What is your worldview? What is your basic understanding about life that drives you forward and compels you to act in certain ways? What are your priorities? What do you really want to accomplish in this life? How do you spend your time and money? What really matters to you?
As a Follower of Christ, I struggle with these questions, although I ask them of myself often. These types of questions derive from the age old philosophical question “What is the meaning of life?” We have all asked this question at one time or another in some way in our lives. Few people, however, have answered this question for themselves in a helpful way.
How should we answer these types of questions in light of our commitments to God and the practice of our faith as believers in Jesus? Don’t fool yourselves. Our relationship with Christ should be the sole factor in how we answer these very deep and high level questions about life. If we base our answers to such philosophical questions on the foundation of Jesus and Biblical truth, we will have a much more solid launching point from which to go out and accomplish that which God has for us to accomplish in this life.
There is so much that can be said about this topic and so many different ways we could take this discussion, and I hope to dive deeper with each successive post, but here I will lift up one aspect of solid Biblical truth and our resulting worldview that can either take us one place or another. That aspect is eternity.
What do we believe about eternity? Is eternity guaranteed? Is eternity in heaven guaranteed? Is eternity in heaven a good thing…really? What will it be like? Who else will be there? Who will not be there? What is the relationship between the here and now and eternity? How does our time on Earth compare to eternity? How is eternity determined by our time here on Earth?
Once we have asked such questions of ourselves and wrestled with the answers, we might be in a better position to understand why it is that we are here on this planet. Then more importantly, how should we be using our time and treasure? What should we be working toward accomplishing? What really matters in this life?
There are two fundamental perspectives from which most people approach these types of questions and which result in opposite worldviews. Are we God-focused, or self-focused? Do we defer to God’s will for our lives as the general rule or do we instead demand to have it our way most of the time? This truthful and candid understanding of ourselves is critical to personal Spiritual growth and ultimately whether we will be successful in our pursuit of God.
There is a reason that Jesus himself told us that we must deny ourselves and take up our crosses to follow him. We cannot move forward and get to where we are going unless we first stop and figure out where we currently are. A follower of Christ, who desires to go where Christ is going, must check regularly to see if Jesus is still there in front of them, leading the way.
This is quite a complex and involved series of questions that would require a good bit of focused time to study through in order to come to a sensible conclusion. I have obviously not done that here, but I invite you, especially if you have never really thought through some of these questions, to get your Bible out and maybe some other texts, and spend some time in prayerful study with God to begin to resolve some of these questions in your own mind and heart.
Also, please continue to check out this blog as we work together to prepare ourselves and the world for the time when we get to meet Jesus face to face.
