oppressed in our world right now. Yes, that has always happened. And it’s gonna keep switching from one person to another. And if for you to say, and we think that they don’t deserve to be oppressed. Yes, that’s good. Our culture will always say that. They’re saying, yeah, well these people who are being oppressed let’s help them out. And I say, yeah, because I’m a Christian, ’cause I’m a Christian.
I believe that these are human beings created in the image of God who have eternal value. But for our friends who are not believers, they don’t have a right to say, Oh, someone’s mistreating that person. We should stop it. So we’re gonna walk through this, and this is what I want us to challenge our students with. Oh man, I got so confused. I thought we started at 2:00 and I was like, there’s no way we’ve been going for 49 minutes. All right, we haven’t, we didn’t start at 2:00 just so you guys know. Alright, we’re gonna walk through, these are five basic questions that a worldview consists of. And then I wanna walk through these and I wanna show areas in which a Christianity has the answers and how our world is trying to give false answers that are inconsistent. So I’ll… We’ll walk through this real fast and then we’ll slow down. So origin our… We need to have answers for origin. Where did everything come from? If there is something rather than nothing, which there is, how did it get here? Where did it come from that we, everyone has to have an answer for origin, everyone has to have an answer for identity.
What I mean by identity is human beings. What does it mean to be a human being? Where do you draw your identity from? And again, what’s your foundation for that? Third, obviously morality. What’s right and wrong? Where does that standard come from? Fourth is meaning or purpose. Do you have meaning and do you have a purpose? If so, why? ’cause again, we have to ask the question why? Even when someone can say good ideas, well-meaning things, something that’s right, something that we would say, again, as Christians, we believe, yes, that’s what’s right to do. They still, we have to have a good reason for it. And then the last one is destiny. And that is that something happens when you die. Everyone’s gonna die.
You have to have an answer for that.
Otherwise, you just don’t have a consistent worldview. And what’s been really good with these conversations that our pastors have been able to have with this couple that’s been coming is we’re able to have really matter-of-fact conversations and they’re not offended. I’ll say, well, that’s where your worldview is inconsistent because you don’t have an answer for this or that. And it’s great because he’ll be like, yeah, you’re right. I just don’t feel that way. And I’m like, okay, cool. Well, feel that way. So origin. All right. Yeah. Page one. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We believe this. We believe that this was a special creation where an immaterial, all-powerful being spoke and the material world came into existence. That’s what we believe.
In Colossians, it says this, I’m gonna read this passage tomorrow morning also. So I hope it’s okay if we’re repeating it. But this is something about how Jesus is the creator and sustainer of the universe. He says he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and in him, all things hold together. That’s huge. He is the head of the body of the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead that in everything he might be preeminent for in him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. We believe as Christians, we believe that every, this is where if you’re gonna be asking these questions, the deeper you dig down, the more often you come back to origin because we do believe that God created this world. And not only do we believe that God created, we believe that God is intentionally sustaining the universe, right?
That’s a really big deal because there are so many people, and you’ll see this every Easter, right? There’s gonna be some new conspiracy where they’re trying to disprove some sort of miracle and you’re gonna have the History Channel, which is, obviously the smartest people ever are gonna be saying, see, Christianity is not true because this miracle couldn’t be proved. And that’s the point of miracles. If you’re in, we get sucked into it. How many, I get sucked into it like, oh man, well, if God made the sun stand still, oh, there’s no natural way to explain that. Man, Christianity must not be true. No, no, no. Yeah, if there’s not a natural way to explain it, it’s because it’s a supernatural event and the shortcut term for that is a miracle, right? So if you believe that God created the universe, then it makes sense that God can do any miracle.
And if you’re a Christian, you have to throw, and this is gonna sound like I’m being anti-science. I’m not anti-science. I love science. I think it’s awesome. I think the more that we understand the way that things work, the more glory we give to God. But you have to throw out scientific explanations for miracles. You have to because they’re miracles. Because here’s the thing, and this is what’s super important as we’re thinking through with a Christian worldview, Christianity is what actually provides a basis for the scientific method because it is only by having this all-powerful God sustaining this universe that we can trust that the universe can continue to operate the way that it always has. Even like this morning, did you guys notice, this is, again, I’m just gonna nerd out for one second. I promise I’ll come back. But when Jude is talking about these false prophets and he calls them the wandering stars, isn’t that fascinating? Okay.
I’m apologizing. This is too nerdy. Do you know that word wandering? Do you know what that word wandering is in the New Testament, in the original language? It’s planetes. Isn’t that fascinating? Because you know planets are tricky wanderers in the night sky because the rest of the stars are moving, and according to our eyes, obviously, I know that they’re not moving. We’re moving, but it’s consistent, right? And when you have this little guy going this way, everything else going here, and you’re like, man, it’s wandering. What is it? It’s not a star. It’s a planet. It’s fascinating because these, and that’s the whole point. Like these are false prophets. You’re supposed to be able to look at them to following them, but they’re going away. They’re not following the Lord. They’re going the opposite way. They’re leading people astray.
