Welcome to a firm foundation presented by Princeton ministries with Dr. Ken Smith. This is Carol Smith, Ken’s wife. Please enjoy.

The apostle Paul states very clearly that all scripture is given by the breath of God. And that what we have in the Bible is nothing less than the breath, the life, the heartbeat of God. It’s very interesting when you look at other religions of the world, that there are only two of the major religions of the world that claim in any way that their religious writings are based upon the foundation of God. Inspired. Of course there’s Judaism, which says that the Old Testament is inspired by God. And apart from Judaism, the only other major religion of the world that claims any involvement of God in their sacred writings is the religion of the Muslims, Islam, where the Quran, the words of that book, are said to be the words of God spoken to Muhammad by means of angel.

And as we would look at the words of the Quran, we find that they are in many ways nothing less than a corruption of many parts of the Old Testament. When we look at the other religions of the world, we find, for example, in Buddhism, their sacred writings, the dharma, are the words of Gautama. And nowhere is there the claim that these are the words of God. Hinduism, with their Vidas and Bahaga Vidas, these writings, no one knows who the author is. There is no single source of writing. And nowhere in Hinduism is their claim that these writings are of a sacred nature. The same is true of Confucianism and the so called five great classics of Confucius.

And if we look very closely at those writings, we find that Confucius taught first that there should be no worship of God or of gods, and also that there is no life after death. And if we go to great philosophies of the world, then the claim of the involvement of God in the writing of those manuscripts and documents is even further removed. Communism with the communist manifesto, stands in defiance against the involvement of God. The humanist manifesto number one. The humanist manifesto number two. Declarations of many of the educators, of politicians of various minds of our own century even make it stark in their contrast that God is not to be involved in that form of philosophy.

And yet, when we come back to the christian scripture, we find the apostle Paul making this declaration that all scripture is God breathed from Genesis to revelation. What we have is the word of the living God, his very breath that has been given to us. And to look at the teachings of the Bible, it becomes inseparable from a christian worldview where there is lack of understanding of the Bible, then it has a tremendous consequence on the worldview of that Christian who would go with anemic understanding of God’s word. You remember, a worldview is the way that we look at life. And out of that understanding comes the values, the way that we then live our life. And yet, in our own time, it seems that the christian worldview seems to be having less and less effect on the culture in which we live. Now.

Why is that? I think there’s a very clear reason, and that is because people know less and less of the Bible, that there is less and less of a conversation that is based around the scripture. A number of studies have been done among american teenagers. For example, we find that 79% of all american teenagers believe that the Ten Commandments are applicable as moral standards for their life today, whether they’re christian or not. 79% of them believe that they have a place of moral standing. And yet, when those same 79% are then asked list for us the Ten Commandments, that only 35% are able to list five or more of those commandments. And what about churchgoers? George Gallup was greatly surprised to find that when he went to people who attended church, that only half of them were able to name the four gospels.

And what about churchgoers? When they were asked the question, how many apostles did Jesus Christ have? 20% of them drew a blank, not knowing twelve. Well, if that is the beginning point for some who are within the world of the church at large, then we would expect that the impact of biblical knowledge and biblical principles would be minimal. And yet, the declaration stands that whether we know the Bible and are able to apply its principles to our own worldview as Christians, or whether we are ignorant of the Bible and not able to apply it to situations in life, yet the truth still stands that the Bible, the scripture, is God breathed, and there it is before us. Now, as we look at our christian worldview, it’s important to see that there are limited sources of information that come to us that are revelational.

In fact, for example, as we look at creation, we can learn something about God from creation. The scripture tells us in Romans chapter one that we can learn that there is a godhead, that he has power, that he has a great force. But creation will not teach us that there is a savior whose name is Jesus Christ. It is also true that we can learn a great deal about God by looking internally into our own conscience. And the book of Romans chapter two tells us that God has placed within us a conscience that either accuses or else excuses our behavior. But that conscience by itself is not enough to lead us to a knowledge of the cross, of what Christ did there at Calvary. Both creation and the conscience are referred to as general revelation.

