For more than 25 years, Monica suffered from an addiction to drugs and alcohol, fueled in part by her painful and shameful past. The thought would come to my mind that I had had these abortions.
I would not want to think about it because the pain was just too real. Thankfully, God healed Monica's heart and today she supports Focus on the Family's pro-life ministry. I want to support a ministry that can help change the trajectory of people's lives that are contemplating abortion. I can't go back in time and change my life and change my decisions, but I can support a ministry that can help possibly change someone else's.
I'm Jim Daly. Let's save babies and give families hope today. Donate and your gift will be doubled.
Call 800-AFAMILY or visit focusonthefamily.com slash gift. If God is not real, we don't have free will. We have no afterlife, no hope for anything beyond this world.
There's all these implications that flow out of that and I think people, when a culture begins to slide in that direction as our culture has, then people begin to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Is there any hope? Is there anything I can grasp onto that can give me something beyond this world? Well, that's Lee Strobel and he's back with us again today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. This is one of our best of 2024 episodes and thanks for joining us. I'm John Fuller.
John, again, I'm so excited to have Lee back. This is my, you know, hot house. You have stepped up. You're very engaged on this topic. I just love the topic. I mean, to me, it's one of those questions. Why, as a human being, would you not try to answer Is God Real?, which is the title of Lee's book.
It's a great title because it's the number one question when you look at searches, etc. Is God Real? I would tell you, if you've never answered that question, get on a horse and start trying to find the answer. What I mean by get on the horse is get the evidence, do the research. There's so many great resources now that can guide you in that way. It's not a brainwashing.
This is factual data. Did Jesus rise from the dead? Yes or no. That kind of is the game changer.
If he claimed to be the Messiah and died and was resurrected, wouldn't you want to embrace that? And that's what we're talking about. Is God Real? Wonderful book. And all I can say is we're going to do the best job we can to present the material.
Then it's up to you. And this is one place you should not hesitate to investigate and determine for yourself. Yes, I believe in Jesus or no, I don't. And Lee Strobel is back with us. As I said, he has been here a number of times on the broadcast. He currently serves as founding director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University, just up the road. And of course, he is a bestselling author. The book that really forms the foundation for our conversation today. And we can't cover it all, so get a copy of the book, as Jim said. The book is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life. And we invite you to call us for a copy or stop by our website.
The details are in the program description. Lee, it's great to have you back. Oh, wonderful to be back.
Day two. Yeah, there you go. I could probably do a month's worth of programming with you, but it's just so much fun. And it's like, you know, the spirit within us when we talk about, is God real? I mean, I think there's something in me that gets excited.
Me too. Yeah, what a wonderful way to spend your life. Well, you know what? And I find out in our culture today, which is increasingly skeptical and even hostile toward the faith, more and more people are saying, is there evidence? Is there any reason to believe? Is it rational? Is it logical? Does it make sense?
And I want to say yes, a thousand times yes. It's great to start there. We touched on it last time. And if you missed the program last time, get the download, go to the website at Focus, get the app for your smartphone.
You can listen to every episode that way. And boy, get to it, because that was some great content yesterday. But we touched on it and didn't dig any deeper, but there does seem to be a slight decline in those who believe in God. Give us those numbers and your perception as to what's going on. Yeah. I met my wife in 1966. Back then in 1967, according to the Gallup poll, 98 percent of Americans believe in God.
Think of that. 98 percent. Today, the number is 81 percent, the lowest in history.
And if you ask people, are you sure that God exists? It goes down to the 60s, about 65, 64 percent. So the question is, why has that happened, and what are your observations about it? I think there's a lot of reasons, but I think one that's particularly relevant to folks on the family is, I see this correlation between two trends in America. One is the increase in spiritual skepticism, people who question whether God exists. And the other trend is the increase in fatherless families.
I think there's a connection. Paul Vitz, who has a Ph.D. at New York University, wrote a book called Faith of the Fatherless years ago. And what he did is he researched the lives of famous atheists through history. Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Freud, Voltaire, Wells, Feuerbach, O'Hare, every single one of them either had a father who died when they were young, divorced their mother when they were young, or with whom they had a very difficult relationship. And the implication is, if your earthly father has abandoned you, disappointed you, hurt you, abused you in some way, then you don't really want to know about a heavenly father, because you think he's just going to be a magnified version of your earthly father.
