Dr. Brown and Sean McDowell Discuss Reaching Today’s Youth

Author and apologist Sean McDowell with an important new book.

We'll talk about it now. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. It gets used and abused in probably equal measure, but today our culture is more confused than ever, young people more confused than ever, and Sean is not only an apologist in his own right, but someone who has a real heart, especially for the younger generation. So, professor, author, apologist Sean McDowell, welcome to the line of fire. Great to have you with us. Oh, man, Dr. Brown, it's a thrill to be here with you. So let me just ask something.

When we've interacted, it's always just been on focused issues and things like that. But I'm curious to know, what was it like growing up with your dad, one of the world's most foremost apologists and author of these mega bestsellers, more than a carpenter and evidence that demands a verdict? What was it like for you to grow up with that being your dad?

Well, I love that question. And I would say I didn't look at my dad through the lens of like, wow, my dad is Josh McDowell. Now, I knew he was a big deal because he had written those books essentially before I was born and more than a carpenter when I was one was speaking around the world. But to me, it was just like, is my dad present? Does he love my mom? Does he love us?

Is he around? And that's the lens through I looked at my father. And I can tell you one of the one of the number one things I would say about my dad is he is the same on stage and on camera as he is off. Nothing changes with him.

There's an integrity that's there. And I think for me, I never felt any pressure to go in his shoes. He never said, son, you'd be a good debater. You'd be good speaker. You should be an apologist.

I don't remember that once, Michael. The narrative I remember was, you know, son, whatever you do, just use it for the kingdom positively, coaching, teaching, whatever it is. And so now that I'm older and have chosen this path, it is such a joy to have a season to write with him, to speak with him and just do other ministry things together.

Yeah. And, you know, always the perspective of a child is going to be different than an outsider. I remember being at some conferences many years ago when our girls were growing up, maybe they were getting to be teenage years, you know, close to that. And all these people wanted to meet me. And and and I compare myself to your dad in terms of stature or prominence. But, you know, all these folks wanted to meet me. And in general, they said, you know, dad, all these people want to meet you, but but you're just dad. So this is so nobody is anybody.

I said, exactly. It's everybody's dad or mom or son or daughter. But thank God for the impact your dad had and that the biggest thing is that you saw him as being real, that he wasn't just some famous guy out there, but he was a real dad and he guided you in godly ways. Now, did his apologetics insight, emphasis impact you in terms of as you grew up, you had questions or you found paths of study? How did that trickle down that it's not just that you're a professor and a Christian author, but an apologist as well?

Yeah, I think it was a few things. My dad didn't sit us down and say, we're going to have these formal devotionals and formal studies where you're going to read my book and we're like, test you on it. Sometimes people think it was like that in my home.

And I'd be pretty confident to say it probably wasn't like that in your home either. But what my dad did is he just engaged us in conversation all the time. We're driving in the car and he would share something.

We're sitting at the dinner table. He just was regularly asking us questions. And one of the things that he did is, even if I asked him a question, he'd often go, he'd say, you know what? That's interesting.

Let me ask you about this. How would you answer that? If I made a point, he'd say, that's interesting.

I imagine somebody on the other side would say this. And he really trained us to think and to love truth for itself. I think a lot of people thought he would just like indoctrinate us as kids, me and my three sisters, but he really didn't.

He modeled, he taught it, engaged the conversation, asked us questions. And without realizing, I just kind of became the kind of person that was curious and asked questions and wanted to know. But I think what really sunk in is I went through a period of pretty significant doubt when I was about 19 years old. And I was on the internet. This is like mid 90s. And this is the first time you kind of Google and search. You actually couldn't Google, but you could search things. And some of the secular web began responding to my dad's book evidence that demands a verdict.

And there were doctors, lawyers, historians writing these responses. And I just had never seen that kind of challenge before. And I knew my parents met well, but that was the first time I was like, whoa, what if they're wrong about this?

A lot is at stake. And you know, to make long story short, I told my dad and he's like the eternal optimist. He's like, son, I think that's great. You can't just believe because I believe you need to seek after truth and know I love you anyways. And I think it was because of the relationship with him that I felt no need to rebel.

