Review Questions (Lessons 1-5)
5 Pages - 76K

In learning any subject, repetition is key! You have to review the content in order to get it stuck in your mind so that it can be recalled when you need it. The following questions will serve as a review for you and help to get the sweeping review of what has been covered in the past five lessons. You will need to refer back to the notes on the site to answer some of these questions. Just remember that this is not homework it is all a part of the journey to learning to see your world through God's eyes. Take some time to think through this stuff...it will help! Download the review questions

If you have some time, read through Daniel 4. This is a great example of the DVP vs. HVP confrontation. Add a comment to this entry and share what you learn. Keep in mind the goal of the viewpoint confrontation, which we studied in our last lesson.

Divine Viewpoint Strategy (Part 2)
8 Pages - 132K

In our last lesson we discussed the importance of developing a Divine Viewpoint (DVP) Strategy to deal with the difficult circumstances we face in life. Looking at the person of Joseph as an example, we learned that he interpreted his situation of dying through the viewpoint of his biblical worldview.

In the midst of his death, Joseph didn't loose control of his thoughts. He refused to see things they way an unbelieving Egyptian would. Rather, as a follower of God, he used God's word to direct his actions and calm his heart. We called this thinking strategy the RCT (ReConnecT) Drill. We want to reconnect our thoughts with the God's Word when things get difficult. There are three components that Joseph used in order to maintain his Divine Viewpoint (DVP). These included:

• Recall - when a stressful situation arises you recall a Scriptural text, fragment, promise, or story to quite down and focus on the Lord.
• Connect - once you have the appropriate Scripture in your mind you have to connect it to your situation. This often happens as you talk to God in prayer about your choice. Thinking through the Human Viewpoint (HVP) and Divine Viewpoint (DVP) choice you have before you.
• Trust - we keep God's Word circulating in our mind, encircling our situation, until we can trust the Lord and move forward.

Developing this strategy takes focus and time. We can't apply this approach to thinking when we are in the middle of an emotional situation or under high stress. We must train our minds with this strategy before we get caught in a jam.

In working through this strategy in my own thinking, I find that each step in the ReConnecT Drill can present its own set of challenges. The first two steps require that you understand what God has said concerning your situation. This of course takes time and commitment to learn and remember.

The third step of trusting is often the most difficult. This is because we cannot make ourselves trust God's Word without first being convinced.

Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. (Romans 10:17)

Being convinced of God’s Word is essential because we have to deal with so many hang-ups in our mind. We have thoughts bouncing around in our heads like, “why are you doing this to me God...I can’t see the purpose for this terrible thing...if God really loved me He wouldn’t have let this happen.” These kind of thoughts are so familiar to us because we spend the majority of our time feeding the Human Viewpoint (HVP).

Trying to combat this in our mind is very difficult because our bible training is so little that when we get in a jam and we recall a fragment of Scripture the HVP, being so much stronger, just swallows it up and destroys it. The end result is our inability to walk by faith.

The strategy to overcome this problem is to reverse the trend. We want to develop a DVP that outweighs our HVP. We want to be convinced of God’s truth when we are not in the thick of life’s stressful circumstances. We need to transform our minds and swallow up temptations with truth in order to maintain our walk of faith.

This lesson builds on a few biblical confrontations of DVP vs. HVP and then further develops the need for training in the Christian worldview in order to be ready to give an answer to the curious unbeliever.

Divine Viewpoint Strategy (Part 1)
8 Pages - 208K

Have you ever noticed that with every area of life there is a type of training designed to help you get the most out of your work? For example, if you want to build houses you have got to start with an apprenticeship and work your way up to being a contractor. Or if you wanted to be a farmer, you would begin as a hired hand and slowly learn the ropes. With military personnel there are years of training and ranks that must be climbed before you can command any leadership. Finally, if you desired to be an athlete, you must train your body to perform a certain way so that in the thick of competition you can respond without having to constantly refer back to the very basics.

So if training is so crucial to every other area of life, how is that when we get to our Christian walk there seems to be an exception to the norm. Often when it comes to spiritual things the general feeling is that no focused training is needed. Everyone just approaches it from his or her own direction. More often than not this approach leads to little or NO spiritual training and preparation. It's like a soldier who is thrown into battle without any training except what was given at the recruiter's desk, they just have to figure it out from there.

In other cases there is training provided, but the focus ends up in the wrong place. It starts with our actions and begins to identify the things you "should" and "shouldn't" do as a Christian. This is like teaching a soldier how to use a weapon but not helping him understand the strategy of battle. He operates in one dimension not having the skills to see his situation and adapt to it. To be sure there are going to be changes in our behavior, but is that where it starts?

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is -- his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Rom. 12:2)

The Bible offers us a strategy for walking by faith that starts in our minds. A training that challenges us to begin seeing the world through the eyes of the Lord (DVP) rather than looking at things from our own perspective (HVP). A way of continually shaping our minds to prepare for the battle of life. A way of starting with the correct thinking strategy and ending up with a proper behavioral response.

As we study through the Bible, you will notice that we are constantly looking at each teaching through two different perspectives. We first and foremost want to train our minds to understand how the Lord sees a situation (DVP), but in order to sharpen our vision we will also look at how man alters and manipulates God's word to meet his own needs (HVP).

This lesson offers you a strategy for dealing with the situations you face in life. A mental approach to thinking through a circumstance in life from a Divine Viewpoint (DVP). As your understanding of God's word expands and as you learn how it better fits together, you will become stronger in your ability to perform this strategy. However, I want you to see how you can apply your biblical worldview to your real life issues. This isn't pie in the sky stuff. It has real implications, and it must be applied.