He's only going to hurt you more. And so you don't realize this is going on, but it will cause you to kind of manufacture reasons not to believe. I was an atheist for much of my life, and I had had a terrible relationship with my father. So you fit the mold.
I fit the mold. I remember my dad looking at me on the eve of my high school graduation. We had a big blowout argument, and he said, I don't have enough love for you to fill my little finger. Wow.
And so we had a difficult relationship. Did that influence me to walk down the road to atheism? I think so. Was I aware of it?
No. And so I think, now, by the way, I'll mention this. If somebody's listening and saying, oh, my goodness.
Never thought about it. Maybe that's true for me. Maybe it's true for my best friend or whatever. Here's the antidote.
C.S. Lewis said this. He said, imagine, say to your friend or whoever's going through this, say to your friend, can you imagine for just a moment what the perfect father would be like? Just imagine. What would he be like? Oh, well, he'd be gracious. He'd be kind. He'd be your biggest cheerleader. He'd be your biggest encourager. He'd pick you up in his lap and give you a hug. Say, well, that is the picture of your heavenly father.
Right. Your heavenly father's not just a magnified version of your earthly father. He is fundamentally different. He is the perfect father.
He is the father who you long to have for eternity. Lee, last time, and this should entice people to go, listen, we ended with a story of you interviewing Hugh Hefner from Playboy and talking to him about the resurrection of Christ, so God bless you for even doing that. I mean, that's amazing courage and an iconic figure in atheism, agnosticism, whatever you want to call it, Hugh Hefner. You also had some discussion, I believe, with Evel Knievel.
Yes. You are interviewing some very interesting people. I've had some fascinating, and Charles Templeton, the famous skeptic from Canada, the number one skeptic. So let's kick off day two with your Evel Knievel discussion.
Oh, sure. What did you say to him? Well, Evel Knievel was on a beach. You know, Evel Knievel lived, he was a womanizer, he was a drunk, he was a gambler, he was a bad dude. He didn't seem to respect life very much.
No. I mean, like, his own. He had more broken bones than anybody in the world, according to- He had broken every bone.
He had broken everything. And here he is on the beach in his later years, and God spoke to him. And he said, I felt it on the inside. And God said, Robert, I've saved you more times than you'll ever know. Now you need to come to me through my son, Jesus.
Wow. And it freaked him out. He said, I don't even know who Jesus is. So he called the only Christian he knew, Frank Gifford, the sportscaster. Yeah, yeah. Gifford's husband. Oh, yeah. And said, Frank, I had this experience, and God spoke to me.
But who is Jesus? And Frank said, get that book, Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel. Oh, you got to love that.
That'll kind of explain it. That's great. So anyway, he reads my book. He becomes a radical born-again believer.
How old is he at this point? Well, he's in his late 60s, early 70s, but his health was failing. And he, probably the most radically transformed person I'd ever encountered. A 180-degree change, so much so that when he was baptized, he gave his story.
He gave his testimony. And then he looked at people out there in the congregation and said, do you know Jesus? Have you met him? Have you encountered him?
Have you experienced him? And the pastor literally ripped up his sermon and said, you've heard the gospel. If you want to right now get – and this is a church that never, to my knowledge, had an altar call. He said, if you want to get up right now and come forward and receive Jesus and be baptized, come forward.
Seven hundred people came forward in two services to receive Christ and be baptized on the spot. Let's speak to a couple of other illustrations or examples you have in that regard. We hear a lot from the Middle East about Muslims having dreams that we've had a couple of guests on that have talked about those experiences. Their ministries are in that part of the world. We don't want to talk more about that because of the dangers involved. But they are reporting that, that there seems to be this incredible harvest, spiritual harvest taking place with Muslims. That's right.
What's happening? This is in closed country where it's illegal to share the gospel. And what we're seeing is a third to a quarter of Muslims who come to faith in Christ are because they have a Jesus dream. Now, what's interesting about these dreams is that they don't go to sleep as a Muslim, meet Jesus in a dream, become a Christian generally. What happens is – and this shows that the dreams are not just subjective, but there's something objective really going on – is that the dream will point them towards something else that will explain the gospel and lead them to faith.
So I'll give you an example. There's a woman named Noor in Cairo, mother of several children, Muslim woman. She has a Jesus dream. Jesus appears to her. She feels the love, the grace. She's never experienced this before. She's talking to Jesus.
They're walking along a lake. And she said, Jesus, tell me more. Tell me more. And he says to her, my friend will tell you. And she said, who's your friend? And then she realized there was another man walking with them.