Yeah, but how does that make sense? Well, it makes sense when we realize that the universe was created by an all-powerful God who is sustaining it, right? The only way that navigation makes sense is if there’s a sustainer of the universe. Everybody, when you’re looking at the GPS on your telephone, that only makes sense because there’s these satellites who are just going perfectly in orbit because we just threw them out there, and God took over. Isn’t that fascinating? So we have to have an answer for origin because everything else is gonna be based off of that, especially when we look at identity. I’ve got to go a lot faster now, and I apologize. When we look at identity, see, Stan, this is, you’re right, I do this. I hate the fact that when my friends make fun of me, it’s for things that are true about me.
Thanks a lot, Stan. Anyway, so identity, right? What does it mean to be a human being? Okay, every one of us lives as if we have some sort of inherent value. We do. Everyone lives that way, right? You take care of yourself. You got up, got something to eat, put on clothes, look both ways before you cross the street because you believe you have inherent value, and as Christians, we believe that every human being has been created in the image of God with eternal value. We believe that when God said, this is Genesis 1, 26 through 28, let us make man in our image after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping things that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them, and God blessed them, and God said to them, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
When God created, he created the natural world, all of it, and then he created mankind in a position to have responsible stewardship over everything else. It’s fascinating. I teach a class for Liberty University Online, Liberty University, training Champions for Christ since 1971, and changing lives one degree at a time, and I will ask some of these questions, and I will have students who claim to be Christians who are in college that will say, humans aren’t more important than animals, and I’ll say, and I’ll as nicely as possible reply back and say, well, it’s really difficult to live that way consistently, and again, when… And I’ve been talking with my atheist friend, he wants to say, he wants to say, oh, all of life has the same value, but he does that while eating a chicken salad in front of me, right?
There’s an inconsistency there, and we need to challenge, ’cause it sounds so great to be like, oh, well, I don’t think you should, I don’t think any animal needs to be killed, okay, but God told us to take dominion over the birds, and over the fish, and over the creeping things, and part of that is harvesting them, and cultivating them, and we have it clear, you’re allowed to eat them, and you’re allowed to eat them because they’re not the same value as a human being, and that’s why, and I’ll have that conversation with my friend, and say, if we came here, and you had the option of getting chicken, fish, or human on your salad, you would be repulsed by human, but why?
And again, you have to have an answer for why. If we’re just a product of naturalistic causes and events, time plus chance got us where we are now, then there’s no reason to say that human beings have any higher value than anything else, so any type of human rights issue that’s going on right now, that students want to fight about, and some of them, they need to, right? Especially, we’re seeing in America that some of our big metropolitan cities are being used for highways for slave trafficking. That’s happening right now, yeah, and we should be offended by that, but we’re offended by that, because those are eternal souls created in the image of God, not because they’re just some sort of product of naturalistic processes that has lasted billions and billions of years, right? Okay, next, morality. Again, this is what’s fascinating.
We have an unchanging standard of morality based on God’s nature that’s been revealed to us in His Word, right? We believe that, and not only as Christians do we have an answer for what is right and what is wrong, we have guidelines for that. We also understand why everybody in the world lives like there’s an absolute standard of morality, even if they say, ’cause that’s also, even right now, man, it’s so trendy to be able to say, oh, there’s no absolute standard of morality. Everyone, you need to do what you believe is right, what’s true for you is true. Well, no one lives that way. There are secular philosophers who make millions of dollars writing books saying those things.
They’ll say, like, Sam Harris, he’s not as cool and trendy anymore, but when… He’s an atheist who would say stuff, he wrote a book on human freedom saying that human beings aren’t responsible for any of their actions, and I think, yeah, if you hacked into his bank account and took all of his millions of dollars, he’s gonna say, who’s responsible for this, right? Yeah, because we do have a standard of morality, and everyone lives that way. CS Lewis talked about that in the Mere Christianity, talked about this natural law that, even if someone takes our orange slices, we know that we’ve been transgressed against, they’ve done something wrong, because if we don’t have an unchanging standard of morality, you cannot use words like right, wrong, good, bad, fair, just, unjust. You can’t do it. Okay, but it all goes back to, okay, yeah, well, we are human beings created in the image of God, which goes back to the origin. It does, and it’s consistent.
It makes sense, right? Next is purpose and meaning. We believe that human beings have been created for a relationship with God. We believe that every human being is an eternal embodied soul created for a relationship with God and that they’re gonna be, they will be incomplete apart from that relationship. And as Christians, we’ve gone through a bunch of different ways of viewing the world, like we, the creation, and the fall, and redemption, and then the ultimate restoration, meaning that everything was created good, and everything has value because it’s been created good by a good God, and that, up until Genesis 3, when the fall happened, and then mankind has descended into sin, and so, and all of creation has been cursed because of that, but we do know that in Christ, He has paid for our sin and has given us his righteousness so that we can be redeemed, and one day, we’ll be, we’ll have glorification with Him in the heavenly places. And this is what we long for.
