Right Worldivew

2 Corinthians 5:14-17

14 For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; 15 and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.[c] The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

IMPORTANT NOTE See yesterday’s devotional or this one will be confusing (is also in your email or on our website, a quick read I promise)

Another reason we fail to share the gospel is because even if we’ve started to let Jesus change our lives, we are still struggling to accept how He teaches us to view the world.

We still want to see the world as flesh and bone only. Especially in our culture here in modern America, any view of the supernatural is mostly dead and gone. There is some interest in spirituality among the youngest generations, but for most Americans, we fundamentally think about the world as a physical one.

What we can see, what we can touch, hear, smell, taste, etc. Things we can rationalize and explain. The modern American worldview is largely built on three philosophical pillars, called rationalism, experientialism, and empiricism. Stick with me I promise this has a point.

Rationalism = life and truth is primarily based on what can be logiced and reasoned

Empiricism = life and truth is primarily based on what can be explained and proven with data and sensory experiences

Experientialism (one of our more recent additions here in America) = there is no pure external source of truth, but rather each person’s experience is a kind of truth in and of itself

Here is the first problem. Not a single one of these makes any room for the supernatural, any room for a belief on its own (it needs reasoning, evidence, or experience to justify itself), or any room for God, because all three rely on US to figure things out and understand things.

Here is the second problem, you might think you are immune to all three of these, but in reality every single one of us has grown up in a culture primarily shaped by these three approaches to understanding life (yes all of us, of any age reading this). And you cannot live among and in something without being affected by it.

So the answer is not to pretend like we can ignore the effects these views have had on our view of life, truth, and the world. Instead, it is to actively retrain ourselves with the actual pure source of truth found in God’s Word.

But how does this affect sharing the gospel?

Because if there is no one source of actual truth, why would we challenge what other people believe to be true based on their experience?

Because if we are limited to what we as humans can understand, then it makes no sense to give our lives in service to a God we cannot see or “prove” with a science experiment.

Because if the world is only what we can see, then there aren’t billions of people who are walking around dead with no relationship with Jesus.

So we must reorient our worldview to match that of our Lord and Savior Jesus. Who saw other people not as they physically looked, but as those made in the image of God, worthy of respect and dignity merely because of that. But who also saw people as spiritually dead and doomed, without hearing the message that He brought.