We read the Bible to get to know God.

I believe that should be the reason that overrides and informs all of our other good reasons for studying the Good Book. But one of those other reasons is to develop a framework for understanding and living in the world – a framework that's true, one that "works." That's the biblical worldview I'd like to talk about in the final essay of this series.

Previously, I spoke about "dots" of information that we're trying to connect to form a picture. We're hampered by our pitifully small collection of dots, by mistaking false dots for true – and then there's our poor ability to connect them. Data as dots. But we could change the analogy to bricks. With these bricks, these little units of knowledge, we can build a worldview.

And we do. You have a worldview, whether you know it or not, whether you developed it consciously or unconsciously. What we want to do, as Christians, is to trade our bricks for God's bricks, and build a model of the world that looks like His.

Pollster George Barna has tracked the percentage of professing Christians that actually hold a Christian worldview, and it is small. It's a single-digit number – and declining. Now, we could criticize the questions that Barna uses (all survey questions are flawed in some way), but I think we know intuitively that his conclusion is correct: Few self-described Christians see the world as God sees it.

And that's not just because of our faulty education in the Word of God. It seems to me that the main reason Christians don't frame the major issues and events of the day as God does, is because we don't want to. We don't really desire a biblical worldview.

That's astonishing, isn't it? We're aware of how little we know about anything, that some of what we think we know is wrong, and that we're making mistakes in how we're piecing our model together. But to throw that away? Our pet theories? Our comforting illusions? Our self-flattering perceptions? That all has to go, Jesus?

It all has to go.

Let me leave you with a few suggestions for reading the Bible in a way that will let you rebuild your worldview. I hope all of these seem childishly simple to you, but I offer them in case they're not.

But before we even get started, we'll need to recognize that the viewpoints we get from TV, media, movies, pop music and art, etc. are noise, and then turn down the noise. Our current worldview is a blend of all this trash, with a few Scripture snippets sprinkled on top. We have to take out the trash.

Also, most of us were not taught to read deeply. We should come to see reading as an interview with the author. "Why did you use this word instead of that word?" "How does your statement in chapter 7 square with what you said in chapter 2?" "How does this assertion advance your argument?" "What about this objection?" A stance of active engagement with the author will help us read everything better, including the Bible.

OK, now for the recommendations. Lean hard on our old and true friend, Context. Not just one verse before-and-after, but the context of the argument being made, in that scene, to those people. And the larger context of the particular book, and the whole Bible.

Make sure you understand who is speaking, and who is being spoken to.

Look for paradoxes, not contradictions. "There is none righteous, no not one" alongside "Job was a righteous man" looks like a contradiction – to an atheist. You're not an atheist. So find out how those two statements can both say something true.

Look for the big themes.

Don't let the theological words scare you, or slide by you. An understanding of the word "Word" (Logos) in John 1:1 will lead you to wonder, and to worship.

Don't let the preacher give you some plausible patter. Check it for yourself!

Try to follow the timeline (and the geography). I'm bad at this. All those stories about Jesus that we learned in Sunday School? They tell us a lot more when we put them in order.

Maybe most importantly, try to see what is God's "attitude" about all the different relationships: Who is God? What is a human being? Aren't there two kinds of humans in the world, and if so, what is the line between them? What is sin? What is righteousness? What is a family, in God's eyes? A community? A government? What is the interplay between justice and mercy for each of these groups? What is work? Easy, one-dimensional answers should be held in suspicion. How is Jesus at the center of all these questions? What is God's final plan? What is the tension between the Now and the Not Yet?

Maybe what we want is a "new-world view," after all.