I just wanted to know what was true. So I think looking back now, if I said, why do I do apologetics? It'd be really three reasons. Number one is I have a heart for young people. And you work with young people for five minutes, and they're going to ask apologetic related questions.

They just are worldview questions. Number two is just seeing the love and example in my family. And number three, my own story, experiencing it and just wiring as a person who wants to know and think.

Yeah. And I'm so glad that you shared all that. And the way your dad reacted is the key thing. We're secure in having the truth. We welcome the hard questions. I have a book coming out in May called Has God Failed You? And we deal with many of the reasons why people fall away from the faith. And there's a chapter in the book called Permission to Doubt. And it says in Jude, just one little verse you never hear preached on, have mercy on those who doubt. And there's a doubt that's the result of hardened unbelief and double mindedness that gets rebuked in the New Testament. But then there's the doubt of struggling to believe, is there a God or does God care about me individually or is the Bible true?

And when we get all defensive in our posture, then that scares people off when we welcome that. That's a great question. You know, I never thought of that. Excellent question. Let's dig together because we know that there's truth. So that really does say a lot.

And it's so important to have that perspective. So, Sean, dealing with with the younger generation, what's different now than, say, when your dad started doing apologetics? Well, that's a great question. I would say what I asked him that when we were updating the book Evidence Demands Verdict, I said, Dad, what's changed in culture? And he said in kind of the 60s and 70s, the free speech movement, he first wrote Evidence in 1972. He said the problem was external. People looked out and said the problem is war. The problem is something's wrong outside in culture. Now people look within and say there's something broken within me. So that's almost like the question is shifted from externally to internally.

And I thought that's a really interesting observation. Another thing that I think is different is we're seeing skyrocketing levels of depression and loneliness and anxiety raising and you really saw hockey stick increase across demographics in 2012. So that loneliness and that hurt, I think shapes the way we have to do apologetics. The third thing that's changed is I think, broadly speaking, at least 50s, 60s and 70s, our culture didn't always follow it and there was some hypocrisy. But if you said you're a Christian, that was like welcomed and you're supposed to believe that Christian ideas are good. Well, as you know, as much as anybody, now if you say you're Christian and you take Christian ethics and particular sexual ethics seriously, you are bad and you are harming society and you're a bigot. So the kinds of questions that used to be, he told me when he was originally doing apologetics, he'd hear things like prove it, give me evidence. Now it's like you're a bigot. What right do you have to say that? So that focus amongst other things, I think those are three big shifts in how it's been done.

Yeah, massively big. Friends, I'm speaking with Sean McDowell, his brand new book, Chasing Love, Sex, Love, and Relationship in a Confused Culture. I heard your dad say at a meeting a few years ago that the types of objections he would run into with college age students, he was now running into with 12 and 13 year olds. Obviously they filtered their way down through internet and obviously a 12 or 13 year old repeating a meme is different than maybe a 19 year old learning something in college, the capacity even to think it through or to understand it. And then my friend, Professor Daryl Bach had commented that in years past, we could say it's true because it's in the Bible.

Now we have to say it's in the Bible because it's true. So just fundamentals are really thrown and messed up and nowhere is it seen more than in areas of sex and sexuality. So Sean, in writing this book, who is your target audience and what were you hoping to do through the book?

So I'm writing for high school students and the hope to do is really a few things. Number one, help them see that the biblical worldview is not only true, but it's good and it's beautiful when it comes to sex and marriage. Because the perception right now is not only that it's false, but it's antiquated, it's irrelevant, it's harmful, it doesn't apply to me.

And I want to say no, no, no, actually it does. And God gave these commands in the beginning because he is good and his commands are to bless you and to bless the larger society. So I'm trying to flip the narrative and say the question is not how I find love in society.

The bigger question is how do I love God and love other people in the way that it's described in scripture? And I'm kind of raising the bar. I say to young people, I say, look, you know that the only things that are really valuable are things you've sacrificed for in your life. It's much easier to take the narrative of what our culture believes about these issues.

