Why So Many Christians Are Falling Away from the Faith (and How We Can Help Them Return) Part 2

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And I've said many times that sometimes we don't create an environment for that because we're not secure ourselves. Here, honestly, I'll take a call any day, say any Thursday, right? We're opening the phone lines. From a rabbi, from a counter missionary, from a religious Jew, from an educated Jewish person who doesn't believe in Jesus Yeshua. Take a call any time.

If there is an opportunity to have a debate, the messianic claims of Jesus Yeshua with a Jewish person. Any time. Gladly.

Hours. Will I take hours of calls for the whole world to hear, yes, yes, yes. Why? I'm really secure there. I'm really secure knowing that Jesus Yeshua is the Messiah. I'm really secure in explaining how he fulfilled the messianic prophecies. I'm really secure in that. And if there was any new objection that came up I never heard how to think about, I'm very confident that I'll come up with a good solid answer from the Word and with the wisdom of God.

Yeah. Now, if I was doing this with Muslims, Muslim scholars, Muslim theologians, Muslim counter missionaries, whatever, I would be less confident because I don't know the Qur'an well. Yeah, I can read it in Arabic slowly and I've studied portions of it, but I don't know it well.

Do I know the Bible or other literature? I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in Islamic apologetics. And even though I'm confident that over time, without question, I come up with answers. In fact, I feel it'd be much easier to come up with answers to Islamic objections than Jewish objections for many reasons. Many, many, many reasons.

But I can't say, hey, just call them with any objection. I'm ready to answer. Because I'm not ready right off the bat, right? What if it was an area where I struggled personally?

What if I always struggled? This is not the case with science and the Bible. I'm just not sure.

I don't know. The Bible seems to contradict science. How can I believe both? That's not my case. That's not my issue.

Let's say it was. I wouldn't say, hey, phone lines are wide open. Call with all your scientific objections.

Because I'm thinking, I don't know if they have answers. And your objection may shake my faith. So sometimes we're just not secure enough. Friends, we need to come to this place of deep security in God and deep security in His truthfulness.

So that we're not rattled when someone else comes with their objection. I prayed and I fasted. My child died. And you believe in healing too. It's like, oh, don't talk to me about that. Because it's going to rattle me.

I'm praying for my own kid to be healed. Somehow, friends, we need to be deeper in God. More secure in God. So that, look, you can come to me with every kind of objection and question. And I'll say, okay, let's find the answers together.

Let's say I was a pastor, a youth pastor. Hey, let's find the answers together. Because I know they're there, even if I don't have them. I'm 100% sure of the reality and truthfulness of what I believe. 100% stake my life. I have staked my life on it.

As many of you have as well. But I want to show you something fascinating in Job chapter 42. Let's take a look at this. Job chapter 42. After God has finished speaking to Job, Job said in reply to the Lord, I know that you can do everything.

That nothing you propose is impossible for you. This is from the new JPS translation. So he's quoting God's words back to him.

Who is this who obscures counsel without knowledge? He says, indeed, I spoke without understanding of things beyond me, which I did not know. And then quoting from the Lord's words to him again, Shemanah v'nochir deb'er. Eshelcha v'ho dieni. Hear now and I'll speak.

I will ask and you will inform me. Now Job confesses again, the Shema ozes shematicha. I heard of you with my ears, with the hearing of my ears, literally. But now I see you with my eyes.

Alkein em asvin ichamt yalafar v'efer. Therefore I recant and relent being but dust and ashes. Or literally on dust and ashes. The Hebrew could well combine both. Now look at this. After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, and Job repents and recants and relents because he spoke with ignorance, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Tamanite, presumably the oldest of the three friends that came to comfort Job but then end up accusing him, I am incensed at you and your two friends, for what? You have not spoken the truth about me as did my servant Job?

What? Job spoke the truth about God? And then this. Now take seven bowls and seven rams and go to my servant Job.

Let's just scroll down a bit. And sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves and let Job, my servant, pray for you. And notice three times he's called my servant in these verses. For to him I will show favor and not treat you wrongly since you have not spoken the truth about me as did my servant Job.

Wow! How did Job speak the truth about God? And how did the friends not speak the truth? Let's understand what these verses are saying. The friends did not speak the truth about God because they painted him in this one-dimensional way. That if things go well for you, you're righteous and therefore God is blessing you. If things go poorly for you, you're wicked and therefore God is judging you. Or perhaps he is chastising you so that you can be more righteous, but that's the only possible explanation. One of those two is either judging you or chastising you. There can be no mystery, there can be nothing beyond that. Therefore, Job, well obviously all your kids died and everything, God must be teaching you a big lesson, but probably you're really wicked.

