Christian Philosophy: Everyone Has a Philosophy. It's The Lens Through Which They View The World and Make Decisions. (2 page)

Satan comes against us through philosophy and vain deceit, which means he uses lies and deception. Sin wouldn’t have entered the world if Adam and Eve had recognized Satan was using the serpent to deceive them.

Paul goes on to say that we can be spoiled by “the traditions of men.” Traditions are tied in with our philosophy; they are ways of thinking and behavior that are handed down from generation to generation. It is the handing down of opinions, doctrines, practices, rites, and customs from one generation to another.
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Obviously, secular traditions present an ungodly perspective, and are therefore an obvious threat to seduce Christians, but religious traditions can also keep us from experiencing God’s best. Not every religious opinion, doctrine, and custom that works its way into the church comes from God—some of them come from people who are mistaken, or worse, self-seeking and deceitful.

During one debate with the Pharisees, Jesus told them they were, “Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye” (Mark 7:13). The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day. They were trying to serve God and by all outward appearances they were, yet they made their traditions—all of the customs and opinions they had added to the Word of God—equal to God’s Word. Jesus said that by elevating their traditions above the Word of God, they neutralized the positive power of His Word.

The world, and even the church, is full of philosophies, vain deceit, and traditions of men that will carry you away captive if you aren’t careful. They will rob you of the blessings that Jesus purchased with His atonement. One of my goals is to expose those philosophies for what they are: deception from the enemy. Religious and secular traditions have corrupted our way of thinking, and everything in the Christian life revolves around the way you think. Proverbs 23:7 reminds us,

For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he…

This verse stresses the important of what you think at the heart level—not at surface level. Surface level knowledge is like the information you acquire when you go to school and learn stuff just to pass a test, but it never impacts you in a significant way. You might not even really believe what you learned. Back in school, we stored that information in our short-term memory so that we could pass a test, but there’s no way we could still pass those tests today. It was information we never meditated on or used, and it didn’t go down to the heart level.

Heart-level knowledge is different. Scripture says that as you think in your heart, that’s the way you are. In other words, your life is going in the direction of your dominant thoughts, or your dominant philosophy. This is not referring to individual thoughts, but rather the pattern or model you have combined your opinions and life experiences into, which then shapes how you view the world. This is how your philosophy ends up determining your response to life and how you will act.

I knew a woman who came out of an abusive marriage and the experience left her with a chip on her shoulder. She had unresolved hurts and pains that shaped her way of thinking. Her basic philosophy was that all men were out to get her. No doubt, at one time that attitude helped her avoid abuse from her ex-husband, but her outlook continued to influence her even after she got out of the abusive relationship. She didn’t trust men, and she was always expecting men to do bad things, so she was sensitive to the slightest provocations. Her philosophy prevented her from having any sort of meaningful relationship with other men, which meant she couldn’t keep a job. She had a wrong way of thinking that was robbing her of joy and peace in life. People might not use the term “philosophy” to describe her outlook, but that’s exactly what it was.

“Beware!” Paul says, because if you let circumstances in this life affect you and create a perspective in you that is different from God’s outlook, then your wrong perspective is going to rob you of happiness and success. Once you establish a philosophy that causes you to prejudge situations, the same circumstances that caused you to come up with the philosophy in the first place are going to follow you wherever you go. You will filter everything that happens in your life through your philosophy, and it will make you prejudiced to see, hear, and find what you are looking for. You’ll form opinions, make decisions, and base your actions on the things that are happening around you, but if your philosophy is incorrect, then your conclusions are going to be wrong. This is exactly what we see happening with so many people today.

A lot of people wish they could be different. They wish they could maintain healthy relationships with other people, for instance, but they just can’t seem to get along with others. It doesn’t matter how well a relationship starts off, something inside tells them it’s going to fall apart. Relationships have always fallen apart for them, so they have come to expect it. In order to get different results, they need to change the way they think. As long as you maintain a way of thinking in your heart, then your philosophy will dictate the results you see. This is exactly what Scripture means when it says: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

Your life is going in the direction of your dominant thoughts. If you can’t maintain relationships, then I guarantee you have a wrong philosophy that is causing those results. If you can’t succeed in business, even when you have ability and you know you should be doing better, it’s because you have a wrong philosophy that is defeating you. Philosophies become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you want to change the results in your life, you have to start by changing the way you think. Philosophy is relevant to our daily lives, and establishing a Christian philosophy, or a godly way of thinking, will have tremendous benefit to you. It could literally revolutionize your life.

Many people know separate truths from God’s Word, but they don’t combine the truths into a way of thinking that impacts their overall outlook on life; that’s why I joke that most people don’t let the Bible get in the way of what they believe. They are just tagging on truth after truth to some sort of hodgepodge system of thought, but there is no organization, no intentional effort to create a godly worldview. In other words, many believers do not have a solid Christian philosophy—they have a jumble of unorganized thoughts.

Simply tacking on more and more separate truths to a wrong philosophy isn’t going to create a godly worldview. This is why some people can go to church for decades and memorize half of the Bible but never see any real fruit in their lives. You have to allow God’s Word to get down to the foundation of your philosophy, and to do that you must make a deliberate effort to change the way you think. You have to renew your mind (Romans 12:1-2).

