17: Kingdom Worldview

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Here we are in episode 17, starting our third series. We’re talking about the Kingdom Worldview. Hello, Father.

[00:29] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:32] Stephanie: I am very passionate about the topic of this series. It is immensely important. Worldview – it’s not just something that we are born with. It doesn’t have to be a passive thing. We can be aware of our worldview. We can change it, affect it intentionally. I’ve talked to people before who looked at me with these huge eyes. Like, what? Like you can change your worldview? Yes. Yes you can. It’s so important to know that. So what we’re after here is a kingdom worldview. One of the things Jesus came to do was to teach us a kingdom worldview; to see life as God sees it; to understand reality as God understands reality. And so we were just talking about whatever you consider common sense is determined by your worldview. So father, what is worldview?

[01:18] Marcus: Let’s start with the definition – my worldview is the lens through which I look at reality. That’s a simple definition. It’s the beliefs and assumptions that determine how I explain reality and how I evaluate reality. I say beliefs and assumptions because a lot of times assumptions are essentially beliefs that I don’t even realize I hold. From culture to culture to culture, people have beliefs and assumptions that determine how they explain what they are seeing, what they’re experiencing, and also what they value as important or beautiful or just or good or evil. All of these things can change depending on your worldview. Again, it’s the lens through which I look at reality. It’s the beliefs, either the ones I assume to be true or the ones I ardently argue to be true, that determine how I explain and evaluate what I see around me.

[02:24] Stephanie: And why is it so important?

[02:27] Marcus: We’re talking about reality and that’s why this is so important. How do I see reality? A simple illustration I heard somebody use long ago, is if your worldview says that your car runs on unleaded gasoline, but it actually runs on diesel, and you put unleaded gasoline into your diesel engine, you will ruin it. So your worldview is your concept, that mental picture of how the world works and how reality works.

The other reason it’s so important is that it determines what solutions you think are possible because it determines what you think causes things. So what we’re really going to focus on here, there are a whole lot of dimensions to worldview, but we’re really going to hammer in on the idea of causation.

What makes things happen? Why do they happen? I’ll give you an example. I talked to a friend named Bill Jones, who had once worked with somebody who had pounding headaches. Now, you said common sense comes from our worldview. Most of us westerners have a worldview that says, if you’ve got a pounding headache, what do you do?

[03:48] Stephanie: Go to the doctor, take an aspirin, do something.

[03:51] Marcus: Exactly. You take Tylenol. If that doesn’t work, you take more Tylenol. If that doesn’t work, you take Tylenol with something else in it. If that doesn’t work, you go to the Mayo clinic. You go to some specialist. You get a brain scan, whatever. She did all that for years and years and years, just pain management, trying to manage these pounding headaches until finally she met with Bill. Bill had a worldview that said, “You know what? Sometimes headaches are caused by spirits.”

Now, most of us laugh at that. That’s like cartoon fodder. “The demon of headaches has gotten me – haha – isn’t that funny?” It’s because our worldview doesn’t think that’s a possible solution, so it’s not common sense to us.

[04:36] Stephanie: But also, I would also interject that there are some people who have been around who found a demon under every rock, so others are jaded by that worldview because that’s the extreme of it. I’ll just throw that out there too.[

04:51] Marcus: And that’s the thing with worldviews. You can go into opposite extremes.

One example of the opposite extremes is about a missionary working in an Amazonian jungle village when a measles epidemic broke out. The villagers decided to cut the heads off of all the roosters. What made that a common sense solution? They believed that measles were caused by spirits. Even when the missionary tried to show them a slide of bacteria, saying “You can see the microorganisms that are behind all of this!”, their interpretation, their worldview was so entrenched that the chief thought he was seeing the spirit when he saw the microorganism.

So your worldview will determine what you see as possible, and what you will see as causal, and therefore what you see as possible solutions.

So, back to the story of Bill Jones and the woman with the headaches. What ended up happening was that  she had actually gone on a short term mission trip, picked up an occult object, and brought it back with her. Her headaches essentially started when she got back from the mission trip. So when my friend had her destroy the object and command anything demonic to leave, her headaches literally stopped in the middle of the prayer and never came back.

And so we would say from a kingdom worldview, it makes sense to consider spiritual dimensions for solutions to the problems in our lives. It goes on and on and on beyond that. That’s why worldview is so important, because it will determine what we think is real, which will determine how we explain what is real; It will determine what we think is important, and it will determine the possible solutions that we are willing to consider in trying to fix problems.

