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Making sense of the World
It is our common tendency — maybe almost a need — to place everything we experience in the context of a narrative. A story, filled with assumptions.
If you get the story wrong, your response will be wrong. And if you get the story of the world wrong… you will get your life responses wrong.
Stories and World Views
Narratives are actually so foundational to how we think that they determine how we understand and live life itself.
The structure and purpose of many worldviews and cultures can be summed up into a narrative that says what is wrong with us and what we can do about it.
When any one of these worldviews grips the imagination of a culture, it has a profound influence on how life is lived, even for those who do not accept that worldview
The Gospel and Other Worldviews
The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Al Wolters
Our enemy is not sin, not other cultures!
Without an understanding of the gospel, we will be either naïvely utopian or cynically disillusioned. We will be demonizing something that isn’t bad enough to explain the mess we are in; and we will be idolizing something that isn’t powerful enough to get us out of it.
Through a story of a school administrator, Keller illustrated that the Gospel gives us a way to understand the macro and micro problems and see a hope — even a way — of redemption. And as we find solutions, that we do not idolize them but stay focused on Christ.
The Gospel and Business
To be a Christian in business… means thinking out the implications of the gospel worldview and God’s purposes for your whole work and life — and for the whole of the organization under your influence.
Sphere of influence. Prayer, discernment, and obedience!
The Gospel and the Arts
The Gospel is more globally pessimistic about human nature than virtually any other view of things.
We are all at fault for the state of the world!
Each of us is capable of the worst kind of evil, and there is nothing we can do to change ourselves, or even see ourselves in our true light, without God’s help.
The Christian Worldview Shapes All Work
Think of the gospel as a set of glasses through which you “look” at everything else in the world
Questions I should ask myself:
- What’s the story line of the culture in which I live
- How about in my field? My company?
- How does my particular profession retell this story line?
- What parts of the dominant worldviews are basically in line with the Gospel?
- Where must I challenge my culture?
All Christians live in cultures and work in vocational fields that operate by powerful master narratives that are sharply different from the gospel’s account of things.
We can be sure that this ultimate learning experience will never truly end; we are told the angels themselves never tire of looking into the gospel to see new wonders (1 Peter 1:10-12)
I really do need to seek an answer to these questions, and focus my eyes on Jesus. So easy to say though, and easier to forget. I will need to revisit this section.