The Power of Belief, Part
1
By Bill Watkins, RMCA Middle School Teacher
“I can make you winners,” Coach Thornton
told us. And we believed him.
We were four young runners -- ninth graders. Three of
us had been under Coach’s training for two years, and he had made
us victors in our respective track events. The fourth runner among us
was new to our school, but he was the fastest 100-yard sprinter we had
ever seen. With him and Coach’s dedication to us, we believed
we could win the 440-yard relay race.
We listened to Coach. We trained hard. When our faith
in ourselves faltered, we trusted that Coach knew what he was doing
– that he really would make us winners. And that he did, many
times over. In fact, our final race as a relay team came at the Junior
West Coast Relays in California. The night we ran, we broke the national
record by a tenth of a second, and we shattered our junior high school’s
record too. We stood on the victors’ platform and received our
medals with the crowd’s standing ovation ringing in our ears and
filling our ecstatic, tear-stained eyes. That season we learned the
power of belief.
Belief shapes who we become, for good or ill. Proverbs
affirms this: “For as he thinks within himself, so he is”
(Prov. 23:7). This is because, as Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland
points out,
“Beliefs are the rails upon which our lives run.
We almost always act according to what we really believe. It doesn’t
matter much what we say we believe or what we want others to think we
believe. When the rubber meets the road, we act out our actual beliefs
most of the time.”
So if we believe we are creatures made by a loving God’s
hand, we will see ourselves as having intrinsic value and worth, and
we will likely treat others as valuable too. If, on the other hand,
we believe we are the accidental products of blind and amoral natural
forces, we will tend to act out self-destructive, immoral behaviors
that often hurt other people as well.
Among all we believe, certain beliefs are more defining. These core
beliefs provide the foundation upon which most of our other beliefs
stand or fall. These are the essential beliefs of a person’s worldview.
They concern such crucial matters as what we believe about God, human
beings, the physical world, morality, history, and human destiny.
A worldview is a world and life view. It is the glasses
through which we interpret all of reality and live according to what
we believe. For example, if our worldview glasses are theistic (a belief
in one eternal, infinite, all-good God who created the universe out
of nothing), we will see ourselves and the rest of the world as his
good creation – a creation which he rules over with a loving hand.
Just as red-tinged glasses make what we see appear as various shades
of red, so worldview glasses lead us to view what we see through our
core beliefs.
As children, we learn a variety of worldviews. Our parents,
through their words and actions, teach us their worldview. Our culture
permeates our lives in a variety of ways, and in the process we pick
up whatever worldview it embraces. Likewise, our school teachers pass
on to us their worldview, as do our co-workers, religious leaders, and
friends. By the time we reach adulthood, especially in today’s
America, we have been exposed to several worldviews, leaving us with
a host of contradictory beliefs fighting for dominance in our minds
and wills. Unless we choose wisely among these competing beliefs, we
will travel any number of roads that dead-end into a morass of error,
frustration, dashed hopes, and gaping wounds.
At Rocky Mountain Christian Academy, the worldview issue
has been settled in favor of Christian theism. This is the worldview
all of us on staff share and teach and seek to administer and live by.
It is the worldview we are passing on to your children. It is the worldview
of the greatest figure in human history – Jesus Christ.
