Most Christians could pass a doctrine quiz. The harder question is whether the answers you would give on paper are the answers you actually live by. Dr. Fred Smith, author of Developing a Biblical Worldview, warns that many believers avoid certain behaviors and hold the right public positions, “but underneath the surface, they really are thinking very much like their completely secular neighbors in most areas of life.” This guide gives you a way to check that in your own life and a set of habits for the slow work of changing it.
The work has two parts. The first is diagnosis: exercises that compare the answers you profess with the answers your ordinary week reveals. The second is formation: a few repeatable practices that let Scripture reshape those answers over months and years. You can work through it alone in about a week. A group can cover it in one long session or two shorter ones. Bring a notebook, your calendar, and something that shows how you spent your money and your screen time last week.
Start with what you actually do
Smith organizes a worldview around four questions: “Who are we? Where are we? What is wrong? And what is the answer?” Every person answers them, whether or not they ever say the answers aloud. The trouble is that we tend to answer them in two different voices. One voice is the one we use in church. The other speaks through our habits.
Before you read any Scripture, write the four questions across the top of a page and make two rows underneath.
- In the first row, write your professed answers, the ones you would give if a pastor asked.
- In the second row, write the answers your last seven days suggest. Use evidence, not intentions. Look at your calendar, your bank activity and your screen time.
Here is how to read that evidence. For who are we, ask what your week assumed a person is for. Was the week organized around output, comfort, image, other people? For where are we, ask whether you lived as though the world is God’s creation, a marketplace, a contest or a threat. For what is wrong, look at what made you anxious or angry. People usually get upset about whatever they believe the real problem is. For what is the answer, look at what you reached for when you felt that anxiety. That reflex is your working cure.
Do not try to fix anything yet. The point of this step is to see the gap, if there is one, clearly enough to name it. If the two rows match closely, that is worth noticing too. You can ask what has formed you well.
Read the passage that names the problem
Turn to Romans 12:1-5 and read it twice, once quickly and once slowly. Verse 2 is the center of this guide: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
Notice three things in the text before you apply it.
First, there are two forces in the verse. Something outside you presses you into a shape, and something else renews you from the inside. Paul does not tell the Roman believers to avoid the world’s pressure by trying harder. He says the change happens through a renewed mind. That fits Smith’s point. Changing behaviors on the surface does not reach the place where the answers live.
Second, the word “ye” in the King James Version is plural. Paul is addressing a congregation. Read Romans 12:5 with that in mind: “So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.” The renewal in verse 2 belongs to people who belong to each other. That matters for the habits later in this guide.
Third, the purpose clause says renewal lets believers “prove” God’s will. In older English, to prove often means to test or discern. A renewed mind is one that can tell the difference. It is not simply a mind that holds better opinions.
Now read 2 Corinthians 13:5: “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves.” Look at the verses just before it. The Corinthians had been demanding proof that Christ was speaking through Paul (13:3). Paul turns their scrutiny around and points it at them. The examination you did in the first exercise belongs to that same move. It is easy to audit other people’s worldviews. Scripture asks you to start with your own.
Where the gap usually hides
Smith’s teaching adds something you might miss if you only read verse 2. The secular core of a Christian’s worldview rarely shows up as a dramatic sin. It shows up in places that do not look religious at all.
His clearest example is his challenge to imagine the front walls removed from every house on your street, like a dollhouse. “On a typical evening when everybody’s home, could you really tell who the Christian families are on your street?” He describes each family member alone in a separate room with a separate screen. In his telling, the biggest visible difference might come on Sunday morning, when one household carries golf gloves out the door and another carries Bibles.
That picture shows where to look. A person can hold every right doctrine and still answer who are we with something Smith calls the atomic view: each person a separate unit, unaffected by others and affecting no one. He compares it to marbles in a jar. “The church gathers for an hour or two on Sunday morning, and then after the last prayer is said, it’s like pouring the marbles out of the jar.” The doctrines are still there. The way of living has not changed.
The second thing Smith shows is less comfortable. The worldview that needs correcting also resists the correction. He asks whether you have ever feared your church would find out you struggle with time, money or a particular sin. Many people want to be there for others, he says, but doubt others will be there for them, and “sometimes our worldview actually hinders us from expressing that as clearly as we think we ought to.” Lisa Fields makes the same connection from the other direction. A private, self-protective culture keeps people from being able to “allow others to hold us accountable, allow others to challenge our lifestyles.” If renewal happens among people who belong to each other, as Romans 12 assumes, then the habit of hiding works directly against it.
The third thing is that the pressure comes through stories. Smith says almost every television program answers the four questions, and of the worldviews that challenge Scripture, “It’ll sometimes surprise you where you find them.” A likable character who believes the answer to life is freedom from every constraint can shape your reflexes more than an argument you would reject on sight.
Three tests to run this week
Each test takes fifteen to thirty minutes. Do them on separate days if you can.
