Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
John 14:6 ESV
I have been evaluating how persuasive instruction affects me. It seems that much of it may be acceptable to my senses and often weighs in on my understanding, but seldom does instruction reach all the way down to changing my actual worldview. Probably like you, I have listened carefully to arguments for certain positions but then said to myself afterwards, “You almost persuaded me, but not quite!”
Our worldview is an overall view of the world. It is a philosophical view—an all-encompassing perspective on everything that exists and matters to us. A worldview has profound implications for how people think about themselves, what behaviors they consider right or wrong, and how they orient their lives.
Because it is easier for a person to believe a simple lie than to have one’s mind changed by information that is new and novel, it is important to provide an individual with an alternative account to fill in the gap left by the retraction of false information. In pursuing truth, we want to know how things are and how they work—things only revealed by God either through special revelation from the Scriptures or general revelation from observation of life.
It is important for a believer to be able to identify major non-Christian worldviews that vie for dominance in our society, to understand how they fundamentally differ from the Christian worldview, and to make a well-reasoned case that the Christian worldview is true, good, and beautiful. This is where our work is cut out for us. As believers, we are to carefully present God’s truth, so it permeates the senses, enlightens the understanding and then powerfully persuades down to the deepest level of reason and judgment—an individual’s worldview.
Integrated thinking about how things are and how they work is putting together the way they actually are instead of the way we wish they were, or the way someone claims they are. This is how we discern between truth and falsehood. As I synchronize my way with God’s way—Jesus opens the door to knowing God by connecting everything together accurately and truthfully.