It’s so interesting because so many people are asking the question, what is my purpose? Does my life have any meaning? And as Christians, we can say, yes, absolutely, because every other answer that someone fabricates on their own is gonna leave them empty, right? We see I put in here, garden, tabernacle, temple, incarnation, new kingdom, those to remind us that all of salvation history is about God dwelling with his people. Isn’t that amazing, right? And we, when we read through the early chapters of the Bible, and we see God walking in the cool of the day with Adam and Eve, awesome, but then when sin entered, then we have, we have a broken relationship, and then the rest of salvation history is God making a way for Him to dwell with us. We see him traveling with His people in the Tabernacle when they get their promised land. We have the temple, and then we see Jesus come, and what does 1 John say? It says that he dwelt among his people, right?
The idea is that he pitched a tent with us. He tabernacled with us, right? That’s what we saw happen with Jesus, and then ultimately, he has built us a new kingdom, a city where righteousness dwells, where we will live with him forever, right? That is a purpose worth living for, and what’s crazy is I was even talking with a good friend of ours in the community last night, nope, two nights ago, and he’s got good friends who he’s trying to share the gospel with who are Muslim who converted to Islam while they were in prison, and he’s so conflicted ’cause he’s like, you guys aren’t even like good Muslims. He’s like, the only reason you’re Muslim is because that was the gang that you joined in prison, and what’s fascinating is now they’re out, and they’re still claiming this Muslim identity, and he’s trying to share the gospel with them and say, yeah, you want to be a part of that because it’s providing something that’s bigger than yourself that you can draw your identity out of. Yeah, but at the end of the day, it will leave you empty.
It doesn’t matter what it is that you are using to try to satisfy this longing that you have to be a part of something bigger than yourself. If it’s not in relationship with our Creator, it’s gonna leave you empty, and that’s huge, and so we do. We understand that all things exist to give glory to God, and then finally, destiny is that we believe that every human being is an eternal embodied soul that will spend eternity in heaven or heaven, and we need to think of this reality, and even with our students, with our students, death seems so far away, and so we need to understand that our lives could go at an instant. That’s one thing, Brody was talking about this morning with this young guy from our church, and he was 23 years old and died in a car accident, had his whole life ahead of him, yeah, and now he is in the presence of God. Praise the Lord. It’s awesome, but this is what’s happening, and we lose sight of this.
I’m gonna read a quote from CS Lewis in The Weight of Glory, talking about the people that we’re involved… The people that we’re around every day. It’s way too much to put on one slide. I can’t believe Donovan did that. Donny, shame on you. Anyway, he says this, it is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest, most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long, we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, arts, civilization, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as of the life of a gnat, but it is immortals with whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, exploit, immortal horrors, or everlasting splendors. Isn’t that fascinating? CS Lewis did write fantasy books, but this isn’t fantasy. Every one of us is gonna be in eternity, either in God’s presence or in torment, separated from God for eternity, where Scripture uses the worst possible illustrations. A lake that’s fire. So, if you think, man, drowning would be bad, and so would burning. What if both? Imagine both of them. That’s how bad it is. Right? And I think it’s so easy for us to lose track of that, and especially our students. Our students, even in really good, healthy youth groups, because it’s, you know what?
I love when student pastors are helping kids understand the Bible well, and man, you know how awesome it is when a kid, when it clicks, and a kid’s like, yes, and they’re studying their Bible, and they’re picking up good books, and they’re learning and growing. That’s awesome, but we also have to realize, that the world is dying and going to hell, and we’re the answer, right? So, our students, we have to prepare them, ’cause they’re gonna be the ones that are hanging out with the non-believers that we don’t get to hang out with, right? So, we need to help them, help them understand who each other is. Like, the people that they see on a daily basis, man, these are immortal, embodied souls, right, that have eternal value in God’s eyes. All right, so last, how do we intentionally teach from a biblical worldview?
Christianity provides the only adequate basis for any education.
For any learning, anything that we’re applying ourselves to, it only finds its foundation in Christianity, in the God of the Bible who created, who created image bearers of God, who made them in his image with this understanding of morality, who have meaning and purpose, who are headed on a trajectory either eternity with him or away from him, right? All of these things, when they’re in their school, even in school, they need to understand that the disciplines they’re studying make sense only if Christianity is true and the God of the Bible created the world. That’s it, right? And we have the ability to help our students to think like Christians for the rest of their lives, right? We’re helping train them on how to think well as believers and that we need to help them ask why, expecting an answer, and we can do that by modeling that for them.
When our students, help our students to think. If you ask a question, they answer it, say, okay, why did you say that? And just challenge them to think through what they believe, why they believe it, and make sure that at the end of all the answers of why, they’ve got an answer. And if they don’t, great, help them because you’re there for them now and your time with them is so short.