Posted on Thursday,

Four Essential Questions For Teaching From A Christian Worldview

How to Teach Christian Worldview Video

Recently, I wrote about how and why we are failing our students. But, what does it mean to teach from a christian worldview? The foundation of the Christian worldview is the conviction that in Christ are “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). In other words, Jesus has the best information about everything. To live out a Christian worldview is to “think Christianly” about all of life. Here’s how I have tried to flesh out this conviction: Christianity actually rises to the level of being true or false (and there are good reasons to believe it’s actually true). And if Christianity is true, then it speaks to all of life; it makes a comprehensive claim on reality.

“If Christianity should happen to be true – that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe,” said G.K. Chesterton, “then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.”

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Core Worldview Commitments

In light of that, I teach with the following core commitments. First, Christianity is a knowledge tradition, which means that truths about God, history, the spiritual life, and morality can actually be known, not merely believed (cf. Col. 1:9-10 and Luke 1:1-4).

Second, I assume (and argue for) the existence of objective truth. That is, truth is discovered; not created by an individual or culture. These two commitments will give students the confidence to cut through the mindless sound bites and slogans so common in our culture today.

Teaching from a Christian worldview requires that we ask and answer four vital questions:

1.) What do Christians believe about this? (Understanding / Content)
2.) Why do Christians believe this? (Reasons / Evidence)
3.) Why does this matter to my life? (Integration / Ownership)
4.) As an everyday ambassador, how can I help others connect with this important truth? (Embodiment / Connection)

This isn’t everything that could be said. But I think it’s an important starting point. Our beliefs and our thought lives provide the live possibilities for us to choose from in the day in and day out of life. If our thoughts are mostly away from God, then our choices most likely will be as well. Renewing our mind is fundamental to being an apprentice of Jesus and worldview formation (Col. 3:1-3; Rom. 12:1-2).

See more of my biblical worldview, apologetics, and culture teaching videos on my YouTube Channel.

I have tried to flesh out and apply this approach in my book with Zondervan, Think Christianly: Looking at the Intersection of Faith and Culture.

Posted on Saturday,

We Don’t Just Help Special Needs Children…They Help Us (Video)

Please take 3 minutes and watch this inspirational and sweet reminder of this precious little image bearer…

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” – Genesis 1:27

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Posted on Tuesday,

Are You Practicing Jesusanity or Christianity?

Several years ago while living in Dallas, I was on a date with my wife and was walking past a storefront, only to discover Jesus staring back at me—a bobblehead Jesus, that is. I had seen bobbleheads of NFL players and rock stars before, but I didn’t realize that Jesus had reached bobblehead status! Fast-forward a few years to when I was kicking off our Christmas series at our church. Want to know who was helping me preach that morning? Yep, bobblehead Jesus standing on a stool (I am happy to report that I was neither fired nor struck by lightning). To help make the Jesusanity versus Christianity distinction more concrete, I read out loud to our church the ad from the back of the box he was packaged in:

The name Jesus means God saves. The term Christ is a title for anointed of God. For Muslims and some Jews, Jesus was a prophet. Buddhists say he was enlightened. Hindus call him an Avatar (the incarnation of a deity in human form). And Christians hail him as the Son of God. Although he is understood in many different ways, everyone seems to agree that he was an extraordinary man.

Now I would take “extraordinary,” but is that what Jesus was after? Today in our thoroughly pluralistic culture, Jesusanity is what is most often practiced. Jesus is respected as one of the great religious leaders — even the best religious leader of all time — but he does not have unique status. For many people today, both inside and outside the church, Jesus is not unique; he is simply one among many. Respected? Yes. Street cred? Check. But if we take the New Testament documents seriously, Jesus wasn’t aiming for respect. His messianic mission was far larger than that.

