worldview

Yesterday I finished up Nancy Pearcey’s new book Saving Leonardo. Nancy doesn’t write a lot of books, but when she does, they are worth reading. She’s a unique thinker and one who puts into words what for so many of us are just ideas flitting around the edges of our minds. This new book is just like that.

When I finished it up I began to write a review but found that I was having trouble distilling my thoughts. I did something I try not to do, at least until I’ve finished writing my own review—I went looking for what others are saying about it. As I did so, I came across a really good review written by David Steele (who blogs at veritas et lux). David was kind enough to give me permission to simply re-post his review. It nicely captures my own thoughts on Saving Leonardo!

*****

I met Bob Bevington a couple of years ago. He and I both somehow ended up at a youth conference and we began to chat while walking from the venue to a nearby hotel; we were the only adults around so we must have naturally gravitated toward one another. We were surprised to learn that we were both under contract to write a book—I was writing The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment while he was working with Jerry Bridges on a book they were to co-author. Since that time he and Bridges have written two books together, the second of which is The Bookends of the Christian Life.

This book relies upon a metaphor that extends from cover-to-cover: the metaphor of bookends. I think we have all experienced the difficulty of putting books on a bookshelf without using any bookends. You know what happens. The books on the end inevitably tip over and once they fall, the ones beside them fall too. Soon the whole line of books has tipped over and several of them may have crashed to the floor. The solution, of course, is to install a couple of sturdy bookends on either side of the shelf. This will support the whole row, keeping them right where they are supposed to be.

“Think of your life right now as a long bookshelf,” say Bridges and Bevington. “The books on it represent all the things you do—both spiritual and temporal. There’s a spiritual book for each activity of your Christian growth and service, perhaps with titles such as Church Attendance, Bible Study, Daily Quiet Time, Sharing the Gospel or Serving Others. The temporal books might include Job Performance, Educational Pursuits, Recreation and Leisure, Grocery Shopping, Driving the Car, Doing the Laundry, Mowing the Grass and Paying the Bills, to name a few. Our temporal books are intermingled with spiritual books on our bookshelf, since all our activities are to be informed and directed by the spiritual dimension. … Without adequate bookends, even if we succeed in getting all our books to remain upright, their stability is precarious at best.”

Through the bookend metaphor, the authors use this book to teach about God’s solution. “When we become united to Christ by faith, God places a set of bookends on the bookshelf of our lives. One bookend is the righteousness of Christ; the other is the power of the Holy Spirit. Though they’re provided by God, it’s our responsibility to lean our books on them, relying on them to support, stabilize, and secure all our books—everything we do.”

The authors dedicate half of this book to each of the two bookends. In the first half they look at the righteousness of Christ as a means of assurance in our day-to-day relationship with God. It is only because of the righteousness of Christ that God can see us as righteous. As our sin was transferred to Christ on the cross, his righteousness was credited to us. And so we live now in the present reality of being justified before the Father. In the second half they turn to the power of the Holy Spirit to fight with us and for us as we battle against indwelling sin. Here we see both the Spirit’s monergistic work in giving us new life, in giving the gifts of repentance and faith, but we also see the necessity of synergistic work where we cooperate with the Spirit in putting sin to death (though obviously this is a qualified, uneven synergism much in the same way my six year-old daughter may help me shovel the driveway).

In each case Bridges and Bevington look to gospel enemies that can cause our books to begin to tip over and in both cases they offer a series of focal points that will help the reader keep his life and his faith focused on that particular bookend. As he progresses, the reader will find answers to such questions as: How can I overcome persistent guilt? How can I deal with the pressure to measure up? Where can I find the motivation it takes to grow? How can I live the Christian life with both my head and my heart? How can I be sure God loves me? How can I change in an authentic and lasting way?

In The Bookends of the Christian Life Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington look at the Christian life through a wide-angle lens, examining the framework that supports, stabilizes and secures the believer’s life in Christ. They teach elements of a distinctly biblical worldview, leaning upon the righteousness of Christ on one hand and upon the power of the Holy Spirit on the other. This is a deeply pastoral book that constantly encourages the reader to look to Christ and to depend on the Holy Spirit. I have read it twice and have benefited from it both times. A wise and powerful book, it is one I heartily recommend.

Buy it at Monergism Books

So Ray Boltz, a once-prominent figure in the world of Christian Contemporary Music, is gay. He came out to his family—he is the father of four grown children—in December of 2004 but only recently has the news trickled beyond that inner circle. Just a few days ago his story was featured in an article in the Washington Blade, “the Gay and Lesbian News Source of Record” in D.C. and it provides a rough time line of the recent years of his life. In 2004 he retired from singing and touring, in 2005 he separated from his wife and moved to Ft. Lauderdale to start a new life, and this year his divorce was finalized. He is now living what he describes as a “normal gay life.”