You're really wicked. That misrepresented God. You see, but Job just repented for what he said about God. He just recanted. He just said a couple chapters earlier, I'm nothing.

Violence is nothing. So how did he speak the truth about God? Well, he knew that something was wrong. That the God that he loved and served and worshipped was righteous, and yet what happened to him was unrighteous. That even though he was not a perfect human being, God said about him, there's nobody like him on the earth.

That's what God said to Hasatan, the adversary. There's nobody like him on the whole earth. Nobody on the planet like Job. He fears God and turns from evil. And you read Job's own confession.

You read Job's words in Job 31 and 32. I mean, it's extraordinary the way the man lived. It's extraordinary the ethics by which he lived. So he knows that what happened to him is contrary to the nature of God.

And who actually carries that? It's Hasatan, Satan, the adversary, that brings all the destruction on him. And God says to the devil, you're moving me to destroy him without cause, for no reason. That's what God says in the second chapter.

Job realizes that. And he appeals to God. And he's challenging God. He speaks foolishly because he accuses God of being a moral monster. He accuses God of being behind all the wickedness in the world. He accuses God of personally attacking him and wanting to destroy him and hating him.

And I always had him singled out, waiting for this moment when he was going to destroy him. He paints a false picture of God and speaks falsely and speaks ignorantly. Because what does Job know? God begins to say, come on, where were you when I created the world? And tell me, where are the mountain goats? And how do they conceive?

And when are the babies coming? You don't know anything, Job. You don't know what happens. You can't tell me how to run my universe. You can't tell me the rain comes down.

You don't know any of this, Job. But Job was right in saying that God had to set things straight. As it's often been said, he fled from God to God. And he pleaded his case to God and said, there's a witness. Someone's going to testify on my behalf. And ultimately, I know my redeemer's going to stand up for me. Was he thinking of a Messiah-like figure, an intermediary, an angelic figure, God himself?

Different passages seem to go in different directions. But ultimately, he's saying, I know God's going to do what's right. He has to. And I'm challenging him to do it. And if I could stand trial before him and argue my case, I'd be righteous.

I'd come out right. Friends attacked Job, saying, you're trying to make yourself more righteous than God. And in a sense, he was.

Like, I'm in the right and you're in the wrong. But behind it, the idea that the God of the universe is the God who brings justice was right. So here's the thing. God put the book of Job in the Bible for a reason. And God put books like Ecclesiastes, with its cynicism and skepticism, in the Bible for a reason. And God put Psalms of desperation and hopelessness and despair and pain in the Bible for a reason. And we need to allow people to express what these books express and go on the journeys that these books speak of and tell them it's okay to doubt and have questions. It's okay to ask hard questions.

It's okay to even question the goodness of God. Let's get you through it so you encounter him and find out how good and majestic he really is. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get into the line of fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown.

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Sounds like win-win, doesn't it? So that's vitaminmission.com. All right, as we continue to dig into why so many people are falling away. We, on yesterday's show, went through a summary of all of the comments that you made on social media, the main comments and main themes and main statements that were made. Then we focused on digging deeper foundations with a healthy gospel message, the importance of making disciples. The last segment, we talked about books like Job, Ecclesiastes. They're in the Bible for a reason because this is the human experience and many do go through severe trials and many do question God. Rather than us getting scandalized by someone questioning God, let's recognize the pain that they're in. You know, there's the saying that there are many atheists and their views boil down to, there is no God and I hate him.

Yeah, I mean that when you probe deeper, they're upset because they feel, I believed this doctrine for years. I put my whole life in it and we believed and we prayed for the healing of my spouse. I fought for her healing for years and years and I stood on the Word and she got worse and worse and sicker and sicker and she died. And then I was told I didn't have enough faith.

I don't need this stuff. And you walk away and it's the pain that carries you away. And then maybe over a period of time, intellectually, you fortify your non-belief, right? Many times just because of pain. There is a brother who lives in Bethlehem and he is a Christian and a great friend of Israel and the Jewish people. And he lost his son to cancer and when he tells the story, when I had a meal with him face to face in Bethlehem and he shared his story, it's always with tears. And it's just a hellish battle and this kid just kept joking and smiling and trying to overcome through it.