A while back, we had a woman at Charis Bible College who was in her late sixties and had been raised by parents who struggled through the Great Depression. After living through the Depression, her parents carried the fear that there might be another total economic collapse, and they instilled the same philosophy in their daughter. When the woman came to our Bible college she had a lot of money, but she still had a poverty mentality. She would squeeze every nickel and get every last drop of product out of every jar in the house. It’s good to be economical, but you can also get out of balance by being too frugal. A poverty mentality like that comes from fear, and it will rob you of peace in your life.

The woman came to me one day and said, “I’ve heard all of your teachings on prosperity, and intellectually I understand what you’re saying. I see that I should be more generous and I shouldn’t be afraid, but this is the way I was raised.” What she was saying was that she knew her philosophy was wrong, but she felt like she couldn’t change the way she looked at life.

Changing the way you think is hard, and it isn’t necessarily going to change simply because you are presented with the truth. Individual truths are not going to change your philosophy unless you make the effort to embrace those truths. The Word says, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32), but it’s only the truth you
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that sets you free. To be set free, you have to have more than a mere mental awareness of truth, you need a heart-level understanding.

Recently, I was talking to some friends who told me they know people who have studied every one of my teachings, and they study the Word, but they still aren’t operating in faith. They can quote all of the things I say about trusting God, but they don’t trust God. The truths they have learned haven’t changed their philosophy, and I think that’s tragic. You have to get beyond merely possessing individual pieces of information. You need more than facts to be set free. You have to combine those facts, connect the dots, and pull them all together so that they change the way you look at life.

We have a tendency to think that our problems are our problem, but they aren’t. Often, our problems are just symptoms of deeper heart issues. We’re looking for physical or natural reasons to explain why our life is the way it is, but the condition of our lives is a result of the way we think—not what is going on around us. Outside forces have an impact on us for sure, but they aren’t the determining factor in our reality. The apostle Paul said, “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). The way we respond to what happens to us determines the condition of our lives, and the way we respond is a direct result of our philosophy.

I have seen this very clearly in some of the third world countries in which I’ve ministered. The poverty is so severe, you want to just throw money at the problem. But others have done that and the people are still struggling. I’ve come to realize they struggle because of their philosophy. You can’t just give people a fish, you need to teach them to fish. If you just give money to people who have a poverty attitude, they will quickly be poor again. They need a new way of thinking; a new philosophy.

The most important thing you will ever do is renew your mind and form a Christian philosophy, or a Christian worldview. Once you have a Christian way of looking at things, then your philosophy becomes a filter through which you see and experience life. Everything gets filtered through what God has said and you see the positive instead of the negative. You’ll be encouraged when other people are panicking. You’ll operate in faith when other people are running scared.

Whether you realize it or not, you have a philosophy, or a way of looking at life. It’s an attitude that has been formed by the way you were brought up, by the experiences you’ve had, and by the things you’ve learned. Through all of those things, you have formed a way of seeing life that largely predetermines your responses, and even your experience of life.

Right now, we’re in an economic downturn. Other people with a less optimistic philosophy, are calling it a worldwide financial crisis. News broadcasts are busy prophesying doom, gloom, and disaster. I don’t deny the economic challenges out there, but I’m not a pessimist either. I’m not fearful and preparing for the worst-case scenario. Scripture says that perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18). If you are secure in the Lord and you know God is your source—not this world system—then you can go ahead and prosper while the whole world is falling apart. It doesn’t matter what condition the world economy is in, because the world economy isn’t our source. God is our source.

My personal finances are prospering and so is our ministry. While the stock market has been in decline, my portfolio has been increasing. While many organizations are making cutbacks, our ministry is seeing the greatest growth and income we’ve ever seen. We’re reaching more people with the Gospel than ever before, and things are working for us. Our experiences are completely contrary to what the world is saying should be happening.

The reason we are prospering is because I have a philosophy that is based on years and years of walking with God and seeing God bring me through. My faith and hope are in the Lord—not in the world economy. My Christian philosophy causes me to filter information differently than the world does.

The dominant worldview in modern society is humanistic, which tries to explain life and truth purely from the perspective of what matters to humans. Humanism rejects God totally, but aspects of humanistic philosophy have worked their way into many Christians’ belief systems. Instead of filtering life from God’s perspective, many Christians are filtering life through mental reasoning. Instead of trusting in God, society is conditioning believers to lean unto their own understanding (Proverbs 3:5). Instead of walking by faith, Christians are being encouraged to walk by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). This is exactly what the apostle Paul warned us against. It is a direct attack from the devil to rob believers of God’s promises for us “through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

Too many Christians are looking at life from a humanistic standpoint. They aren’t factoring in God as their source, and they feel like they are limited by how the world’s system is going. When people have a philosophy that doesn’t factor in God, they fall into panic when the stock market crashes, jobs are being lost, and the media is crying about a financial crisis. We’ve all heard stories about millionaires who committed suicide because they lost money and thought their lives were over. Those kinds of people have their whole identity wrapped up in possessions. People who have a philosophy that God is their source won’t fall to pieces in a crisis because their joy and satisfaction are found in God and in relationship with Him.