163-The Battle of Worldviews Part 1

The spiritual condition of America, politics, culture, and current events, analyzed through the lens of scripture. Welcome to the Alex McFarland Show. William Webster's dictionary defines worldview as, quote, a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world, especially from a specific standpoint.

Hi, Alex McFarland here. We're going to talk about worldview because there is the, I'm sure you've heard of it, Christian worldview, or a biblically informed worldview, and that's really been the orientation of the Western world for 2,000 years, and certainly the orientation of America for 249 years. We're approaching the 250th birthday of America. America is a biblically formed nation, not so much in practice anymore, sadly, but still on paper. Our Declaration, Constitution, 27-point Bill of Rights, and 50 out of 50 state constitutions mention God and moral truth and God's laws that are the basis or the guardrails for any stable society. Now, a lot of people are unaware of this, and if you mention Christianity in the public square, very often you get pushback from people, even from Christians. I just got a letter from a former supporter just this week, and someone who has been with us for years and years said, take me off the mailing list, I'm not going to support you anymore, because you don't mix religion and politics.

And of course I'm reaching out to this person and thanking them for their prayers and support in years past, and to be sure, this ministry is about winning souls to Jesus Christ. But the idea that God's word and known moral truth can somehow be segregated, separated, insulated from daily life, and even a culture's direction, is just impossible. It would be like saying, I like to swim in the water, but I don't want to get wet.

Getting in water of necessity means getting wet. And waking up in the morning and just entering your day, and the choices we make, the actions in which we engage, and individuals and culture of necessity, there are moral and yes, spiritual implications for all the things that we do all day long. It is impossible to separate worldview and theological positions from day to day life. Certainly impossible to separate government, culture, business, economics, education, family, morality. It's impossible to extricate those from theological implication. It's like time, space, and matter.

Physicists say that time, space, and matter are inseparably woven together. And that's how it is with our worldview. It is impossible to govern without a worldview.

And I think it's not too hard to think about from China, communist Cuba, the USSR, North Korea. When a government is divorced from a Judeo-Christian moral foundation, it gets really dark really quickly. So what we're trying to do with our ministry is not only introduce millions of souls to Christ, and the Lord's allowing us to do that, but we're trying to help a Western world, and specifically America, that's got, frankly, a spiritual amnesia. We're trying to help them remember that the founders quoted the Bible 3,154 times in the colonial slash revolutionary era.

We're trying to help them understand that, yes, the secret of America, as Tocqueville said in the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous two-volume set Democracy in America, that the secret of America, he only understood it when he heard, quote, her pulpits aflame with righteousness. Even John Steinbeck said it in his writings and in his final work, Travels with Charlie, that the churches of America and the pulpits calling out sin and offering forgiveness to sinners, that is the DNA of America. It's very interesting that many former political scientists and secular writer understood what American Christians today seem to not know, that we were founded on Christian principles. And it is to our peril, to our grave danger, if we forcibly suppress the voice of Christianity in the public square. So a biblically informed perspective is really a framework or template or grid for identifying worldview concepts present in current events, government positions, literary works, movies.

Let me talk about education for just a moment. Romans 12, verse 2, speaks of establishing a Christian worldview. Romans 12, too, the Word of God says, Do not be conformed 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 is the perfect will of God, his good, pleasing, and perfect will. And our greatness, our success, our stability, our safety, our prosperity as a nation was inextricably tied to people who thought Christianly and lived Christianly. And I interviewed not long ago Thomas Hagedorn from Ohio. He wrote a wonderful book that I highly recommend called Founding Zealots. And it's the story of how Christians started American education. Now we know that American education in many a sector, government schools, I don't say public schools anymore, I say government schools, because that's what the K through 12 public school is. And yet the schools originally came out of the churches, the Ivy League, the beginnings of our schools, and I've spoken on the campus at Yale, and I attended classes at Harvard.

They were all started as Christian institutions, and now they are just forcibly Marxist, woke, secular. Let me tell you the story of a student, and I of course would not give their name, but at UNC Chapel Hill Medical School, spring of 25, there are now courses in our medical schools on gender affirming care. Now what that means, those going into nursing, PA school, medical school, not all, but in many schools, UNC Chapel Hill, one of them, students are forced to learn about transgenderism. And three students in a class, it was taught by a man masquerading as a female, they asked some questions, very innocuous, because males and females are different. Well, they were sent to the dean and reprimanded for bullying. And they were not bullying, they were simply asking, without going into detail, males and females' bodies are different. Why would we administer medical care that's appropriate for a female to a male that is not a female and does not have the organs of a female? And they were in medical school.