Everyone in the world has that source of information, and no one is saved because of that information. As a matter of fact, the wrath of God is kindled against man, as he would take the creation and corrupt it and turn itself on its head until man begins to worship himself rather than the creator. And what do we do with our conscience? Well, we disconnect it all too often. And that is why there was needed in the plan of God, the giving of special revelation, which is the scripture, that special revelation where we learn about the life, the ministry of Christ, the plan of God the Father, to save people from their sin.

When we consider our own christian worldview and the place of the Bible in the formation of that view, we find that there have been three important areas of information that we learn through the Bible that we cannot get from any other source, and that should have a great influence on the way that we look at the world. The first is that the Bible has brought to mankind a new view of God that was never there before, that through the words of the Lord, as we have them in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, we are presented a God who is a loving father. We are shown a God who is not capricious like the gods of Rome, not a God who is distant like the grecian gods.

But when the Christian learns about this God who created him, he is told to pray to God in this way, our Father who art in heaven. And so the message of the Bible that affects the worldview of man is that God is to be seen as a father, and all those who would love him and who have put their faith in him by trusting in grace in Christ. All of us look upon our Father who is in heaven and know that he has planned for us many good things and great blessings. Just this week, I met Jeff Collins, who is involved with christian response ministries. And he was showing me a book of pictures that he had recently taken india, where literally hundreds of people were lined up to go into a hindu temple.

And in that temple they would pray to any number of nameless gods. He said that there were some five to 7000 gods in this one temple alone. And they would go in and they would make their offerings, but they were making their offerings to gods who they did not know, who had no name. How much, in contrast that is to the Christian who praise our Father who art in heaven. But also, the Bible has given a worldview that has shaken man in giving man a new view of himself. That we see that were created in the image of God.

We are not the consequence of some great misfortune in nature or the consequence of one chance chain reaction after another, but instead that God has created us with worth and dignity and that every person who has been created is created with the image of God alive in their heart. And so Jesus said that we are of great value, of much worth. The third important concept of the Bible that has shattered other worldviews is the amazing picture that the scripture gives of salvation. That salvation is not dependent upon what we do. It is not dependent upon our good deeds, but rather it is dependent upon what Christ has done for us.

And that has had a tremendous consequence in the way christians who have a christian biblical worldview look at God, they look at themselves and they understand the salvation that has come to them through Jesus Christ. And it hardly matters where you open a book of church history to see what the opinions were that maintained the church. We find that throughout the ages, the Bible has always been seen as the word of God. We find in the early centuries, Clement simply saying the scriptures are the true words of the Holy Spirit. Tertullian. The scriptures are the writings of God. Augustine, who had a tremendous input into a pagan world and brought into that world a biblical worldview. His belief, not one of the authors of scripture erred in writing anything at all.

Martin Luther, who spearheaded the Reformation, said, no other teaching should be proclaimed in the church than the pure word of God. That is the holy scriptures. Yet we live in a time where if you were to say, my life, my worldview is based upon the Bible. There are a number of opposing viewpoints that people bring. For example, what about the Spanish Inquisition? Surely you can’t say that a biblical worldview is always going to produce good things. Just look at history in that inquisition. Well, if we look at the ruthless Spanish Inquisition closely, we find that the major thrust of the Inquisition was simply to ban the Bible. It was an act of the religion of the day that was suspicious and concerned that the Bible was being translated into the common language of the people.

And so it was religion, not the followers of the Bible, but religion, the church, that said, we don’t want the Bible translated. We don’t want people to read the Bible. And so the powers were sanctioned to be unleashed against those who would want to have the word of God translated. And so the bonfires were built. And many who we look at as the reformers of the church who are trying to take the scripture and present it to the community. Many of them were put to death. We find another opposition a few years ago that was very common, and that was, what about the Bible? This biblical worldview has caused a lot of problems. Look at Jonestown.

Wasn’t that an example of a group of people who had come together based upon the Bible and trying to create a community where the Bible would be their source of information? And we remember the horror of some thousand people who died by taking poison as Jim Jones led them in that tragedy. Well, those who escaped Jonestown, they have affirmed in various hearings first that the Bible was never studied in Jonestown. They say, those who escaped from Jim Jones, that the Bible was never preached in Jonestown. They say there was never a prayer meeting that occurred in Jonestown, but there was, for 24 hours a day, never ending a tape recording of Jim Jones. And he was reading. And what was he reading from? He was reading from the writings of Karl Marx.

