Worldview

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. This is the word of the Lord. May He add His blessing to this reading. Our text comes to us from that second reading.

That's the first two verses of chapter 12 in Romans. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. And friends, the message is the fourth distinctive of what it means to be reformed, and that is that we have a Christian worldview. Now I think I may have spoken on the topic of worldview in one of the evening series a few years ago. So if you hear an example that you've heard before, my apologies for that.

But we live in a world today where I think most of us know what a worldview is, what it entails, what it means. And we realise that here, we live by an Australian worldview, and I hope a lot of you or all of you actually recognise that we are not just Australian but a Christian Australian worldview that marks the way we live. But I want to point out that if you are aware of this, the concept of worldview is relatively new. I began teaching it twenty-five years ago at Theological College, and at that time, students said, worldview, what is it? You know, it just wasn't known as yet.

But textbooks tell us that this concept arose in the academic world in Germany back in the late 1700s. Immanuel Kant is the philosopher often credited with that. But I think they're wrong because I can show you a facsimile of a book written in Dutch that came out of reformed thinking called, you know, Dutch which means worldview, and it was written in 1708, so that's eighty years prior to Kant. And I think reformed people have always been aware that to be reformed is not just to follow a religion, but to live in a special way in God's world, recognising that it is a world ruled by God, that all aspects of society must conform to Him, and that even in our scientific explorations, the recognition that God made this world, that He put order into this world actually led to the blossoming of science which came out of this worldview. Unfortunately, this Christian worldview, which was strong in Western Europe, was overtaken in the late 1800s by, yeah, liberal thinking and where they began to talk of nature instead of God shaping this world.

And God, at that time, raised up some church leaders. There was a Scottish Presbyterian named James Orr, and there was a Dutch pastor called Abraham Kuyper who became prime minister of The Netherlands, but both of them said, people, we have to return to a distinctive Christian worldview, not follow this liberal thinking. And there were others who followed in this. T. S.

Eliot wrote a book, The Idea of a Christian Society back in 1940, and he says, we as Christians have a special way that we should live because we recognise that God is our creator and ruler and cares over us in His grace. But of course, there were many protesting voices, and one of them came from an Oxford scholar named D. I. Munby who published the book, The Idea of a Secular Society. Obviously, he didn't agree with Eliot who said the idea of a Christian society.

Nope. He wanted a secular one. And he said, what we want is changes on six crucial points. And I mention that because I think these six crucial points that he wanted changed help us to see where society went when it departed from the Christian worldview. He said the first thing we want is a world that is uncommitted to any view of reality.

You can believe what you like about creation, about man, about our place in the universe. Reality is what's real for you, and you can believe what you like about religion, about how you live, about what genders we have, make up your own mind. You only have to go to YouTube to see how this led to all kinds of weird claims that we are really ruled by aliens who visit us occasionally in spaceships and have left monuments in South America and all that kind of thing. Other people who claim that there is a possibility of perpetual motion, that these laws discovered by Newton don't count, all kinds of weird ideas, but they are not committed to reality. The second thing that Munby said is this new world is going to be pluralist.

We don't follow just one culture. Now I come from a migrant family, and I remember soon after we entered New Zealand, we went to visit the museum in Auckland, a beautiful museum on the waterside there, but there we saw a lot of the New Zealand culture, and there was a picture there of the queen. And I think I asked, who's that lady there? And my parents said, well, that is our new queen because now we live in New Zealand and we no longer are following the Dutch ways, we will become like New Zealanders because after all, if you want to be Dutch, stay in Holland. Good place for it.

But in New Zealand, you become a New Zealander. Now I think that was widely accepted by migrants except we began to recognise that maybe we were being unfair to the traditional inhabitants of the country, Maoris in New Zealand, the Aboriginal people here. Why should they have to follow our culture? And we said, well, we can be pluralist here. But then we began to get waves of refugees with different cultures, and we all thought they would go back to their own homes.

So we said, well, you live the way you used to so that you can go back home. But then we discovered most of them never went back but still continued in their culture. And then when new migrants came, they said, well, if they can do it, so can we. And many people began to say, this is great. And I have to say, I think it's wonderful when you have many people from different cultures coming together, sharing their insights, sharing their, yeah, great achievements of their culture.

We had a feast in Geelong called Pako Fest where all the different ethnic groups had little stalls and you could sample their food. They would do some dancing, show their traditional dress, and that was wonderful. But there's another side to that, and that is when it comes to morality, every culture has a morality but it doesn't coincide. They all have, say, respect for the elderly, but the way you do it in one culture is very different from the way you do it in another culture. I think one example of this is what I discovered in Nigeria where I lived in a tribe called the Tiv people, and there were lots of fruit trees, and you could help yourself to the fruit as long as there wasn't a broken pot underneath the tree.