This is not some, you know, liberal arts group exercise. These are the hard sciences. And yet the hard sciences have been infected by LGBTQ trans theory. And imagine, I mean, would you want that sort of DEI doctor to be your physician? Students at a medical school being sent to the dean, reprimanded. And they said that the speaker giving the class on gender affirming care had pink hair, a big man bun, and the students, medical students, said, we are honored this person would even speak here.

You have no idea. You've insulted the speaker and you're on academic warning until further notice. In other words, till you get in line and just go along with the counter-reality narrative. We are in a battle of worldviews. Now when we come back, I'm going to talk more about some of the philosophical foundations that paved the way for our abandonment, not only of biblical truth, but just abandonment of reality itself. But how, as it's been so often throughout history, the only hope for finding our way back through the darkness to the light of truth are the Christians, really. The Judeo-Christian worldview. We must be the clarion call for truth in a world that is increasingly built on lies.

Stay tuned. The battle of worldviews continues after this. Fox News and CNN call Alex McFarland a religion and culture expert. Stay tuned for more of his teaching and commentary after this. Do you know what is one of the most important topics in American life?

The state of the family. Hi, Alex McFarland here. I want to invite you to our very, very special speaker series, Conversations That Matter, to be held in America's number one resort city, Myrtle Beach. Gary Chapman, the man that wrote the five love languages, one of the biggest selling Christian books of all time. Dr. Chapman will be speaking on relationships, family, marriage.

Oh my. It's June 15, 7 p.m. at the Greg Rolls Legacy Theater in North Myrtle Beach. Visit alexmcfarland.com for information and tickets.

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He's been called trusted, truthful, and timely. Welcome back to The Alex McFarland Show. Welcome back to the program.

Alex McFarland here. We're talking about worldview, and the Bible says so much about worldview. I read Romans 12, too, about renewing our mind.

In other words, restoring our mind. And the more we feed on scripture, and not only the objective holy writ that is the Bible, but just the good old common sense that the dear Lord wove into our psyche that you know. Children know right from wrong. Children can discern true and false.

Children are very logical, and adults can be. Sadly, many cultural and social dynamics cause us at a very young age to be somewhat choicey and judicious about how we do or do not acknowledge truth. But let me say one of the most vital things that we can ever do, and it is just imperative that we allow the Holy Spirit to lead us in this way, that we follow truth.

T-r-u-t-h, the Greek word is aletheia. And we've said many times the definition of truth is that which corresponds to reality. Okay? You may not know this, but if you're a Christian, even if you're a rational adult who may or may not be a Christian, if you believe truth is important, and you, to the best of your ability, you follow truth where truth is known, you have what is called a correspondence view of truth. See, there are different views of truth. Is truth relative? Do we all make our own truth?

No, that is false. Is truth just simply pragmatism? Well, truth is that which works. Well, that's not a good litmus test for truth. I mean, Adolf Hitler and the dictators have been very pragmatic. They have controlled people and committed genocide, and hey, if you're a dictator, that might work. That's pragmatism, but that's not the acid test for truth.

And on and on we could go. But really, truth, in a biblical sense, and this has really been observed throughout much of world history, the correspondence view of truth is the best view. Truth is that which corresponds to reality. In other words, it's the way things really are. And the wisest thing you could ever do is to commit yourself to the following of, the yielding and acknowledgement of, the obeying of truth. John 8 32, the Lord Jesus said, the truth will set you free. Now we've become a nation, just like medical schools teaching kids that men and women can change their gender.

That is just ontologically, objectively false. So I was interviewing an Islamic man who became a Christian, and he's an international diplomat from the Middle East. And he was saying that the Muslim world is laughing at us, just waiting for the time that America will be easily overtaken, because the rest of the world is plotting their own survival, and we're debating how not to offend men who put on women's dresses. And the rest of the world is laughing at us, just waiting for us.

Do we get invaded and overtaken that way, or do they just wait and watch while we implode on ourselves? So let's talk about how America fell away from truth. We were founded on, as Steinbeck said, the pulpits of New England, white hot on fire with truth and righteousness.

But we begin to fall away. And let me talk about how in the aftermath of World War II, the great prosperous Eisenhower era after World War II, philosophies that had been percolating in Europe for some time began to infect, first of all, American academia. And the worldview of our nation, ministers, educators, they believed that God was infinite and personal, triune, sovereign and good. And God created the universe out of nothing.

