We need to define what a worldview is. At Summit Ministries, we use this definition from the book that my co-author David Noble and I wrote called Understanding the Times. A worldview is a pattern of ideas, of beliefs, of convictions, and habits that help us make sense of God, the world, and our relationship to God and the world. It's a mouthful, but there are two key aspects to it. It's a pattern.
That's really one of the most significant words. It's a pattern. Ideas flow in patterns. Beliefs flow in patterns.
Convictions flow in patterns. Habits organize themselves around patterns. And we develop all of these ideas all the way down to our habits because we're trying to understand God, the world, and our relationship to God. So the word pattern is a key thing. It's the ability to recognize patterns.
patterns that helps someone be successful in any area of life. And it's true in the realm of our strong convictions too. Otherwise, you're faced with the fact that there are thousands of different kinds of issues and thousands of questions people could ask about your faith. You could never really master it all. We need to learn how to see the patterns.
Think about how patterns make the impossible possible in so many different areas of life. Here's a picture of the retired tennis professional Andy Roddick. He was famous because he could hit a tennis ball, he could serve a tennis ball at 156 miles an hour, which is called a tennis serve. It's also called assault with a deadly weapon.
It's unbelievable to imagine standing across the court from this guy. Well, that's impossible to return a serve like that, according to physiologists from UCLA. In fact, they said, None of the back and forth in a professional tennis match is possible. It's the only way it's physiologically possible is for the person to return to serve before their brain realizes it has arrived.
And you say, but that can't happen. But it happens all of the time. You've seen professional tennis matches.
So I had a friend who was a professional tennis player and I asked him about this. Did you ever play Andy Erotic? Oh yes.
I said, what was it like? He said, very difficult. I asked him, what was his serve like?
He said, you cannot even imagine how overwhelming it is. I asked him, did you ever return the serves? He said, of course.
Well, how did you do it? He said, think about it this way. Once you've gotten to be a professional tennis player, you have played.
thousands maybe even tens of thousands of hours you've had thousands of hours of intensive very specific practice so that you can become better every single time you're on the court he said once you do that you start to notice patterns that other people don't notice could be little tiny things like the position of the feet of the server it could be what they've done in previous matches and what they are likely to do do this time in a similar scoring situation. He said you look at all of those patterns and you gain a little bit of insight in what to do and the impossible becomes possible. Isn't that cool? Let me give you another example. For those who think a little more up here, the game of chess is this way.
Grandmaster chess players in the old times were thought to have photographic memories because they could look at a partially played game of chess. They could just look at it for two seconds. seconds see the position of the pieces and then turn around on a piece of paper write down the position of every single piece on the board with uncanny accuracy.
So it was assumed they'd somehow looked at the board, took a picture in their mind, turned around, wrote down what they saw in that picture. But then researchers played a trick on them. They showed them a partially played chess game, two seconds, sure enough they were able to very specifically and accurately write down the position of every piece on the board. But then, instead of showing them another partially played game, they showed them a board in which the pieces were randomly arranged in a way they would never appear in an actual game. In this test situation, the grandmaster chess player's level of recall of the position of the pieces on the board was no better than the non-chess players who were the control group in the study.
In other words, these grandmaster chess players weren't memorizing the game. the board, they were looking for the patterns of play that would have occurred on the board over time. So it's true in tennis, it's true in chess, it seems to be true in life and investing and business and all other kinds of areas that the better we can understand the patterns, the more successful we can be. The question is, is it true in the world of ideas? Because this is a big world.
Here's a picture of the Bodleian Library, the famous library at Oxford University. They have have millions of books. How many ideas are in millions of books? Billions?
Trillions? It's hard to even imagine. But the Apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians 10.5, we are to demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and take captive every thought to the obedience of Christ. How on earth are we going to do it?
There are billions of them. There's no way a human being could ever even read a tiny fraction of those books, not to mention master the ideas and know how to respond intelligently to them. But if we can understand patterns, everything changes.