If there was a broken pot underneath the tree, it meant that tree belonged to somebody who had planted it, and so the fruit was theirs. And everybody observed it, no problem. Trouble was in the tribe next to us, they also have fruit trees, but they said if a fruit tree is planted in rows, then you know it belongs to somebody. But if they're just scattered everywhere among other trees, then you know they're wild and you help yourself. No problem.

They did it their way. On the other side, they said, no, the way they did it is as long as a fruit tree is not within about 50 metres of a house where you can see it from the house, then you can help yourself. But if it is close to the house, then it belongs to the homeowner. All of those worked, but what happens when you combine these three groups into a town together? Well, what happens is that the children say, what are the rules?

They observe no rules. They begin to pick the fruit before it's ripe, and nobody gets anything. You see, you've got to have a standard that is common to all. And unfortunately, with our multiculturalism, we have seen an erosion of moral values and of laws, and people started to take advantage of this situation by lobbying for what would have been considered deviant behaviour like the gay and lesbian lifestyle and so on. And all of this received a big boost more recently with the critical race theory, you know, that whole Black Lives Matter movement.

This movement we know as woke where you, well, live a totally different lifestyle that just pleases you and you don't worry about other people. And with the erosion of borders and refugees flooding in and with these refugees especially people who were, well, opportunists and criminals, we find that it has eroded laws in many societies. The third thing that Munby was talking about is that in the new society, we would be tolerant. Anything goes and must be tolerated without criticism. Now I'm all for being tolerant where people have different tastes and so, but of course, you cannot be tolerant where people start to live in a lifestyle that is against God's will.

And the unfortunate thing is that while people preach tolerance, we actually see they have become very intolerant when it comes to people who do have firm views about religion or morality, and freedom of speech is an erosion. I know for what I'm preaching today, if I preached it in Victoria, I could be put in jail for saying what I said. I hope it's not true here. But we have vilification laws, and you cannot speak out against wrongs that other people want to follow. Speaking out against sinful behaviour is called hate speech.

The fourth thing that Munby said is we want to eliminate the sacred. Now in the past, of course, society made its laws with reference to God. It was common to find the Ten Commandments in courthouses and so on recognising that that's where our morality comes from. But we have now said, no, it's not God, but society itself that sets the law. But I want to point out to you that here we go a step backwards to the way society used to be before Christianity came.

Because before Christianity came, the ruler who made the laws was above the laws, and he was free to break them all. The Magna Carta sought to change that, but didn't take hold for a long time where it said the king should also be under the laws that he makes, but of course that was not the case for a long time until Christianity really began to take hold. And what we see then in a society where people themselves set the laws or maybe a vocal minority pushes society into going a certain way, you can't complain if you think society is wrong because society itself determines justice. Society is now above the law, and so you cannot complain when you think society is wrong. You see, the old philosophers over in Greece already recognised you could not have morality until you recognised that there's some point outside of humanity.

They called it the summum bonum, the greatest good. Most people just call it God. Okay? But being philosophers, they didn't want to use the name God, but they recognised that there's something out there that should direct us and not ourselves because if you recognise that morality comes from God, then you have something to appeal to when things go wrong. The fifth thing that Munby pointed out is that he wanted the elimination of feelings and intuition from the public forum.

Christian feelings, he said, should be confined to your private life. Okay? If you want to worship, do that inside your house, not outside where people can see you, certainly not outside the place where abortions are committed or so because that would be criminal. It was argued that morality is to be based on facts and not on feelings and not on the Bible. Now Romans 2:14-15 tells us that even the unbeliever knows in his heart what is right.

But then you go to Romans 1, it says, although they know what is right, they choose to do what is wrong, and God gives them over to the evil of their hearts, and their conscience begins to disappear. Now these people who said we shouldn't be led by feelings, they are letting their feelings decide how they want to live. And so they've actually turned things around as in the other cases we looked at too, and they try to uphold their viewpoints by so-called scientific studies based on facts, on statistics. Now let me tell you that statistics are the worst thing to go by because they are so open to manipulation. Statistically, if you have your head in the oven and your feet in the freezer, then on average, you're good, aren't you?

You can't use statistics in that way. Did you know that 63.2% of statistics are made up on the spur of the moment, including this one. I have no idea what it is. But that's how people use statistics, and that's supposed to prove things. Now what we see then is that science has moved from being objective and neutral on matters like morality and so on, that it now begins to push for certain ways that we should behave.

