What's Your Worldview?
“The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.”—Proverbs 20:5 (ESV)
For the past few posts, we’ve been focusing on the importance of knowing God’s Word, not as little snippets of truth but as a whole Story. We are living in that Story today. The struggles we deal with are the smaller scenes within Act 5, moving us toward Act 6’s final conclusion.
Not only is this true for us, but it is also true for others we meet as well. They also are moving through Act 5 in their own scenes. Their lives likewise are part of God’s Story too. And each time we interact with another person, we have the opportunity to help them—through our encouragement and/or our counsel—to also move towards God and his sovereign plans.
This requires, as Mike Emlet points out, we learn how to read a second “book”—the person before us. Before we attempt to provide any counsel, we need to “draw out” the purposes of another person’s heart. There are several skills Emlet describes in chapter 5 of CrossTalk.
Take a History
As a medical doctor, Emlet knew the importance of asking good questions—not just current symptoms but also areas such as past medical history, family and social history, medications, and how the other body systems are responding. A physical exam and perhaps several diagnostic tests complete the picture.
This is true also of spiritual or emotional issues. We wouldn’t assume that someone with a headache has a brain tumor, yet we often hear the word “anger” or “depressed” and then jump in with a solution. Without asking questions, it is easy to mismatch the heart of the issue and our counsel. Though the counsel is true, it is not fitting for the symptoms.
Take the time to ask questions before you jump in. If you’re wondering what some good questions are, check out this post.
Discern Their Worldview
After you ask questions and listen carefully to their responses, you can start beginning to gain a better picture of their worldview, the way they see life. All of us look at life through a particular set of lenses.
Generally, we see life with God or without God. But even if we are believers, we can interpret the world differently depending on what we understand about God, ourselves, and how the world works. If our knowledge of these things through Scripture is weak, even as believers, we will still struggle to make sense of life.
To discern our worldview, Brian Walsh and J. Richard Middleton propose four key questions in their book, The Transforming Vision:
Who am I? What is the nature, task, and purpose of human beings?
Where am I? What is the nature of the world and universe I live in?
What’s wrong? What is the basic problem/obstacle that keeps me from attaining fulfillment? This boils down to how we understand evil.
What’s the remedy? How is it possible to overcome this hindrance to my fulfillment? More precisely, where do I find my salvation?
As you ask questions, use their responses to help you identify their worldview, listening for the clues we need to help us understand how they would answer these questions.
Look for Patterns
After asking structured questions, physically examining a patient and evaluating test results, a skilled doctor has much more information to work with. Utilizing the training they’ve received, they are able to look at the details and consider possible diagnoses that match the patterns that emerge. From there, a treatment plan can be proposed.
Likewise, taking what we have learned, we can begin to notice patterns as well. We begin to see how how actions spring from thoughts or emotions are linked to false beliefs. This is not always easy but God’s Spirit helps us to make these connections.
While there may be a lot of details surrounding their circumstances, our goal is to not too wrapped up with individual details. Instead, we want to recognize the patterns that these details suggest. Learning how to match the details to the Bible’s counsel is the skill we’ll be focusing on in the next post, but that is what we seek to do.
Conclusion
The responses we receive to our questions help us to discern various points of how they see life. Together, these help us “read” a person and understand the angle by which they see their problem and how to solve it. It is either in line with God’s solution in Scripture or it isn’t.
This is why asking good questions is so important as a counselor. It is also why it is so important we know God’s Word well too. We cannot see where it goes off track otherwise.
If we want to truly be a help to others, we need to “read people” just like we read Scripture. Just as we don’t want to chop the Bible up into little bits, we don’t want to just hear the snippets of people’s lives and draw conclusions on what they need to do.
Learn to “read” the person before by slowing down, asking questions to unearth clues, and then prayerfully ask the Lord to help you discern the patterns. This type of “reading” is vital if we wish to truly be of help.
Action
Think about the situation you identified in this earlier post (Post 2) and write out your honest answers to each of the four questions in light of it: where are you, who are you, what's wrong, and what's the remedy? Are any of your answers subtly different from what Scripture actually says? If you’re walking with a friend, based on what you know of their situation, how might they respond to these questions?