God ex nihilo, spoken into existence. And humans created in the image of God possess personality, intelligence, morality, creativity. But human beings, our purpose was to know the world around us and the God who made this world. We are to have a relationship with God himself, because God built into us the capacity to know him. The problem, the barrier, the wedge between us and God has been sin. But Jesus Christ and Christ alone is the solution for sin. And the purpose of life is to repent, be saved, to know God and to grow in God. And one day when we leave this world, as we all will, we will face God. But face God, as 1 John 2.28 says, unashamed, confident before him. Now, basically, an agnostic Darwinian evolutionary worldview began to infect America post World War II.

Now, it had been going on for 30, 40 years, but it really began to be mainstream, sadly. And our really six and a half decade long fall away from God began as naturalism, began to infect American education. And what is naturalism? Well, matter exists eternally and that's all there is.

God does not exist. That is a physicalist, naturalistic, secular worldview. And human beings are complex machines. I remember when I was in school, elementary school in the 70s, we would see film strips about the human machine and personality rather than soul and spirit and body.

Personality was assumed to be an interrelation of chemical and physical properties that we just do not understand. But death, and that's just part of the evolutionary equation. Death in a secular worldview is the extinction of personality and individuality. And so history is simply, it's not creation, fall, redemption, Messiah, church age, eventual return. That's really the biblical view of history.

And yes, there's a biblical worldview of history, but the secular, naturalistic, relativistic worldview of history, that history is simply a linear stream of events linked by cause and effect, but without any overarching purpose. And that is really the nihilistic worldview. Nihilo is the Latin word for nothing. And nihilism is just nothingness. So history, collective, my life, individual really means nothing.

So what do I do? Well, eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. What an empty, empty life. Perhaps you saw in the news, very sadly, the Palm Spring, California bombing of a fertility clinic. So the man that did the bombing, they're saying that he was an anti-natalist nihilist. Okay, anti-natalist.

He didn't like human life and humans being born. And then nihilist. Nihilism is just a philosophy of nothing. You know, what is life? Nothing.

What should I be passionate about? Nothing. It's just whatever. And so even law enforcement officials and journalists who are not, in my opinion, the most precise thinkers in the world anyway, but pundits, commentators are suddenly in the quest to understand a worldview.

But here's the point. If for decades you tell American children that come from broken homes, no parent, no unconditional love, no context, no sense of identity, you de facto tell generations of Americans there is no truth, there is no God, you evolve, there is no purpose. America where you live is bad. Our freedoms are not worth fighting for.

And if you have food on the table, it's because of necessity. Some stranger on the other side of the world has been robbed and oppressed. And there is no truth, but you're bad and there is no moral accountability, but you're guilty of things you can never rectify and life itself is burdensome and the environment is dying and humans are the problem. I mean, it is little wonder there aren't these homegrown domestic terrorists that blow up a fertility clinic or that open fire on a church congregation, because we have basically declared war on things that are good and true and beautiful.

C.S. Lewis wrote about this in a very famous chapter called Men Without Chess and he said, we decry valor and then we are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We decry honesty and then we are surprised that there are thieves. Look, we've banished God and moral truth and there are repercussions. When we come back, we'll talk about the way home on this edition of The Alex McFarland Show. Stay tuned.

Fox News and CNN call Alex McFarland a religion and culture expert. Stay tuned for more of his teaching and commentary after this. Would you invest a financial contribution to see young people saved, people give their lives to Christ, and people care about God and country? If you would please make a donation securely online, you can give at alexmcfarland.com or please mail a check to TNG, P.O.

Box 485, Pleasant Garden, North Carolina, 27313. Your gift will be faithfully handled, fruitfully used, and we thank you in Jesus' name. Do you have a desire to deepen your faith, better understand Christian apologetics, or to get a biblical perspective on current events? Well, I've tried to make it simple for you to do just that. On my website, alexmcfarland.com, there's a new section called Ask Alex Online.

It's simple, it's clean, and you can read my answers to common questions about God, faith, and the Bible. So visit the website alexmcfarland.com and look for the section that says Ask Alex Online. Welcome back to the program. Alex McFarland here. We're going to resume our look at the battle of world views, but I want to say a big thank you to those who monthly support our ministries of events, publishing, and broadcasting to evangelize the lost and equip the saved. As we hear this program, our speaker series is well underway.