It pushes evolutionism. It pushes things like climate change and so on. And I think what we have here is not science, but feelings and intuitions hiding under a mask of science. Lastly, he said, in this new world, there will be no ideal types or models. We used to have models that we followed.

Many people went to Sunday school, and there they learned about Daniel and David and Christ, and we used to sing songs like Dare to be a Daniel. That's how you want to live. Well, they didn't want any of these types. Notice that it wasn't just Christian, even authors like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, even Enid Blyton, some of you older people remember her, I think they still upheld a Christian morality through their heroes in the books. But since the sixties, we find very different role models in literature.

Our heroes today are flawed. The hero typically has no sexual, well, mores to guide him, just sleeps where he likes, but he's a great man because he does something good. Our heroes are vampires, homosexuals, cross-dressers, transgender people, satanists, anything but normal people. I think if you still want a good model today, you may have to go to a film like the Narnia series, but those films are hard to find. What about sports heroes?

Well, we do want our sports heroes to set an example to us. But notice that somebody like Israel Folau who spoke out against homosexuality or Margaret Court are not accepted as sports heroes anymore because they uphold a Christian morality. Now God warns us in our text today that we should not be conformed to that kind of living. We should be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Now I want to point out that this transformation to a Christian worldview is not something that happens overnight.

Okay? It's something you've got to work on. It's ongoing. The Greek word makes that clear to us. In fact, I think you all know the Greek word.

It's the word metamorphosis. Remember that word? It's a word we use for when some beetle makes a cocoon and comes out like a beautiful butterfly, and that takes time, doesn't it? It's close to what we as Christians call sanctification, but it's more than that. Sanctification talks about renewing our hearts, but when it talks about this metamorphosis, it also talks about renewing our minds, the way we think, the way we understand things, the way we, yeah.

We marry that to the way we behave so that in heart, soul, and mind, we may worship God. But here, we are speaking especially of our rationality, the way we reason, the way we evaluate, the way we judge things, the way we interact with God's world. In other words, it's talking here about adopting a Christian worldview. Now if you want to know what that entails, we do well to look at the end of chapter 11 of Romans that we read here where we have the doxology. It begins, oh, the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.

How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways. The first thing we have to do when we study God's word is to recognise God's greatness displayed in it all. The recognition of the power and wisdom and, yeah, ability of God to do things that are beyond our understanding. Even God knows the sparrow that falls off of the power line. He knows the number of hairs on our head.

And therefore, as Christians, we should have no problem with miracles, with creation, with the virgin birth, with the resurrection. A God who can do all this, He can do that too, surely. Secondly, we read there, for who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been His counselor? We have to recognise that God is beyond our understanding. He is not responsible to us.

The quotation here comes from Isaiah chapter 40. And there are some questions that we just won't be able to answer. Questions like, why is there sickness and war and poverty? Yes. We know it's because of sin, but why this person, not that one?

Why the person who we are so hopeful about suddenly falling, by the wayside, because of sickness? And why does God allow the wicked to prosper? Now similar questions were asked by Job. Remember when he was suffering, why me? Why does it have to happen?

And in the end, Job had to confess that God's ways were too wonderful for him to understand. Now the third thing we see here is that things come by God's grace. Or who has given a gift to Him that he might be repaid? Nobody is repaid in what they receive. What we get is purely by grace.

Now the world believes that if there is a God, that He owes it to us to save us, to look after us, and bring us into His glory. Now God doesn't owe us anything because we have rebelled against Him through Adam. By nature, we are children of wrath. And therefore, as Christians, we should realise that though we may talk about human rights, really, there are no such things as human rights. We only have the privileges that God gives us by His grace.

Everything good that we receive from God is not because we deserve it, but by grace. God's common grace whereby He makes the sun shine on sinners and saints alike, but for us also God's special grace by which He brings us into salvation and a relationship with His Son, Jesus Christ. And the doxology ends then, for from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen.

The recognition that everything is from, through, and to God is so important for our worldview. All we see around us is a blessing from God and that science and knowledge too are from God and that, therefore, He cannot be excluded from the education that our children receive. And we recognise that everything we have is through God, and here we think especially of Jesus Christ, that He is the only mediator by which we can receive God's grace. Other religions cannot help you there, whether it's Islam or Hinduism or just naturalism. They don't give any help.

It's only when we pray in Christ's name that we receive God's blessing. And lastly, everything we do must be done to God. Now there is a Latin phrase we used to use. I wonder if some of you recognise it, Coram Deo. Anybody heard it?