Well hopefully some of the previous entries have given you a few reasons to begin re-considering your worldview and how important it is to your walk with the Lord. Even though you likely have some good Christian teachings in your mind, you still need a system to begin organizing them so that they can be recalled when it matters most.

You may have noticed that Bible is not constructed as a theological dictionary or textbook. God did not reveal Himself to us this way. Rather, He used stories or historical events with specific teachings embedded within them. So if we want to know the Lord’s thinking on a matter, we need to know both the historical events and the teachings associated with them.

In order to develop a Christian Worldview, we need begin where God began and study through all the major stories of the bible in a chronological order. Each story will lay a foundation of knowledge in a specific area of our thinking. As we progress through the stories, our knowledge will grow as the Lord reveals more.

I will use the diagram above to help our minds catch the “big picture” of what we need to understand. We will add to this diagram throughout our study, but to keep it simple now we will just take a look at the major 22 historical events found in the Bible. As I mentioned, each event has a basic set of teachings associated with it. Learning these events and their teachings as well as learning to tie them together is the purpose of this study.

So why are we only using these 22 historical events? Simply because they are referred to more often than other events, meaning they are more popular amongst the writers. This study is not completely comprehensive, but gives you the big "filing cabinet" so you can continue to learn more and file it in the proper place as you go.

We are going to focus on the most important content and develop our thinking one story at a time. Keep in mind that we will constantly set God’s divine viewpoint (DVP) against the human viewpoint (HVP). This is very helpful because you will not only know God’s thinking on the matter, you will also see the most popular view of man on a matter. This is a huge help because it makes the teachings of Scripture much more clear and our choices more distinct.

Learning to view the world around us through the eyes of the Lord may sound like a worthwhile goal, but what does it really mean, and how do we propose to actually accomplish this? With all the bible studies, books, programs and seminars, how is this approach to studying the Bible any different?

More than any other time in history there is an abundance of information available about the Bible. There is literally a specialized study on just about every topic you can imagine. But all too often these specialized studies provide us with a little bit of insight into a particular area but don't show how they're connected to other major teachings in the Bible. They ignore the "big picture".

I relate this issue to a kind of mental office desk. For example, each topic we learn about in life is like a piece of paper. Every time we learn something new, our desk gets a little busier with paper. Before long, our entire desk is filled with all these teachings just scattered and stuffed wherever they seem to fit at the time. Do you feel like your knowledge of the Bible is pretty scattered at the moment? Keep reading, there is a solution!

Here is where this particular study is different. When you learn at the worldview level, you won't be adding to the clutter of your mental desk, rather you will have the opportunity to begin the process of organizing and making sense of what you have previously learned. It's like a big filing cabinet with all its proper storage drawers and labeled folders. By studying the Bible in the order it was revealed and learning how to tie each of the major teachings together, you will essentially create for yourself a mental filing system. This will be helpful moving forward as you continue to study the Bible as well as give you the tools to go back through all those messy papers in your mind and file some of them away in your worldview; others you will want to discard.

Ok...maybe this is a little out there, but this organizing process reminds me of a cartoon I saw as a kid: Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land. In this episode the Spirit asks Donald to play a mental game, but he finds Donald's mind to be too cluttered. After some mental house-cleaning, Donald is able to discover some cool inventions made possible through math. If you want you can see this part, push play then move the playhead to 2:02 and watch until 1:28.

As you get started, I'm not sure if you will have dust and moths coming out of your ears like Donald did, but you can imagine what it would be like to see the world through a more organized approach to thinking. I can honestly say that this study has done that very thing for me. It has built up my faith in God's Word! It has changed my life and stabilized my understanding of what the Bible says. I literally can understand the major flow of the scriptures and have the "big picture" context in my mind.

Read part 1 first (see below)

Take a moment and think about the last moral decision you made. Maybe it was only a few moments ago. Now think about the last time you said "you should" or "you ought to". Think about the last song you heard, the last bit of world news you read or the last movie you laughed at. How about the last opinion you shared or ethical stand you made.

These decisions, these thoughts, these feelings are all the outer evidence of a much deeper choice you have made. Now I realize that you may not have ever thought about this before and you may not have specific memories of making this decision, but you have. In the very background of all your thinking there is a single question of final authority. If you were to see this question written out it might look something like this:

"Who or what is the final authority for ultimate truth, for moral guidance in living, for meaning and purpose in my life?"

The way that you answer this one question will form what can be called your worldview. Every action, thought and word is governed by this worldview and no human is exempt from having one.

Exploring this question of final authority and developing a total Christian worldview from the Bible is the purpose of this study. Our goal is to challenge our current worldview in an effort to rebuild our life on the solid foundations of God's viewpoint...to see our world through His eyes.

Honestly, you don't need a huge billboard to explain that the world does not adjust itself to meet your needs! It pushes ahead with its own agenda, shaping and molding our minds. Maybe you feel like you're just not in control and it's just too difficult to do anything about it. Even as a Christian, you just don't feel equipped.

Have you found yourself believing opinions about something you heard on the news, or from a friend, a song, or maybe a movie. Our beliefs can change sometimes without us even recognizing it. It's very subtle how things like this happen. The world doesn't miss an opportunity to fill us full of opposing views, ideas, and concepts that we often never take time to challenge. This is a BIG problem the Bible characterizes as worldly thinking or what might be called human viewpoint.

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. (Col. 2:8)

So how, as Christians, should we address this issue? Can God's Word supply us with a worldview that can be understood and trusted; a Divine viewpoint useful in all areas of life? Or is the Bible just an old ancient book that has little to no value for the "normal" things of life. It's nice to read on occasion for a little pick-me-up, but can it provide the ultimate standard for all truth?

It comes down to this, if the Bible is not the very truth of God then we can set ourselves up to be our own final authority in life. So the real question we should be asking ourselves is, "who is my final authority?"