And Jesus said, my friend will tell you. Well, she wakes up from the dream. Next day, she goes to the crowded marketplace in Cairo, and she sees the man from her dream, the exact man who had been walking next to Jesus. And she goes up to him and says, you, you. And the guy, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on? He said, you were in my dream.
Same glasses, same face, same clothes. You were in my dream. And the guy says, did you ever dream about Jesus? And she said, yes. Well, he was a missionary. And the only reason he had come to that crowded marketplace that day is because he felt God leading him to go to that crowded marketplace on that Friday.
And then so he opens the Bible, and he shares the gospel with her. So this is what generally happens. So this tells me this is more than just something going on in somebody's head. This is something supernatural going on.
And this is the pattern that we see. You know what I love about that? Last time we talked about God's intricacy and detail orientation about setting the universe in exactly the right way.
That any one thing that would have been just off would not have allowed things to occur like we experience them today. That's amazing. That sounds like a job for God. Right?
Setting these things. But then you turn around and talk about that same God who is creating this situation for a woman and to reveal himself. I mean, that is God.
It is. It's not just the working of the universe, but the tilt that he wants to have you come into a relationship with him. That he would care about each of us. We're all made in his image. He loves us.
It's hard to even believe. I think it's uncomfortable a bit to believe that God would know me and care about me like that. Don't look at me, Lord. I talk in the book about the instances where people like Evel Knievel have had these direct experiences of God, where he just literally intervenes in their life.
My friend Nabeel Qureshi, who was a Muslim and very anti-Christian, and he got in all these debates with Christians trying to convince them that Christianity was false. And he had a dream. And in this dream there was a banquet. And yet as he looked into this banquet, he realized he was excluded from the banquet. He wasn't invited to the banquet.
He didn't accept the invitation to the banquet. And it was a chilling dream to him. And he woke up and he said to his Christian friend, hey, I just had this weird dream.
What does it mean? He said, look in the Gospel of Luke, because you just dreamed a scene from Luke's Gospel about a banquet that God invites us to, but we have to accept the invitation. And Nabeel Qureshi ended up not only coming to faith, but then becoming a great apologist and evangelist before his untimely death in 2017. Amazing. Yeah. And wrote a great book called Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus. There you go.
It's a top seller in the Middle East. Yeah, I tell you. Well, we're talking today with Lee Strobel on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. And this is the personal God of the Bible that we see.
And Lee has taken to task a very big, ginormous task. Is God Real is the name of his book, exploring the ultimate question of life. We're touching on portions of the book last time and today, but get a copy of this. Go through this, be encouraged in your faith or maybe answered in your doubt through this book.
We have details on the website and the link is in the program description or give us a call. Lee, I'm going to ask a couple of questions about wickedness, evil. If the question is, is God real? The second question is, if there's a loving, kind God, why does evil occur?
Why do babies die? That kind of line of reasoning and fair question. Yes. It's an off-the-table question, especially if you've sat in front of people that great losses occurred in their life, like the loss of a child. It is the number one question. And it's interesting that every worldview has to respond to this question, not just Christianity. But I think we've got the best answer. Again, I'm going to ask a couple of questions that get us there. But first is, your experience as a journalist, training in university, you got an assignment to go look at the underbelly of Chicago. That kind of reinforced your atheism, if I remember correctly.
That's right. Describe that assignment. Why did it affirm your atheism? When I saw the kind of poverty – I mean, I grew up in the suburbs. My dad was pretty wealthy. We lacked for nothing. Except love.
Except love, yeah, in many ways. And yet, as a journalist at the Chicago Tribune, I remember one of my first assignments was to do a 30-part series on the poor of Chicago. To profile a poor family or a poor person every day for 30 days. Wow. And so I went out to the poorest sections of Chicago and found these people who lived in desperate situations. And it did dig my hole of atheism even deeper.
Why? Because I thought, how could there be a loving God if I'm in comfort in the suburbs, and yet just 30 miles away, people are living in poverty like this. It just reinforced my idea that there is no God. And this is the number one objection that's raised. I did a study a few years ago.
I hired Barna's organization to do a scientific poll. And I asked Americans, if you could ask God any one question, and you knew he'd give you an answer right now, what would you ask him? And by a factor of 80 percent or so, the question is some permutation of why does God allow suffering. And my wife has a neuromuscular condition that has her in pain every single day. She has been in pain every day for 20 years. She'll be in pain every day for the rest of her life.