The news was not of too much interest to me on a personal level—I don’t know Boltz, do not own any of his albums and am not familiar with even his most popular songs (which seem to be “Thank You,” “Watch the Lamb,” “The Anchor Holds” and “I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb.”). I know a little bit about him because of my many years of listening to Christian music but to me he is little more than just another face in a crowd. So it’s not like this news involves a man whose ministry I’ve known and loved. What fascinates me about this story is its worldview implications.

There are essentially two ways that humans can understand the world. The first way is the way we all understand the world until the Holy Spirit intervenes in our lives and gives us new eyes to see. This worldview is I-centered. I am the center of my own universe and the arbiter of all truth. I may not vocalize things in just this way and may not even think them quite like this, but it is ultimately what I believe. I believe that I am capable of looking at the world and understanding the way it works—who God is, who I am, the relationship between us, and so on.

The other way of seeing the world is God-centered. Here I acknowledge God as the center of all that exists and the arbiter of all truth. Everything that is true and everything that is knowable has its source in Him. Thus I can only interpret the world properly by rightly acknowledging God. This is, obviously, the biblical worldview. It is God who tells me who He is, God who tells me who I am and God who declares the terms of the relationship between us.

The first worldview allows me to acknowledge as truth only what I want to believe about myself; the second worldview requires me to acknowledge as truth what God says about me. The first worldview has to have as its premise that I am ultimately good while the second has as its premise that God is ultimately good. In the first view I sin against myself while in the second I sin against God. The contrasts could hardly be more pronounced.

Reading this story in the Blade provided an interesting perspective on worldview. Here is what Boltz said about the freedom he has found in declaring and accepting his homosexuality. “I didn’t have to be who I was in the past. I didn’t have to fit somebody else’s viewpoint of what they thought I was. I could just be myself and I met a lot of wonderful people.” He said also, “If this is the way God made me, then this is the way I’m going to live. It’s not like God made me this way and he’ll send me to hell if I am who he created me to be … I really feel closer to God because I no longer hate myself.”

He states with startling clarity that he rejects God’s assessment of who he is. No longer did He need to fit his worldview into anyone else’s—he was free to accept his own self-assessment. God’s assessment is that Boltz, like me, is a sinful man and one who is tempted and tormented by sin. He is a man who is corrupted by sin and so deeply corrupted that without God’s intervention he will more and more resemble the sin that inhabits him. And one sin that Boltz long wrestled with is the sin of homosexuality. This may well be a kind of besetting sin—a sin that has plagued him since his youth and one that has never lessened its pull on him. Each of us has sins we are more prone to than others and I know there are many Christians who fight lifelong struggles with sexual orientation. But I also know that God can give grace to overcome even that sin. A God-centered worldview would tell Boltz that, though he may be somehow inclined to homosexuality, this tendency is a result of sin and it is a tendency that God utterly rejects. A God-centered worldview would tell him that God assesses his sin and calls him to repentance. God does not condone his homosexuality any more than God condones any other sin.

Sadly, Boltz has an I-centered worldview. He declares without apology that he is gay and, digging a knife into God’s back, says that it is God who has made him this way. He rejects God’s assessment and instead assesses himself by his own standards and declares that he is good. He piles sin upon sin, accepting his homosexuality as good, rejecting God’s declaration that it is sin, divorcing his wife, living that homosexual lifestyle.

The lesson to me in all of this is the importance—the life and death importance—of seeing the world not through my eyes but through God’s. God has given us the Bible which allows us, like a pair of glasses that somehow illumines blind eyes, to see the world as He sees it. Through the Bible I find that I am not good but am instead utterly depraved. Incredibly and humiliatingly, I find that I have no ability to properly see and understand reality without Him. I find my desperate dependence upon Him to comprehend what may seem so plain and so obvious. I find that I need Him to interpret reality for me because, without Him, I’ll get it wrong every time. I need God to teach me to see myself.

Instructing a Child’s Heart has been a long time coming. It was thirteen years ago that its predecessor, Shepherding a Child’s Heart, was published. It was thirteen years ago that Tedd Tripp published his last book. It was no lost on me that many of the book’s lessons and anecdotes now focus on the author’s grandchildren. Thirteen years is a long time by any measure!