Overcoming everything, the cancer, everything that would come with it, just a trooper, a fighter, and he ultimately lost him. And honestly, I haven't been through that. I've lost people close to me but never a child. So I can honestly say I don't know how agonizing it would be. I can imagine, but I don't know.

So those of you who have lost children, you can't speak to that. And what he found in his church was a lot of superficiality in terms of response. He was, praise the Lord, everything's going to be fine. And then when it didn't go fine, kind of being in denial and him agonizing and wrestling with it. And when he began to look at Jewish spirituality, he found a certain rawness.

He found a certain ability to wrestle with God in the tradition of Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord, who I believe is Messiah pre-incarnate there in Genesis 32. But he saw this raw, honest spirituality. They would say, God, I don't like you today.

I'm struggling. And then we'd come back to worship and adore him. In fact, Elie Wiesel tells a story from the Holocaust that, for many, it'll be scandalous when you hear it.

But please hear it out, okay? It was during the Holocaust, so again, unimaginable sufferings and watching whole communities just wiped out. Wiped out, literally, here today and gone the next. Wiped out, exterminated.

Horrors beyond imagination. And a group of Jewish men, many of them from traditional backgrounds, so they're praying regularly and doing their best to be observant in the midst of the hell they're living in in the concentration camps. They meet together and they bring God to trial. And they find him guilty of committing crimes against the Jewish people. And after coming to that conclusion, they went to evening prayer and worshiped and adored him as God.

You say, I don't get that. Well, it's difficult for us to conceive the whole circumstance in which they lived and died and the hell that they experienced. But they were basically saying, from our perspective, God, you're guilty and you let us down.

Nonetheless, we know you're God and we worship you and you're worthy of praise. A deep contradiction, yes, for sure. But something that was part of their spirituality. This brother is a Christian. He is a Jesus-loving follower of Jesus. He does not convert it to Judaism.

But he moved over to Israel and then lives in Bethlehem in solidarity with Israel. Because he found a certain honesty in spirituality there. So we've got to cultivate that honesty. Parents, can I encourage you to cultivate honesty with your kids? To say, hey, if you're struggling with something, or if you don't agree with mom and dad on this, let's talk about it. Or if you're having questions about the Bible being real, or your friends maybe mock you for this, or when you pray you don't know if God's really there, hey, let's talk about it. It's fine.

It's okay. Cultivate honesty. It's so crucial. And then if your kids raise things like, wow, I don't have an answer for that, tell them, you know, that is a great question. I never thought about it, so I'm just going to do some thinking I want to pray to, and then we'll talk some more. And if you don't have an answer, then reach out to others.

Call the show. You know, let us be a resource. And we'll get the answers together. Let's cultivate an attitude of honesty in the Bible.

Let me go back to the list here. So, again, many said people go along with family traditions, never getting genuinely saved. So it's important to make sure that someone's raised in the faith. Not that you put them under pressure to, quote, say a prayer, but you really pray for them to really be converted, really experience God, really be born again, really come to know the Lord. And for others that are just really into the apologetics and the defense of the faith, make sure they have a born-again experience. Make sure they're walking with the Lord and enjoy fellowship with God, because otherwise they're going to run into other intellectual experiences or have some life crisis, and they're going to lose whatever little faith they have.

Let's just see here. Yeah, personal traumas and pain, how could God allow these things to happen to them? You want to affirm to someone, yeah, I could understand why you're struggling. You don't, please hear me, you don't want to give cheap answers to a person in pain. You don't want to give trite answers. You don't just want to quote a scripture, even if the scripture you're quoting is true. Please hear me now. Even if what you're quoting is true, it may not be time for that truth.

Again, let us not give cheap answers to people in pain, let us not give superficial answers. When it comes to many people falling away now because of biblical teaching on sexuality, in my book, Has God Failed You? By the way, there's a whole chapter in Has God Failed You? dealing with the book of Job, and unpacking in greater depth some of the things that we just talked about in the first segment about the book of Job. There's a whole chapter on that, and if you want to really dig deep into Job, I have a whole commentary on Job. The Faith to Challenge God, that's the subtitle. A new translation and commentary.

Depends on how deep you want to dig. But, here's the point when it comes to these issues and these questions. And I have whole chapters dealing with them in Has God Failed You? I take two chapters dealing with is the Bible outdated, bigoted, homophobic, misogynistic, etc.