In stark contrast to Jesusanity, Darrell Bock summarizes that Christianity “involves the claim that Jesus was anointed by God to represent both God and humanity in the restoration of a broken relationship existing between the Creator and his creation.” Only Jesus the Messiah can address humanity’s deepest need, the forgiveness of our sins so that we can be reconnected with God and enjoy the eternal kind of life we were made for (Mark 2:1–12; 8:27–30; John 17:3). In Christianity, Jesus is worshiped; in Jesusanity, he is simply respected. The difference could not be more important for our world. I dive into more of the implications of this mindset here.

Posted on Friday,

Are We Trivializing The Cross of Jesus Christ?

Early on in my graduate studies I came across a passage in a book on sin that has always stuck with me. It is profound and challenging. But we must maintain clarity here. What happens when we fail to talk rightly about sin and grace? In short, we trivialize the Cross. In his excellent book, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, Cornelius Plantinga highlights the value and necessity of accurately speaking of sin and grace:

To speak of sin by itself, to speak of it apart from the realities of creation and grace, is to forget the resolve of God. God wants shalom and will pay any price to get it back. Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way. Moreover, to speak of sin by itself is to misunderstand its nature: sin is only a parasite, a vandal, a spoiler. Sinful life is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life. To concentrate on our rebellion, defection, and folly—to say to the world “I have some bad news and I have some bad news” –is to forget that the center of the Christian religion is not our sin but our Savior. To speak of sin without grace is to minimize the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, and the hope of shalom.

But to speak of grace without sin is surely no better. To do this is to trivialize the cross of Jesus Christ, to skate past all the struggling by good people down the ages to forgive, accept, and rehabilitate sinners, including themselves, and therefore to cheapen the grace of God that always comes to us with blood on it. What had we thought the ripping and writhing on Golgotha were all about? To speak of grace without looking squarely at these realities, without painfully honest acknowledgment of our own sin and its effects, is to shrink grace to a mere embellishment of the music of creation, to shrink it down to a mere grace note. In short, for the Christian church (even in its recently popular seeker services) to ignore, euphemize, or otherwise mute the lethal reality of sin is to cut the nerve of the gospel. For the sober truth is that without full disclosure on sin, the gospel of grace becomes impertinent, unnecessary, and finally uninteresting.

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Posted on Friday,

How To Deal With Emotional Doubts

Our thought life is central to living a vibrant Christian life. In Romans 12:2, Paul says that the way we resist the pattern of this world is by renewing our minds. Now he could have said a lot of different things instead of mind—heart, emotions, worship—but he didn’t. The reason is that what we think about and what we believe are critical to how we live. Dallas Willard, a Christian philosopher who has done a lot of work in the area of spiritual formation, offers penetrating insight into the interplay of thoughts and emotions:

Our thoughts are one of the most basic sources of our life. They determine the orientation of everything we do and evoke the feelings that frame our world and motivate our actions. Interestingly, you can’t evoke thoughts by feeling a certain way, but you can evoke and to some degree control feelings by directing your thoughts. Our power over our thoughts is of great and indispensable assistance in directing and controlling our feelings, which themselves are not directly under the guidance of our will. We cannot just choose our feelings.

We don’t have direct control over how we feel. But we can indirectly affect our emotions by thinking in certain ways. If we want to get at the root of the emotional doubt, then we have to change our thinking and stop allowing ourselves to believe lies. We must tell ourselves the truth—God’s truth—until we accept it. Again, this is not a one-time remedy; it’s a habit we need to build into our life.

In light of this, I hope that you will no longer feel ashamed when you experience doubt, nor idly sit by and allow emotional doubt to paralyze you with fear. I will let the poignant words of Oswald Chambers conclude our discussion: “Unless we train our emotions they will lead us around by the nose, and we will be captives to every passing impulse or reaction. But once faith is trained to control the emotions and knows how to lean reso- lutely against weakness of character, another entry way of doubt is sealed shut forever . . . Much of our distress as Christians comes not because of sin, but because we are ignorant of the laws of our own nature.”

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