She has an incurable condition unless God does a miracle, which he has not done. And so this is a personal issue. And I bet for people listening too, you say, yeah, it's a personal issue. And fortunately, we have a personal God who provides good answers. In that context, you interviewed Peter Kreeft, who's a PhD.
I don't know if it's philosophy or in philosophy. You quote him in the book, and I just want to read the last line of that quote, because it's so powerful. And it maybe for the first time kind of put it in context for me, because it's okay to be upset about suffering. I mean, God is big enough to take that. I think suffering, as Scripture talks about, certainly leads to good things if we allow it to do its good work. And yet at the same time, it shouldn't be the obstacle to why we believe in God. But the quote was this, the source of evil is not God's power. I would even add his existence, but rather mankind's freedom, that we create the evil upon other people. That's a powerful quote, and that probably covers a good percentage of the evil that occurs in this world. You still have death of an infant, but speak to those things.
Here's what he means. God has existed from eternity past as God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit in a perfect love relationship. And so the greatest value in the universe is love. And when God decided to create humankind, he wanted us to be able to love, love him and love each other.
But the only way you can enable someone to love is if you give them free choice, freedom of the will. Why? Well, when my daughter was little, they used to have a doll called Chaddy Cathy. Remember Chaddy Cathy? And it had a string on the back. I thought it was called irritating. If you pull the string in the back and let go, it would talk to you. And so my daughter would pull the string and let go, and the doll would say, I love you. That's how good the technology was. But the point is, did that doll love my daughter?
No, of course not. It was a mechanical device. It was programmed to say that. It had to say that.
Real love always involves a choice. And so what has humankind done with its free will? We've turned our back on God.
We hurt each other. We're selfish. I mean, I can take my hand and I can feed a hungry person.
Or I can take that same hand, using my freedom of will, and pick up a gun and kill an innocent person. Our freedom of will has opened the door. Now, God created the potential for that to happen because it's the only way we could love. But we activated that potential by inviting evil into the world. And the Bible says that it's even corroded creation itself, that creation is groaning for redemption that will someday occur and for things to be made right. So I think this goes a long way toward us understanding how our choices can open the door to evil entering into our lives. The other contrast would be, in my mind, the fall of Adam and Eve, invited sin into the world, the chaos that's in the world.
They use their freedom of the will. You mentioned this a moment ago, Charles Templeton. Because I thought the example that he had comes to the core not so much of man's evil against man, but circumstances that occur. And I think Charles Templeton, who was a pastor who claimed he had lost his faith when he saw a Life magazine photo of an African woman holding a dead child because of drought, described that because that maybe cuts closer to the core of why would that happen, why wouldn't God just make it rain?
Yeah, exactly. Charles Templeton was the number one skeptic in Canada. He wrote a book once called Farewell to God, My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith. So it's kind of the opposite of my book. Right. And now I will, there's a spoiler alert, but in my book I disclose something that most people don't know, which is that on his deathbed it appears that he did come back to faith in Jesus Christ.
Wow, okay. So thank God for that. But he raises the question of what about this suffering, what do we do with this? And a lot of people see this. I see the suffering in my wife and say, how can God tolerate this? And yet the Bible says that God can cause, if we follow him, if we're committed to his ways, in this world or the next, he can take our suffering and he can draw good from it. Now sometimes that gets thrown out by Christians.
It's Romans 8.28. God can cause us all things to work together for good for those who love him, and those who are called according to his purpose. And sometimes we're a little flippant with it. We're a little blithe with it.
Someone is going through a tough time. Oh, Romans 8.28, God's going to draw good from it. I don't feel like we are ill-willed in doing that, but the way we say it can come across as cold. It's something to think about.
It can. And yet, one thing that Peter Crave said to me that changed my life, he said to me, I forget when I told my wife this, she cried. He said, God has taken the worst possible thing that could ever happen in the universe, which is the death of the Son of God on a cross. And from that he has drawn the best thing that could ever happen in the universe, which is the opening of heaven to all who follow him.
And if God can take the worst thing in the universe and turn it into the best thing in the universe, he can take even our sufferings, even my wife's pain that she goes through. He can take that. He can redeem it. He can draw good from it.