There's the God of the Old Testament in particular, angry, genocidal, in the description of Richard Dawkins that I interact with. So, the fact is, God's ways are best. And what we want to do, and what I try to do in the book, is explain how amazingly God ordered us. How amazingly he made the human body. How amazingly he designed us as male and female. And then the purpose of his design, and the exquisite exactness of his design. And how, when we work with his design, it is best for the human race. So, it's not a matter of hatred, bigotry, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia.

It's not that at all. It's rather saying God made us male and female for divine purposes. God made us a specific way to flourish, and God's ways are best. But we must realize, friends, the younger generation in particular has been incredibly bombarded. Incredibly bombarded with LGBTQ activist thinking.

From preschool through university, from social media to media, Hollywood TV, peers bombarded. And they have been influenced far more than many of us realize. Therefore, we've got to get in the trenches with them, help them to understand God's ways.

God's ways mean best. We continue to discuss your thoughts on why so many people have fallen away from the Lord in recent years. Definitely a spike, an increase, more than we have seen in my memory as I'm 50 years in the Lord now.

I've never seen it on this scale. Is it the final apostasy Jesus spoke of? Could be.

It could be. A whole lot would have to happen for that to be true. And it also makes me wonder, will this be taking place at the exact same time as Great Harvest? Because there's massive harvests taking place around the world. But for sure, it is a serious time of falling away.

And therefore, we need to address it head on and not live in denial. I was speaking at a church in California, maybe seven, eight thousand members. And one of the pastor leaders said to me that none of his children, all of whom were either older teens or young adults, so 19, 20, early 20s, he said not one of his kids, they're all raised in church, agreed with him on what the Bible said about homosexuality.

That's how much they had been influenced by the culture. And that's why many have fallen away. Because, like, you're making me choose between my best friends and your Bible, this old Bible with all these old things in it and God destroying whole races of people and wiping out the earth and all that. I'll stay with my friends. I'm going to be nice to my friends and they're nice people.

Why does God hate them so much? That's how they're thinking. And if you don't recognize that and realize that, you may lose them, at least for a season.

Yeah. Or if you don't realize the internal struggles they're facing and questions they now have. Look, there was a survey done earlier this year, and I wrote about it, which indicated a massive spike among Gen Z young people. So many teenagers, early 20s now. And this massive spike as to how many of them identified as bisexual.

Even with the millennials, it was nowhere near this. With this constant influence and this constant celebration and this constant, it goes all different ways and whatever, an experiment and kids coming into their own sexuality and trying to find out who they even are. It doesn't even mean they've had same-sex encounters, but that's how they identified for someone.

It's just a cool thing. Now, here's what's interesting. I'm just going to see if I can find this now. I'm going to type in Newsweek, Barna, Poll, LGBT Gen Z. So here's a Barna poll. Yeah, look at this. A friend sent me this a couple weeks ago.

Are you ready? This is Poll Bond, Newsweek, October 10th. Nearly 40% of Gen Zs, 30% of young Christians identify as LGBTQ poll shows.

This is the degree of cultural shift. You know, many years ago, there were some cultural leaders who made the statement that the homosexual population cannot grow by reproduction, so it has to grow by seduction. And, of course, that got people very angry, as if gays were mainly sexual predators of children. And in some ways, it was not talking about being a sexual predator. It was talking about what's being taught, the influence. That was the emphasis. But the way it was said, seduction versus reproduction, offended people to the point they didn't even look at what was being said. Perhaps the better way to say it is because the homosexual population will not grow by reproduction, and on average, a gay couple is not going to have anywhere near the number of kids that a straight couple is going to have on average, just because of the difficulties and challenges of bringing a child into the world as a gay couple, right? So it won't grow primarily by reproduction, but by indoctrination.

That remains true. And the indoctrination is massive. You say, well, I'm going to fight back, I'm going to print verses in bold, and I'm going to staple them to the wall in my kid's bedroom, and every day they're going to... Oh, and that's going to win their heart over. That's going to change their thinking. An angry approach of shouting scripture at them. No, that's not going to do it. But we must pray for them, realizing the pressure that they're under.

We must recognize they're growing up in a different world compared to the world in which we grew up. Here, I'll give you a quick example. You know, I've got a very intense schedule.

