Christian Philosophy: Everyone Has a Philosophy. It's The Lens Through Which They View The World and Make Decisions. Read Online Free PDF

doctrine is a perversion of Scripture in that it falsely teaches that everything that happens in life is preordained by God. It’s nothing more than a stoical worldview. People who teach that doctrine think absolutely everything that happens in life is God’s will—even evil things such as murder, rape, and sickness. Those people believe that even if God didn’t cause the event directly, He must have allowed it to happen because He is all-powerful and He could have stopped it if it was against His will.
    It’s true that God is all-powerful, but His Word teaches that He has no part in evil (James 1:13-17). It is the devil who comes into our lives to steal, kill, and destroy. God only comes to give us life, and to give us life abundantly (John 10:10). Everything that happens in life is not the result of God’s will. Some things are just attacks from the devil. Thankfully, God has given us the authority to rebuke and resist those attacks. God’s Word says,
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
    James 4:7
    Any teaching that doesn’t conform to the Word of God is false, no matter how popular it may be. You have to evaluate your philosophy and make sure it is based on the Word of God, and not on the philosophies of this world or the traditions of men. Everything that God has shown me has helped to form my philosophy. It is all woven together into one dominant way of thinking. The Word of God has dictated my philosophy, and my response to life is, in turn, dictated by my philosophy. So the blessings in my life are simply a result of filtering life through God’s perspective.
    But Stoicism and Epicureanism aren’t the only philosophies out there. The philosophy that your parents had when they raised you also has an impact on your belief system. Not merely their worldview, but the philosophy they instilled in you by the things they said, by the way they treated you, and through the behavior you witnessed.
    I have a very close friend whose father was a good man in many ways, but he also had a mean streak. When my friend was a boy, his father used to browbeat him constantly. He was always scolding him for doing things incorrectly. Those negative statements became part of the way my friend looked at life. He saw himself as the man his father told him he was.
    They lived on a farm, so the father was always fixing cars and other equipment and my friend would help. One of the things my friend’s father used to tell him was that he couldn’t put a nut on a bolt without crossing the threads. I remember working on a car with him one time and I watched him start to shake as he put a nut on a bolt. After he got the nut on, he was afraid it wasn’t on right, so he kept taking it off and putting it back on until he actually cross threaded the bolt. The things his father spoke over him became a curse because my friend took those words to heart and made them a part of his philosophy.
    All of us have been influenced by the philosophies we were raised with or that we picked up through experiences. Racism is an example of a philosophy that is handed down from one generation to the next; it’s a kind of tradition. If a child raised in a racist environment doesn’t replace those lies with the truth, he or she will incorporate prejudice into their worldview and it will affect their experience of life.
    America had a tradition of racism that was hard to overcome. Martin Luther King, Jr. made a stand for morality and led our country through some difficult times. He didn’t stick his head in the sand and hope that the problem of racism would go away. He stood up for a Christian philosophy that says all men are created equal, and he helped to change a nation. Today, society often fails to recognize that Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn’t merely a civil rights leader, he was a Christian leader.
    In the same way that society persecuted Martin Luther King, Jr. for his stand against racism, I can guarantee