And you know what? I see how he draws good from it. I see how it has changed her life in a way where she is so empathetic and caring toward other people who are hurting in a way that she probably wouldn't be if she personally had not gone through this experience that she's gone through. And I think when you look at it, all of the evidence, which we talked about last time, this time, the book, far more discussion about the evidence there, the resurrection, etc.
It's all critical, especially for thinking people. You need to feel it, understand it, touch it, rationalize it, believe it. But in the end it's kind of like Revelation 12-11, which is a scripture I've often thought about where it says, They have conquered him, meaning Satan, by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they love not their lives, even unto death.
And that's what you're kind of describing, suffering and pain. But the idea that no one can steal from you your testimony. I mean, they can tell you right is wrong and wrong is right, but they can't replace in your heart what God has done to you, the way that you've heard his still voice in your heart. That's right.
They can't challenge the fact that God has changed your life. Right. Or the fact of the death and resurrection, the blood of the Lamb. That's what that's referring to, the evidence of the resurrection.
That combination is unassailable. Yeah, it is. And I've found, frankly, over the years that I've changed my approach in talking to people who raise questions about pain and suffering. What I used to do is, oh, if you could ask anyone question you knew he'd give you an answer, what would you ask? Well, I'd ask, why does he allow suffering? Oh, well, let me give you a five-point sermon on why God allows suffering.
And I'd give him a five-point sermon because I think we have good reasons to understand why God would allow that. I don't do that anymore. What I do now is I ask a follow-up question. Why did you ask that one? Now they get personal. Now they say, because my wife was just diagnosed with cervical cancer and I want to know where's God in the middle of that. Or we lost a baby in childbirth five years ago. Where was God when that happened? And I've come to realize what that person probably needs from me right now as a follower of Jesus is probably not a five-point sermon.
What he needs from me is to put my arm around his shoulder and to sit next to him and to cry with him and to be Jesus with him in that moment. And I think maybe my own brush with death has given me sensitivity to this. And so I've found that at some point, yes, let's deal with the intellectual question. But the love of God, the grace of God, if I can be a conduit from that into a hurting person's life, God uses that in remarkable ways. It's always great to hear from Lee Strobel.
And boy, he had such great things to share today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. Such wisdom and insight that really helps all of us, I think, grow in our faith. You know, right at the end there, that concept of the love of Christ, I've always felt like the one weapon that the enemy of our soul cannot compete with is God's love. I mean, everything else he can manipulate, our intellect. You know, he can twist people into thinking taking their own baby's life is a good thing. I mean, it's unbelievable what the enemy can do to twist our heart. But the love of God, nothing on this earth can compete with that.
And Lee so brilliantly expresses that. And he gathered all those experts to validate the existence of God. And that gives us such a solid undergirding for our beliefs. And here at Focus on the Family, we want to give you the tools you need to build a solid relationship yourself with the Lord and live in his peace and love. And if we've helped you to do that, I'd like to ask you to consider giving back to help others find that love and peace as well, especially here at the end of 2024.
We have been running a little behind, and I want to kind of put the pedal to the metal, as they say. We need to hear from folks, and if you've supported us in the past, I'd like to encourage you to pray about supporting us again. If you haven't supported us, step up and be part of the financial team that helps us get this done. When you give a gift of any amount today to the ministry, we'll send you a copy of Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life as our way of saying thank you for helping others. Yeah, partner with us today to give families hope. And on behalf of all those that you're going to help through Focus on the Family, thank you. Our number is 800, the letter A in the word family.
800-232-6459. Or you can donate and get a copy of the book, Is God Real? Online, we've got the details in the episode notes. And when you're online with us, be sure to look for our Best of 2024 audio collection.
It's free, and it's got all the best content from this past year addressing faith and marriage and parenting and more. Now tomorrow, we'll have another of our Best of 2024 programs featuring comedian Jeremy Nunes, who has some great insights about family humor, like what happens when you're six feet, six inches tall. He wanted to be done with his food, and I said, nope, you did not eat all your vegetables, you're not done. And my wife goes, yeah, don't you want to be big and tall like Daddy?
And he goes, well, I want to be tall, but Dad is freak tall. I ate just the right amount. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Your marriage can be redeemed, even if the fights seem constant, even if there's been an affair, even if you haven't felt close in years. No matter how deep the wounds are, you can take a step toward healing them with a Hope Restored Marriage Intensive. Our biblically based counseling will help you find the root of your problems and face challenges together. We'll talk with you, pray with you, and help you find out which program will work best. Call us at 1-866-875-2915.
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