Instructing a Child’s Heart is a book that focuses on “formative instruction,” a term that begs further definition. Tripp describes it most simply as “teaching that ‘forms’ our children.” It is teaching that “enables them to root life in God’s revelation in the Bible. It provides a culture for our children, a culture that is distinctly Christian. It shows our children the glory and dignity of mankind as God’s image bearers. It provides a way of interpreting life through the redemptive story of God, who reconciles people to himself.” Formative instruction is instruction that comes before problems arise and in that way is different from corrective discipline which follows problems. We form our children by interpreting life for them and responding to its challenges in biblical ways. We form them through the daily discipline of family worship and through spending time deliberately together, but also through reacting properly to the situations life brings unexpectedly. The goal of this formative instruction is, in accordance with Deuteronomy 6, “so that we and our children and our grandchildren may fair the Lord and walk in his ways, enjoying a long life.” We help our children construct a worldview that allows them to properly see God for who he is and to properly see them as His creation.

The book falls into three sections. In the first Tripp introduces the reader to formative instruction, looking at the concept through a wide lens. In the second section he zeros in on the more specific topics that form the true substance of formative instruction. And in the third section he focuses on applying formative instruction in very practical ways.

It is the second section that is the heart of the book. Here, over the course of eight chapters, Tripp describes several essential building blocks of a biblical worldview. He dedicates attention to the heart, the principle of sowing and reaping, God’s plan for authority, the glory of God, wisdom and foolishness, how we are complete in Christ, and the importance of the church. Each of these receives a chapter, or close to a chapter, in which he describes the principle and how it is foundational to building a biblical worldview. Having done that, he turns his attention to four of these, giving practical pointers on how to get from behavior to the heart, how to apply the sowing and reaping principle of Scripture to corrective discipline, communication with children and the centrality of the gospel.

The strength of this book, like Shepherding a Child’s Heart before it, and the message I need to hear again and again, is Tripp’s insistence, his constant exhortation, that parents must look beyond behavior and look primarily to the heart. It is far too simple to create little legalists, children who adhere to the letter of law, all the while defying the spirit of the law and the One who gives us laws in the first place. It is more difficult but far more profitable to look to the heart for it is the heart that is the wellspring of all behavior. The heart is the heart of all effective instruction. But where the focus of Shepherding was turning the emphasis from outward obedience to matters of the heart, the focus of Instructing is on building into a child’s heart a worldview that is biblical enough and sufficiently robust to stand up to their questioning and to the culture’s skepticism. The task of parenting, after all, involves showing our children “the vital connection between the powerful story of redemption in the Scriptures and their daily experience. The instruction we give them will only make sense in the context of the story of the Scriptures that tells them who they are and about the God who made them and offers them redemption.”

Like most books on parenting, this one is filled with moments that are at the same time obvious and profound. You will encounter statements that are so obvious you wonder if they really needed to be said, only to realize that you could have used that bit of wisdom only moments ago. While muttering, “Well, duh!” you’ll also feel twinges of shame and regret. This is a book that is immediately applicable both to parents and to their children. It is a book that turns to the Bible to provide God’s wisdom on how we can be effective parents. “Your greatest need,” says Tripp, “is to understand deep truths from the Bible. Solid parenting skills are built on solid truth.”

This is not a book that tells you how to control or manipulate your children so that they will spend their lives living in an irrational fear of a domineering parent or a hostile deity. Instead, it is a book that teaches parents to gently but consistently build into children a worldview that begins with the heart and that focuses on God and on His glory. “We should impress truth of the hearts of our children, not to control or manage them, but to point them to the greatest joy and happiness that they can experience—delighting in God and the goodness of his ways.”

We’ve waited a long time for the follow-up to Shepherding a Child’s Heart. I believe most parents will feel the wait has been well worth it.

King for a Week is an honor I bestow on blogs that I feel are making a valuable contribution to my faith and the faith of other believers…or sometimes just because I really like them. It is a way of introducing my readers to blogs that they may also find interesting and edifying. Every two weeks (or so. That is theoretical. Practically, I don’t get around to updating as often as I should and we’ve been know to have kings for a month or two!) I select a blog, link to it from my site, and add that site’s most recent headlines to my right sidebar. While this is really not much, I do feel that it allows me to encourage and support other bloggers while making the readers of this blog aware of other good sites.

This week’s King for a Week is Stand to Reason, a blog associated with (obviously) Stand to Reason. This organization was founded by Greg Koukl and Melinda Penner in 1993 to “equip Christian ambassadors with knowledge, wisdom, and character.” It “trains Christians to think more clearly about their faith and to make an even-handed, incisive, yet gracious defense for classical Christianity and classical Christian values in the public square.” The blog, which was started earlier this year, furthers this goal with regular updates dealing with a variety of subjects, most of which have to do with apologetics and worldview. Though the site tends to be pretty American-centric (perhaps a bit too much for this Canadian’s liking!) it is still a good source of information and of thought-provoking content. It’s a good one to add to your RSS reader or to your list of daily stops.

In the coming days (and/or weeks) you will be able to see the most recent headlines from this blog in the sidebar of my site. I hope you will make your way over to look around.