And yet it seems common knowledge among our own culture that certainly Jim Jones is an example of a biblical worldview gone awry. And yet, by his own declaration on many occasions, he would take the Bible and condemn it and say that it has no place here. Unfortunately, Christians have become timid with the use of their Bible. Sometimes, if you notice that it is on the top of your pile of books, as you are going somewhere, Christians will conveniently place another book on top of it for fear that someone might notice that we’re reading a Bible. As though, wouldn’t that be terrible for them to know that I read this book, let alone to see that I have placed my worldview as a result of the principles of this book.

I believe that everything that we have that is good and decent can be traced to the biblical worldview, and either directly to those who taught and lived a biblical worldview or indirectly to a biblical worldview. Sir Francis Bacon said this. There never was found in any age of the world, either religion or law, that did so highly exalt the public good as the Bible. There was a time when Europe was a pagan world. It was dark. It was filled with superstition. And it was not until a man by the name of Patrick brought a biblical worldview, the Gospel of Christ, to Ireland. And those pagan Irish were turned to follow Christ.

It was not until a man by the name of Ulfhilus brought a christian worldview to a group of people who were considered to be so dangerous that it was fearful to go into the land of the Goths and the Visigoths. And yet Ulfilus went into Germany, and he brought the Gospel of Christ. A man by the name of Columbia brought the Bible to a place called Scotland. Boniface brought the gospel into Germany. Ansgar brought the gospel into Scandinavia. Augustine brought the gospel, the biblical worldview, to England. Queen Victoria was once asked, what is the secret of the greatness of England? And she said, england’s secret of greatness is the Bible.

I wonder how many of us consider what we have received as a result of previous generations who had a biblical worldview and wanted to see the teaching of the scripture influence a wide range of areas. Yet I think today few of us realize how important that biblical worldview has been to give us many of the things that we enjoy and we would normally think of without reference to their source in a biblical worldview. What about the whole area of respect for human life? Well, we find the roman philosopher Seneca admitting this of children. He said, monstrous offspring. We destroy children. If weak and unnaturally formed at birth, we drown them. That was the practice.

There was no known group who were opposed to that until Christians in the first century began to take these children who were being discarded, and they would bring them to their homes. And when there were too many children, they enlarged the space. And what did they call it? An orphanage. And the history of orphanages goes back to this early beginning of the placing of the christian worldview upon a dark and pagan world, until finally, by the year 315 AD, the emperor Constantine, who was a newly professing christian, decreed that parents must no longer kill their newborn offspring. What about the sick? What about hospitals? Where did this begin? From what seed came the concern for healing? Well, we find that there were signs throughout history of those who were concerned about medicine, but it was not until christians went to various towns. They gathered.

They gathered within those towns those who were sick and homeless. And soon, in every community where there were large numbers of christians, there began hospitals, places to care for the homeless the ill. A man by the name of Fabiola brought the biblical worldview of Christ, and he established the first hospital on record outside of Rome in the year 380 AD. Chrysostom, who is remembered as a great preacher of the gospel, was also responsible for the first hospitals in Constantinople. And the symbol of the medical profession is a staff, and entwined around the staff is a coiling snake. From where did that come? Why, it came from the Book of Exodus. It came from the ministry of Moses as held that staff high as the serpents bit the people and the medical profession, looking upon that, remembered, and they took that as their symbol.

And what about the first home for the blind? It was founded on the banks of the Euphrates river by a christian by the name of Thalacius. And what about the first home for the insane? It was found in Spain by christians. What about nurses? We find that it was christians in Italy who first established what they referred to as the brotherhood of nurses. And in modern times, it was Florence Nightingale, a christian woman, the lady with the lamp, who established what we know today as the modern nursing movement and jails. John Howard, the sheriff of Bedfordshire, England, visited a prison, and he was a Christian and he had responsibility, and he looked at what was happening and he prayed, o Lord, visit the prisoners and captives and manifest thy strength in my weakness.