Many of you know that. And sometimes while flying, I'm normally resting a little and then writing and editing or reading when I fly. But sometimes, like, chill time and you get free entertainment. So I'm just going to see, OK, is there a family friendly movie? Maybe some action adventure thing, but not some R-rated thing. You know, I don't want it full of profanity, nudity, sex scenes, gratuitous violence. You know, if violence is part like there's a war scene or something like that, and this is part of reality that's being conveyed, that's not my issue.

But there's the violence for entertainment's sake and there's the gore and the harm. OK, so trying to find something. It's like, oh, cool, Jungle Cruise is now out. I'd seen it advertised over the summer online.

All these ads popping up in Dwayne, The Rock Johnson's, this boat pilot going down the Amazon, this whole adventurous thing. So I thought, oh, OK, cool, this should fit the bill. So I'm watching it. You got this one sister, which is a doctor in chemistry and or something botany, something like that. And she's courageous, fearless and even a fighter. You know, and she wants to go in the Amazon to discover this cure.

It's going to heal diseases and everything's going to be amazing. And her brother is coming along and he's totally wimpy and just, oh, he's just got to have all this luggage and care and he's prissy and all this. So it turns out there's a dialogue at one point with Dwayne Johnson and the brother, right?

The Rock and the brother. And he's, why did you follow your sister here? He'd come up with any number of reasons, right? Just think, come on, create a reason why you followed her. Well, he had these three proposals he had to turn down because his interests lie elsewhere. So you're saying you're gay? Is that what the issue is? And then, and then he says, all my family turned their back on me because of who I love, except for my sister.

She stood with me. So that's why he's out on this death defying mission with her. Now it adds nothing to the story. Zero. It adds nothing to the plot.

You could have come up with a thousand other reasons to say why he was with her if the question came up legitimately, right? It adds nothing. Zero.

And by the way, I've been reading up on it once I saw it. And for the most part, when this came out over the summer, gay critics said, this is not enough. Disney, come on, you've got to give us more than this. This is a heterosexually oppressed company.

What are you doing? They didn't win them friends for doing it. It's like too little, too late kind of feeling. That was the response they got. And then I'm thinking, that guy's a stereotypical caricatured, effeminate, prissy gay man. What good does that do?

How does that help anybody's cause, right? And then later on, there are these double-entendre jokes about crude sexual acts, crude homosexual acts. Yeah. Kids aren't going to get it, but it's obviously, parents will get it.

Oh, wonderful. Good job, Disney. But this is the world in which your kids are being raised.

And where Batman is bi and Catwoman or whoever can be lesbian or this one can be trans superhero. This is the world they're growing up in. We must talk about the issues. Here, you've got teenagers Tom Gilson, G-I-L-S-O-N. My colleague Tom Gilson has an excellent book, an excellent book that deals with critical conversations to have with your kids about these issues. My book, Can You Be Gay and Christian, digs into the word about this.

In Has God Failed You, I interact with this in perspective of the beauty of God's order and what he's put together. You're going to have to help your kids sort these things through, either in their own personal struggles or just how to work out being in a culture that's completely on a different page with us. And you can't simply take for granted that your kids hold to these views.

It's really important to help them, get them grounded, and then they can navigate these waters and come out just fine. The scandals in the church, from the sex scandals in the Catholic Church to major scandals in the Evangelical Church and beyond. And look, I'm not here to throw stones. I'm not here to condemn. But it's widespread, from like celebrity pastor, leading educator, apologist, powerful preacher, you know, whatever, worship leader.

It's just across the board, non-charismatic, charismatic, across the board. These things hurt. These things make Jesus look bad. Either people associate him with all this and turn away. If this is the church, if this is Jesus' faith, I want nothing to do with it. Or they say, I don't want anything with the organized church.

I still believe in Jesus, but I'm dropping out of organized church because they're all a bunch of hypocrites. So how do you address that? You recognize that a lot of damage has been done. You recognize that the name of the Lord has suffered a lot of reproach. You really make it a matter of prayer. God would be jealous for his holy name.

I have a whole chapter on that in Revival Where We Die. Do you not know that your honor is at stake? So we deal with that. We deal with that. So we pray for the restoration of the honor of the name of the Lord in the midst of these people, for his name to be hallowed.

Right? The first petition in the Lord's Prayer. But then reach out to people and say, hey, that's the aberration. Look, really, I want you to meet these other believers. They're really solid people. Hey, check out my church here or my congregation here because I've known the leaders for years. They're people of integrity. They're humble. A pastor is a very, very decent human being.