[06:35] Stephanie: I know I’ve had the benefit of growing up in your household. You’ve been figuring out a lot of things. You’ve been on a journey where you’ve discovered a lot of things even as I’ve been older, and so I haven’t had all of this from the very beginning. But worldview-wise, I’ve always felt very centered and comfortable with a biblical worldview, and I haven’t had to ask what the other answers are. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

[07:02] Marcus: Well, there is something comforting to knowing that your worldview can explain what you’re experiencing.

[07:09] Stephanie: Yes. Things do not throw me for a loop. I see other people thrown for a loop. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about a biblical worldview. It would help so many people. So I’m just curious, when did worldview start becoming important to you personally?

[07:26] Marcus: So, you know this actually came from your grandfather. My dad was a missionary who then was asked to teach missions. Part of teaching missions is teaching cultural anthropology because everything is cross-cultural. And how do you bring things into a cross-cultural context? When trying to explain to people how culture works as a missionary, my father taught the model that explained that culture is like an apple. The outside of the apple is what you see, which would be the behaviors of the culture, the unique customs of the culture.

He gave this example:  If you go to Egypt and get an invitation to a dinner, if you show up on time it is considered rude, because the servants are just showing up at that hour to start the process. Everybody knows in that culture that you show up an hour late. Whereas in other cultures, if you’re not there ten minutes early, you’re late.

So you’ve got to know the traits or the customs of each particular culture and how they’re different from one another.

But then you understand that underneath that outer layer of behaviors and traits and customs are the values. What is the value that drives that behavior? I want to honor my host. I don’t want to bring shame to my host, I want to make sure he’s totally ready for me to show up. Understanding starts the process of developing the habits.  If I come late, and that honors my hosts, whereas in other places, if I make the person wait, that dishonors them, I have to understand the values behind the customs. In this case, the value of honoring somebody is what is driving my choice of arriving early, late, or on time.

[09:14] Stephanie: So, that’s where we talk about honor/shame cultures, or fear, what would be the flip side of fear? We would say joy, but [how does that relate to culture?]

[09:24] Marcus: It’s true. Different cultures have different values of what they think is more important or less important. Even in terms of how you dress. In some cultures, you show some ankle and you’re inappropriate. Other cultures don’t care what you wear to the beach. All of these things are expressions of value.

So values come, then, from the core of the apple. If you think of the values as the fleshy part of the apple, then the core of the apple is worldview. And worldview is, again, the assumptions and beliefs I have about how all of this works, what is real and what isn’t real. It answers questions like, where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? How does life work? Is there a God? What is he like? All those are the kinds of questions worldview answers.

And so there are some classic, common worldviews that we all know about – Islamic worldview, Hindu worldview, Buddhist worldview. There’s an animistic worldview. There’s a secular/atheist worldview, and there’s postmodern worldview. We have all these worldviews out there, and part of the challenge is how do we all get along when we don’t believe the same?

That is the big challenge. One of the things that makes kingdom worldview so unique is that we are told that even if people don’t agree with us on the worldview, we still need to love them. Now, the church obviously hasn’t always lived that out, but that is what we’re called to, and that’s why we want to talk about it.

[11:04] Stephanie: We talked a lot in our Solution of Choice/ Broken Discipleship Factory series, about the four good ideas that neutralized western Christianity, and much of that could come back to worldview as well.

[11:17] Marcus: Yes. Every growth model is anchored in a worldview, because my worldview determines what I think transforms people. And so in those four good ideas to neutralize western Christianity, the first worldview was about truth. They looked at reality and said, truth is what drives all change. Therefore, get your truth right, and everything else will change. The next idea was choices are what drives reality.  And then it was power that drives reality.

And now we’re at a point, where everybody believes something different so everyone says we just need to let everybody do whatever works for them and not worry about truth at all. We are starting to move past that. I would say that we are actually not so much in a postmodern world anymore. I think we’re moving into the next phase where a new truth is emerging, it’s just a very anti-Christian truth. People are calling folks to believe in a specific absolute about how the world works. It is just the opposite of Christianity.

[12:22] Stephanie: So unfortunate.

[12:23] Marcus: Yes, what a happy topic, but that’s kind of what I see going on.

[12:27] Stephanie: So we just finished the first series on worldview that needed tweaking, and then a whole series on discipleship in terms of a kingdom worldview. I’ve heard you teach before about discipleship as assimilation, the process of transitioning from one culture to another and learning the ways of the new culture. Tell us more about that.