And he launched what is referred to as the first reform in prisons. Today, Chuck Coulson, with his prison fellowship ministry, is looked at by christians as an amazing light. And yet throughout the centuries, the church has been concerned about the prisons and the prisoner. And someone like Chuck Coulson stands out as unique, and we are shocked at his success. A man by the name of Robert Rakes was concerned about the hordes of children in England. He was a Christian. The year 1780, he paid a woman by the name of Mrs. Meredith, a small stipend to teach children the Bible in her kitchen. So many children came that they had to enlarge the facility. And Rakes is known as the founder of the modern Sunday school movement.

William Booth looked at the poor and he went to try to feed and to house and to clothe a committed Christian. And thus began the Salvation army. It seems that wherever christians have gone, they have never ignored the call of Christ to go into the world and to show the compassion and the mercy of Jesus Christ. William Carey went to India with the Gospel of Christ, but he also was concerned about two things that were happening. One was that sick babies india were simply believed to bewitched, and they were left to. And so one of the things that William Carey tried to change india was that practice. Another common practice was that of Sati, where at the death of a husband, a wife would throw herself upon the fire as that husband was being buried, and she would give her life.

And Carrie looked at that. He said, this is not what God wants. And so he began to speak out against that practice. It was because of his voice that practice began to end india. And what about equal rights? We find here a list of who’s who in Christianity. We find the name Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe was the daughter of a minister, the sister of a minister. She was married to a minister. She was the mother of ministers. She wrote Uncle Tom’s cabin, which sold over 5 million copies, which was considered to be an unbelievable distribution of a book. It voiced her concern about slavery. She was a christian woman. And when she was asked about that book, she said, the Lord himself wrote the book. I was but an instrument of his hands.

Everywhere that the biblical worldview of Jesus Christ has gone, it has had an effect upon the darkness of that culture. Where there has been anemic, a weak understanding of that worldview, then the church has had little impact upon its culture. But where there has been a clear understanding of the principles of God’s word, it has caused christians to go out into the dark with the light of Christ. I believe that the history of our own age and of past times shows a group of people, christians, who have made a great impact upon the world. And the strength of that impact is because of the Bible, as they have become aware and understood those principles to go into the world. The world has seen untold thousands who have been drunkards in moral derelicts, whose lives were changed by people with a biblical worldview.

That the world has seen the sick and the aged and the feeble and the infirmed be helped by people who have a biblical worldview. The world has benefited from the untold charities, the movements, the hospitals, the nurseries, the schools that have been built by christians. To my knowledge, Madeline Murray O’Hara and all of her friends of that atheistic group have never built one institution to help. There are no hospitals that were built by the money of atheists. I know of no institution that was built by agnostics. And over the head of it would be the declaration that this was made by those who do not believe. And yet you go to hospitals, you go to those places of caring, and you find over and over again the reference at cornerstones, at the places of reminding us who built this.

We find there very often christians with a biblical worldview who took God’s word and went into the world and simply shared what he had done and made an impact. There is a biblical worldview that affects our world. And we as Christians have the privilege of taking that biblical worldview and bringing it into the darkness to the end, that Jesus Christ might be honored and that his church would take that light into the darkness, and that those who have dwelt in darkness would see a great light, and that we would remember that the scripture that we have. The Bible is God’s breath to us. Let us pray. Our God and our Father, we thank you for your word, the scriptures that have been given to us.

And Father, we thank you for the revelation that has been given to us about you, that as we would put our trust in you through Jesus Christ, that we would call you Father, and that we would also see that you have called us to minister to our neighbor. And Father, we thank you for the message of salvation that is so dear that it would take us who did live in darkness and that you have brought us into light. We pray that you would help us to take this light, this biblical worldview, and that we would bring it into the world to the end that Jesus Christ would be honored for. We ask it in his name. Amen.

Thank you for listening to a firm foundation presented by Princeton ministries. This programming is supported by you, the listener. You may go to our website, princetonministries.org, or send your donation to Princeton Ministries post office Box 2171, Princeton, New Jersey 8543. That’s Princeton Ministries post office Box 2171, Princeton, New Jersey 8543. The Lord bless you and Dr. Smith looks forward to hearing from you. We would like to thank Rones web development company for making this webcast possible. You can find their link at the bottom of our website, princetonministries.org