And hey, I know you've been hurt and maybe you've been hurt in four different places. You think that, I'm telling you, it's completely aberrant. It's almost like the devil's got an assignment to take you out, but we're not going to let him take you out.

Show him the real thing. Don't build into the skepticism. Yeah, all organized religion is bad and you need to stay away from it.

So, yeah, there's a lot of corruption and power often corrupts, money corrupts, fame corrupts. But listen, the real gospel is being lived out. Taking some ministries that really help the poor, the needy, the hurting, say, hey, let's get involved here.

Let's do some practical service together. Let's live out the gospel together. And then hopefully little by little as they see genuine people around them and people living out their faith together and people who really care. People are willing to make sacrifice, sacrifices for the good of others. And little by little, their confidence is restored.

And little by little, they realize, hey, there really is a savior who really does change lives and he really does have a people. And then say, look, look in your own heart. Have you failed people? Have you let people down? Have you had sinful, wrong, destructive thoughts?

Hey, if you have, listen, that's human nature. That's why we need a savior. The leaders who fell, the human beings, we pray for their restoration.

Same with you. Don't condemn yourself. Come to God for redemption. Help and say, I know, I know, there's a better way.

But these are practical things we can do to help people recover their faith, return to faith, get strong again in the Lord. So let's stand together. Let's do it. We've got one more segment and we'll continue over the right way. It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome to the Line of Fire, friends, as we are here to encourage you, strengthen you, see you healthy, thriving in the Lord, bearing fruit that will last, living the grace of God, flooding your life. You know, God called us to be overcomers more than conquerors. That means there are going to be obstacles.

Yes. Welcome, welcome to the broadcast. This is our last segment talking about why many people leave the faith, interacting with the hundreds of comments that you posted on Facebook and Twitter about this. And how we can help them recover their faith. You know, tragically, the name of Ravi Zacharias is very bad and tastes very bad in people's mouths when they say it now. Leaves a bad taste because of the scandals associated with him. And of course, every victim, everyone that was hurt, we grieve over that for sure.

I do want to reference something he said, though. When he wrote a book, Has Christianity Failed You?, he explained that he held this event, a place that seated several thousand people, if I recall. And it was for people, if you left your faith, you're struggling in your faith, and the demand was massive.

He was shocked by how many people came and showed up. In other words, it was deeper than he realized. The needs were deeper. The situation was worse.

And that was some years ago, and it's gotten worse since. So, what are some of the issues? Again, a superficial gospel, a what's in it for me message.

A compromised message has produced false converts and shallow converts. An inability for us to be spiritually honest and cultivate an environment where people can come with their doubts and questions. A message that mixes truth with error and basically tells someone that it's just going to be a smooth ride, smooth sailing. Give your life to Jesus and everything goes well.

And when it doesn't go well, well, what do you do? You question Jesus. You question the Bible. What we should question is, did I hear that message accurately? Or does the Bible paint a very different picture? It paints a very different picture. But one that says, no matter what you go through, no matter what hell on earth comes your way, no matter what horrific losses you sustain, God's grace can carry you through.

God's grace is sufficient. Years back, I read a painful, shocking, horrific story. Mom and dad with a large family in their van. They had some older kids, then some years went by, then a bunch of younger kids.

This is a large Christian family. They're on the highway. There's a guy illegally driving a truck in front of them. Notice he wasn't licensed to drive that vehicle.

He had a metal pole stuck in the back of the truck. It became dislodged, hit the road, bounced into their van. The van was set on fire. The parents sustained burns to their hands. All their kids were killed. All the kids were killed. And one of them, they airlifted by helicopter. You know, the boy always wanted to be in a helicopter. Well, here he is, traumatic burns, airlifted on a helicopter, but he dies.

And I followed this. And I read the quotes from the parents, still trusting God. And there they are at the funeral service with all the caskets and their bandaged hands and still worshipping God.

And it was very intense to watch and overwhelming to think. Again, I can't imagine what they lived through, yet God's grace being with them. You think, okay, but what's going to happen in a year or two or three? How are they going to be doing? When reality sets in, maybe they're being carried by some type of euphoria, denial of reality or something, right?

Who knows what? Or the emotions are all over the place or massive prayer support. And that's going to die out. So I read some years after that, quotes, and the mother basically saying it was only God's grace that allowed them to live through something like that. And years later to still be worshipping.