[12:49] Marcus: Yes, there is this aha moment when we become a Christian, that part of our identity in Christ is that I am a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. I had this aha moment when I was taking my dad’s class on cultural anthropology and putting it together with the biblical teaching about citizenship.  I was thinking that part of what’s happening in discipleship is that I now belong to a new culture, and so belonging is at the core. I went from belonging to the world to belonging to the kingdom. Just like if I were to move from one culture to another culture, and not just move there, but now I belong there,  and now I would say, these are my people, I want to fit in. I want to learn how they think. I want to learn what they value. I want to assimilate into the culture.

In the same way, discipleship is essentially a guided assimilation into the kingdom of heaven. How do people in the culture of the kingdom of God look at reality? What do they value? How do they live?

Discipleship is first belonging: these are my people. Then the worldview grows out of that, which is my theology and how I deal with some of my assumptions about life,  and then my values grow from that, which results in a transformed way of living.

[14:16] Stephanie: So if somebody wanted to do a Bible study that would help them get more focused and entrenched in a kingdom worldview, what would be some good places for them to start?

[14:27] Marcus: You mean actual scriptures?

[14:29] Stephanie: Yes.

[14:33] Marcus: Genesis is where all of this starts. The problem we have when we read the Bible, is that we read the Bible with our lenses already in place.What we kind of have to do is read the Bible while questioning our lenses.

For example, in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), God is constantly appearing to people, speaking to them, showing up in dreams. He is talking to humans in almost every chapter, which raises the question, does God still do that today, or did he stop talking once the Bible was written? Is the Bible God’s final revelation so that from now on, all we have to do is go to the Bible?

I don’t think that’s what the Bible is intending to say. I think the Bible is pointing us to spiritual realities that are supposed to shape the way that we live today. It is less about where in the Bible I go to get this worldview than it is about making sure I allow the Bible to question my worldview.

I would just go back to Jesus’s own day and the Pharisees.The Pharisees were Bible scholars. Nobody knew the Bible better than them. They had the whole Torah memorized. They had most of the prophets and the psalms memorized. The problem was that they had created a worldview that said certain things about the messiah, and certain things about the Sabbath, and certain things about the spirit of God, and certain things about this and that, which did not allow experience to open their eyes to the possibility that their worldview interpretation might be wrong.

Therefore, nothing they saw Jesus do could get them to question their worldview, or to question their theology, or even to go back to the Bible and say, could I possibly have read this through the wrong lens?

That is what our danger is today. We often experience things that should cause us to go back to the Bible and read it again. There needs to be a dialogue with God asking, did I miss something here? Would you show me? How do you want me to look at this?

I think all worldview starts with the Torah, with Genesis, and then it goes out from there. If I’m going to camp out on another passage of scripture, it would be the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) when Jesus, who is a teacher of wisdom, sits down and teaches people where to find the good life, which is what blessed is. If somebody is blessed, it means that God has been good to them. “How do I get God to be good to me?” is another way of saying, “Where do I find the good life?” That is what wisdom is all about.

Jesus walks us through and he gives us a kingdom perspective, a kingdom worldview. He lays out kingdom values and then he wraps up the sermon on the mount with, “The wise person has heard my worldview teaching and my values teaching, and now they are going to put it into practice. This is the way they’re now going to live. The foolish have just heard all this, but have decided that they are going to go their own way.” We still see that to this day.

Mature disciples are growing a sense of belonging, a sense that these are my people. They are also adding to their faith, knowledge, which is this perspective of the kingdom, and having a kingdom perspective on everything they look at.

Let’s face it, if it was that easy, then everybody in the church would always agree on everything. But we don’t.

Part of what we’re doing is using worldview language instead of just theological language. We’re trying to use a little bit different filter to help us think about this thing through a little bit different angle to see if it helps clear some things up for us.

[18:50] Stephanie: Well, on that note, the next episode we will be looking more at Worldview and Kingdom Theology. But for now, any final thoughts to close this?

[18:59] Marcus: Well, I just know that for me, the idea that worldview leads to solutions has been huge. One of the things that sets Deeper Walk apart, the reason that people often say, I love coming to your ministry, is that we offer a variety of solutions. We’re not a, “we have a hammer, therefore everything’s a nail” kind of ministry.

It’s because we have a worldview that says attachment and belonging are important, maturity skills are important, demons are real, the Holy Spirit is still active and engaged in your life today, and the scriptures are the foundation.

We have a worldview and a holistic approach that brings all of these things together, which allows us to see what the right solution is for the problem in front of us, instead of trying to make all problems have a single solution. I hope it’s encouraging to people that we’re going to be taking a dive into this, and I’m excited about it.

[19:56] Stephanie: It’s encouraging to me. I am so excited for this series. So thank you, Father.

And thank you all for joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk podcast and share with your friends. You can find more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.