The dollhouse test
Pick an ordinary weekday evening that has already happened. Write down, hour by hour, what an outside observer would have seen if the front wall of your home were gone. Then ask one question: which of your four professed answers would that observer be able to guess? Write down only what was visible, not what you were thinking. If you live alone, the test still works. Look at who you contacted, who you thought about, and whether anyone else was part of the evening at all.
The island test
Smith asks how much of Scripture you could obey if you were stranded alone on an island. Make the test concrete. Read Galatians 6:2, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ,” and then list five other commands you know from the New Testament. Mark each one: could I obey this alone? Then look at last month and mark each one again: did I obey this in a way that required another person? The distance between the two marks shows how much of your faith currently runs on the atomic answer to who are we.
The main story test
Smith urges believers to “saturate our minds with the Bible before we go out into the world.” For three days, write down the first three things you read, watched or listened to each morning, and the last three each night. At the end, ask which story got the opening and closing word of your day. Then pick the piece of media that appeared most often and answer the four questions for it. Do not stop at deciding whether it is good or bad. Write down its answer to what is wrong and compare that with your own reflexive answer from the first exercise. Look for any match.
Before you draw conclusions
These tests can go wrong in two directions, and it helps to name both.
The first danger is despair. Someone runs the dollhouse test, sees a gap, and decides they were never really a Christian. Smith does not frame it that way. He says plainly that “we may never get it a hundred percent right,” and his central claim is that “a biblical worldview is something we develop. It’s not something that you simply adopt by taking on a few doctrines.” A gap is the normal starting condition for the work. It is not a verdict on your salvation. Paul’s call to examine yourselves is a call to keep checking, not a single exam you pass or fail.
The second danger is relativism. Someone sees how much their culture shaped them and concludes that every worldview is just a personal perspective, theirs included. Lisa Fields offers a useful correction to the language of “my truth.” She notes that “your worldview can be incorrect. Truth can never be incorrect.” That distinction is what makes self-examination possible. If there were no standard outside yourself, there would be nothing to examine yourself against. Smith grounds that standard in Scripture as God’s revelation. Your worldview is your grasp of the truth. It is partial, and it can grow.
A third caution comes from Smith himself. When Lisa Fields observes that more community-centered cultures may understand this more easily than Americans do, he agrees but names a downside. Strong communal loyalty can make it hard for some people to hear the gospel when their family has no history of faith. The goal is a life centered on Christ and his body. It is not a swap from one cultural default to another.
Habits that work over years
The tests show you where you are. These habits are for the long work afterward. Choose one to start. Add another only when the first has become ordinary.
- Give Scripture the first word. Smith says, “We need to be intentional about making the Bible’s story the main story in our lives every day.” Before your phone, read a short passage and write one sentence on how it answers one of the four questions. Work through a single book, such as Romans or a Gospel, so the story builds rather than coming in fragments.
- Find your two o’clock person. Smith once told his congregation “there ought to be someone in this church that you know so well, that if you have a flat tire at two o’clock in the morning and you don’t have a spare, you can call that person.” If you do not have that person, name one believer you could begin to know at that level, and arrange a regular time together. If you do have that person, ask whether you have ever let them see a struggle and not just a need.
- Practice one shared obedience a week. Pick one command from your island test that requires another person. Do it this week with a specific person. Next week, choose another.
- Rerun the inventory every three months. Keep your first two-row page. Each season, fill in a fresh second row from your actual calendar and spending. Compare it with the earlier ones. Over a year, this record will show whether your lived answers are moving.
For groups
The first exercise works best done privately, before the group meets. When you gather, invite people to talk about what they noticed in the process. They do not need to report their answers. No one should have to reveal their spending, their screen time or a struggle. Make it easy to pass. If someone does share something personal, thank them and move on. The group should not try to solve it on the spot. Leaders can model honesty by going first with something real but modest.
Questions to talk through
- When you compared your two rows, which of the four questions showed the widest gap, and what evidence surprised you?
- Romans 12:2 sets being conformed beside being transformed. What in your life presses you into shape most steadily? Is it a person, a platform, a workplace, a hope?
- In the island test, which commands could you obey alone and which could you not? What does the result suggest about how you have been answering who are we?
- Smith suggests the worldview that needs correcting can keep us from asking for help. Where have you seen that happen, in yourself or in a church, without naming anyone?
- Lisa Fields distinguishes a worldview, which can be wrong, from truth, which cannot. How does that distinction change the way you talk with someone who sees the world differently?
- Which habit above would be hardest for you, and what makes it hard?
- If the front walls came off your home a year from now, what is one thing you hope an observer could see?
A question to keep
Go back to the first page you wrote, the one with two rows. Do not rewrite it. Put it somewhere you will find it again in three months. When you come back to it, ask this before you fill in a new row: which of these answers did I learn from Scripture, and which did I simply absorb before I knew I was learning anything? The honest answer will change over time. Watching it change is a large part of the work.