In other words, in the natural, they wouldn't have made it. How many couples, when they go through a terrible trauma of losing a child, their marriage doesn't survive? Because the agony and the pain is too great and the questioning or the blaming or blaming themselves or just the emotions get out of control. And here, they suffer this loss and they go on and the Lord God's grace carries us. So rather than denying we're going to go through hard times, rather let's preach the truth and prepare people for hard times and say no matter what, God's grace sustains. And yes, He does heal and He does deliver and He does protect and He does bless.

And yet often things go the opposite of what we expect. This is when we can find God even more deeply. The church through history has often understood this. The persecuted church, the church in countries as well as America understands this often a lot better than we do.

Oh, let's just see here. Yeah, the rise of atheism. The rise of atheism. It's almost 10 years ago now, or is it longer? What was called the year of the atheist?

Let me just see exactly when that was. The year of the atheist. See if it comes up as a specific year. Okay, when was atheism born? Will 2012 be the year of the atheist?

Yeah, it could be about a dozen years ago. What happened was that suddenly books by people like Richard Dawkins, the British scientist and professor, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, these books became bestsellers. Dawkins' book, for example, The God Delusion was a bestseller on religion lists for years and years and years.

Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great. And this stuff just filtered down into the larger culture. So first lots and lots and lots of people were reading the books and questions were being raised for them. And then the memes, the quotes, the ideas were filtering down. So you get young people talking about, yeah, the Bible is like a Bronze Age book about a Bronze Age god, this tribal deity. Where did they get that from?

This stuff filtered down. In fact, I've often quoted this that Josh McDowell has said that objections that he ran into and would commonly confront on college campuses, encounter on college campuses, he was now encountering with kids 12, 13 years old. So apologetics has been there. Good solid apologetic answers to atheists has been there for years, but often the church has not known about the resources or felt the need for the resources. So we've got to strengthen our apologetics.

Got to understand the issues that folks are going through and then provide the resources for them. By the way, I have not read the book. It came out in 2017, but it's Justin Brierley. I've been on the show a number of times. Unbelievable. It's just this fabulous show with dialogue between atheists and believers or Christians with different backgrounds or a rabbi and a believer in Jesus and so on. It's an unbelievable broadcast.

Unbelievable question mark. Why after 10 years of talking with atheists, I'm still a Christian. I've got to get Justin on the air one day. I've been on his show a number of times.

In fact, I was on his show actually in their little studio there in England. One more thing to tackle, though. Josh Montau has spoken about this a lot as well. One reason why many have fallen away is the ubiquity of sin. Sinful opportunities.

Decadent opportunities. It's not just the flood of opiates into America. It's not just legalized pot. It's not just some of the drug addiction epidemic that is destroying so many lives.

But the ubiquity of porn and sexually explicit and illicit material, illicit in God's sight, it's everywhere. And if there is not increased vigilance, it's like you're a professional athlete. You're the fastest person in your state and you're competing against kindergarten children. You can walk and beat them. You're competing against high school athletes. You've got to push a little. You're competing against the best athletes in the nation.

You better get in the best shape you've ever been. Well, a lot of us are living as if we're competing against kindergarten children, to use the analogy. In other words, we don't realize the epidemic that's there because it just like fell into the whole of it. And look, I've often said this, but there's stuff available now that little kids are encountering at eight years old that I didn't know existed in my worst decadent, most sinful days as a heroin shooting 15, 16-year-old kid. It's there. It's there just with a click of a mouse or touch of a screen. And it's ubiquitous.

And it goes from sick to sicker to things that a normal person could not imagine, I don't even want to know about. But it's out there. And then with that, just the millions of other distractions, the constant options. I mean, you may have cable TV and 300 channels like that, nothing good to watch.

The saturation, constant sports and everything. So something's more neutral, something's explicitly sinful. They're all out there. We must cultivate discipline and holiness and separation. And we must teach God's grace that forgives and empowers.

Otherwise, we will get swallowed up as well. Otherwise, because iniquity abounds, our love will wax cold as well. These are some of the things that are destroying the faith of men. The good news is God continues to build his church. Jesus continues to build his messianic congregation.

Jew and Gentile, one in Messiah, full of the Spirit. He continues to build his ecclesia. The gates of hell, death itself will not prevail against him. So there is more than enough in God for every single one of us to overcome. Let us take hold of his grace and let us offer that grace and help everyone in need. And the most relevant book I've written on this, Has God Failed? Has God failed? Finding faith and you're not even sure God is ruling. Get it on our website, AskWickedBrown.org. I hope this is helpful.