We had Dinesh D'Souza. People came to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina from as far away as Indiana, and then we are just days away from Dr. Gary Chapman, the man that wrote the Five Love Languages, and he has, as I say, probably saved more marriages than any other Christian author that I know of. We've got people coming like Charlie Kirk and Lauren Green of Fox News. Then we've got seven summer youth camps, and there will probably be a total in addition to the seven youth camps that we help produce, and then the others that I speak at will be in front of more than 1,200 teenagers this summer. And every summer I give God the glory, we see hundreds and hundreds commit their life to Christ, and then thousands that understand the need to grow as a believer and to live out a biblical world view. And then, of course, we're at the Cove, the Billy Graham Training Center in western North Carolina, July 18-20, and then again July 28-August 1, and of course I'm on the road somewhere every weekend.

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Box 10231 Greensboro, North Carolina 27404. Just AMM, Alex McFarland Ministries, and your prayers and financial support are gratefully received, faithfully used, and bear great fruit in terms of the souls of people. But we've been talking about worldview.

And let me say this. Before the break, I was talking about the nihilistic worldview where kids commit suicide, the young man in Palm Springs bombed a fertility clinic. Nihilism is a philosophy of nothing.

There's just nothing. But there's an evil twin, and that's narcissism. In a nihilistic worldview, nothing matters and nothing is true. And there's nothing about me worth caring about. But in a narcissistic worldview, it's the pendulum swinging the other direction. Everything is about me. And one of the things, this is even present in the church, I meet young people and not so young people that are thoroughly narcissistic. And it's all about me.

And let me say this. In a biblical worldview, yes, God loves you. But you only find your real self and the true you when you subordinate your wants, your will, your way to Jesus. In a narcissistic worldview, like Narcissus, he saw his reflection in a pool of water and he was so entranced with his own perceived beauty that he fell in and drowned. And we're living in a world of Narcissuses. Now, and certainly if there's any context where narcissism has no place whatsoever, it's in the Christian context. Because we are to have the mindset like John the Baptist, who gave the glory to Jesus. He must increase.

I must decrease. Had a Christian family call me in a panic. And the young adult daughter, who is a Christian allegedly, but very selfish, very prideful, very arrogant, very domineering. The dad calls me in a panic.

And he says, please pray. She's starving herself to death and she won't eat. She's forgotten how to eat. And I know this family, I've counseled this family. And I know the young adult daughter is very narcissistic.

Everything is about her. And so I was talking to this family and the girl repeatedly would say, well, my body doesn't work like everybody else's. See, in a narcissistic worldview, we like to think we're different.

Oh, we're different. I don't learn like other people learn. I don't read like other people read.

I don't think. I don't have the attention span like other people have. My body doesn't process food like everybody. No, you're not unique. You're not different. You're not special.

You're more than special. You're valuable to God. But in a narcissistic worldview, which is where so many millions are, it's either the pendulum swing of nihilism and life is worth nothing or narcissism.

No, every single thing is about me. Both of those are ditches that the devil wants people to fall into. Now as is so often the case in life, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The balanced view. Okay, God made me. God loves me. I've got a problem called sin. I'm guilty before a holy God. But I'm valuable to God, so much so that He sent His one and only Son. And Jesus not only frees us from the penalty of sin, Jesus sets us free from that most devious and destructive of malicious persons. Jesus saves me from myself. If nihilism is a worldview of emptiness and nothingness, narcissism certainly is hell on earth.

Because the most unhappy people are the narcissists and the people absolutely absorbed with themselves cannot see anything beyond themselves, their own situation, their own worldview, their own obsessions with themselves. Now in Ephesians 2, 1 and 2, we're going to have to continue this more, and I'm going to talk about the philosophers of Europe that gave us this modern... Huxley called it a brave new world. It's a bound old lie where we are. But Ephesians 2, 1 and 2, the Bible says, as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world. And the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in the sons of those who are disobedient. You see, in Jesus Christ, we're no longer dead in sin but we're made alive and forgiven. And we did follow the ways of this world and the God of this world, Satan, but now we're living by the eternal truths of heaven and we're led by the Holy Spirit and the King who is coming soon, Jesus.

And there is a spirit at work in the children of disobedience, but we are the possession of our Savior who are made righteous in Christ and that we are living in this world but with the next world in view. I hope you understand that we're in a battle of world views and beliefs begat behavior and behavior begats character, lifestyle and destiny. Let's live for truth and help others find truth as well.

Alex McFarland saying stay bold, stand strong and we'll continue more about the battle of world views next time. May God bless you and use you every day. Alex McFarland Ministries are made possible through the prayers and financial support of partners like you. For over 20 years this ministry has been bringing individuals into a personal relationship with Christ and has been equipping people to stand strong for truth. Learn more and donate securely online at alexmcfarland.com. You may also reach us by calling 1-877-YES-GOD and the number 1. That's 1-877-YES-GOD1. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you again on the next edition of the Alex McFarland Show.