It used to be used in sermons way back. Now people don't know what it means. But what it means is that we must do everything in the recognition that God is looking at us. We have that expression when the cat's away, the mice will play. Well, let me assure you that that cat is never away.

Alright? God is always there to watch us. And so in everything we do, we must do so in the recognition that we want to do it in a way that's pleasing to God in our jobs, in our family lives, in our recreation, in our religion. It doesn't matter where. We do it to please God.

And that brings us to the last matter, that to do God's pleasing and perfect will, we must test what this is. And it says here that you may discern what is the will of God, that by testing you may discern. Now that word testing is an interesting word. It actually means to drop on a stone because back in the olden days, like today, there were many people who wanted to get rich in a dishonest way, and one thing was by counterfeiting currency. If you could take a bit of lead and give it a gold veneer, you could pass it on like, oh, this is worth a lot.

Of course, it isn't because it's only lead, but it feels heavy like gold. So what shopkeepers did, they had a stone on their bench, and they would drop this coin on the stone and listen to the sound it made. And if it was lead, you kind of heard plop. But if it was gold, you hear this ringing sound, and that showed you, yeah, this is a true coin. And that's how we must test everything to see if it has the ring of truth to it or whether it's just some forgery because there's so much around.

We find that in the areas of philosophy, of science, in other religions, God's truth has been replaced by some counterfeit thing that looks right on the outside, but when you test it, it doesn't ring true. And this is why we see that even in churches, people have accepted things like abortion and euthanasia and gender confusion because they haven't tested it. And we must test it, of course, on God's word. This is the rock by which we test it, and when we get an idea, we drop it here and see, it doesn't ring true. And if it doesn't, we say no, and we have nothing to do with it.

Only the Christian mind can do this kind of testing. And so don't be amazed if your non-Christian friends don't agree with you here because without God, their mind is veiled like the Jews we read about in 2 Corinthians 3 in our reading, and that's true not just for Jews, but all those without God in other religions, in cults, in naturalism, and this is explained in Ephesians 5:8-10 that once we were in darkness, but now in light, now we can see and know what pleases God. But those people who are still in darkness, they won't know it. They won't recognise it. And that's why it's so important to develop a Christian mind, and we must do so by reading good stuff that will help us, good books, by seeing the right type of films and videos and YouTubes, by having the right kind of friends who can encourage us in Christian living, by getting together as Christians discussing some of the issues that we face and try them together for the ring of truth to see if it really is Christian teaching founded on God's word.

That's also why it's so important that our children get a Christian education whether at home or at school and that they not be led astray. But it's important we don't just discern God's will, and here I want to point out that as reformed people, we always pride ourselves on our orthodoxy, don't we? Our right teaching. But it's just as important that we have the right practice. Orthopraxy must come with orthodoxy, that we do the right thing and not just talk about it.

It's so easy to complain about the erosion of family values, about the sexual immorality we see, about casinos being built or abortion clinics or, yeah, the things we see around us. But what have you actually done about it? Have you sent letters to politicians saying that's not what we want? Have you supported action groups like the Australian Christian Lobby, Focus on the Family, Binary with its two genders, Creation Science, and so on because we have to uphold God's will which is good and pleasing and perfect and not open to any human criticism. It cannot be improved upon because it is founded on the divine wisdom and knowledge of God.

Now I want to conclude with the observation that I think the key word here is that word metamorphosis, that we have to change, a lifetime thing. We find that same word in the reading in 2 Corinthians 3:18 where it's translated transformed. It says there, and we who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory are being transformed. We're being metamorphosed into His likeness with ever increasing glory which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. Here, it talks about being transformed into the likeness of Christ, developing a Christian mind by becoming one with Christ through His word, through daily Bible reading, by being joined to His body through baptism, and growing in our church fellowship, by partaking in His body and blood in the sacrament of communion.

These are the means that God has given us to grow: His word, baptism, and the table of the Lord. And He's given that to us because it's only in Christ that we can develop a Christian mind and live the life that is pleasing to God. Amen. Let us pray. Our Lord God and our Father, when we hear these words, we pray that You will give us a Christian mind.

We pray that You will give us understanding. Lord, help us to test what we hear on the news, in the media because there is so much counterfeit information, pure lies but dressed up with, yeah, an outer cover that makes it look like it is the right thing. Grant, Lord, that we may recognise that these things are not truth but Satan in disguise. We pray, Lord, that You will lead us to follow You into a Christian worldview where Christ reigns supreme. It's in His name we pray. Amen.