It's harder, but more rewarding and meaningful to follow the biblical sexual ethic. All right, parents, did you hear this? This is addressing high school kids. And Sean, you get the letters, emails, calls, I get them all the time dealing with critical issues, sexuality issues, confusion with high school kids. And they're always asking, where do I go?

What resource can you recommend? In fact, I've recommended a few of yours already over the years because you do have a heart for the younger generation and understand how to communicate with them. So explain the title, Chasing Love. Is that what it's all about? Is that why people are giving themselves to all kinds of sexual sin and there's so much confusion because they're looking for love, but not understanding what they're looking for? Yeah, I love this question.

The title actually came from the publisher. And as I thought about it, I was like, I don't want to chase the love of what our culture says is love. I want to reframe in the minds of young people what it means to live a meaningful, significant life, which is not seeking the world's definition of love, which is do what feels good and define yourself and don't judge anybody. A biblical worldview says sacrifice and lay down your life for another. It's loving God and loving other people. So I'm basically saying a culture in which everybody is seeking a faulty view of love. What does it mean to seek a real view of love, which is loving God and loving other people? So, Michael, I'm just trying to reframe it in the eyes of these young people because they've adopted so many faulty views from our culture that aren't biblical. I don't even think most parents, youth pastors, young people even realize the level of faulty ideas they've adopted. Yeah.

In the book, you deal with some of the myths. Sex is not a big deal. Sex is merely a private act.

Sexual intercourse is all that matters for purity, et cetera. So we're going to get into all of this, the new book by Sean McDowell, Chasing for Love. We'll break it down more, tell you.

In fact, there's a special offer where you can get the book and get some great interviews with it. We'll be right back with Sean McDowell. 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.

Hey, friends, thanks for joining us today, one of these days where I'm not taking calls. And if right now, as you're watching this broadcast or listening to this broadcast, there is some cataclysmic world news taking place, we're not commenting on it. This is a focused interview with Sean McDowell, his brand new book, Hot Off the Press, Chasing Love, Sex, Love and Relationships in a Confused Culture. And not only is the book super relevant as the title tells you, I mean, you know that the moment you hear the title, but it is addressed to high school kids. This is not addressed to parents so that they can then tell their high school kids, so parents read it, of course, absolutely. But this is one you can give directly to your high school aged kid.

And your high school aged kid has probably been exposed to more stuff than you realize, even if you homeschooled your child. Sean, where can they get the book? Any bookseller that they want to go to, they can find it.

So the publisher, they go to Bob Holman, of course, it's on Amazon. One easy way also is if you go to my website, seanmcdowell.org, and you order this just for a short period of time more, I'm sending people interviews with James Dobson, with my father, Josh McDowell and Richard Ross, who founded the true love weights campaign. And I asked him a lot of the tough questions about purity culture, and they give some wisdom of like a lifetime of teaching about purity back. So if somebody orders it through going through my website, we will send them those interviews. Excellent.

All right, friends. So that's, those would be some choice interviews. And what what did you learn by speaking with these old timers? These men have been on the front lines of the battle for sexual purity for generation plus? Are their views just antiquated?

Are they out of touch with reality? What you know, talking to Dr. Dobson to your dad, what did you learn from it? Well, I had these conversations with my dad just all the time, but they're not always public.

So we're kind of revealing some of these things that kind of behind the scenes conversation that my dad and I will have. Excuse me, the one with Richard Ross is very interesting because he started the true love weights movement in 1993. And there's been a huge amount of criticism of purity culture that's come out over the past five or 10 years with people like Joshua Harris, who wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye, kind of renouncing his book. Ultimately, he and his wife got divorced, essentially saying he's no longer Christian anymore.

So there's been huge criticism back. And I asked him some of the tough questions and he made some nuances that I think were interesting. He said, for example, a lot of people have pointed to certain studies in which purity rings are told, don't really help a kid be more sexually pure. Maybe they'll have sex later, maybe one or less partner, but doesn't really produce the results people thought that it would. And I asked him that and he said, Well, you got to keep in mind there's a difference between a group just saying we're going to put pressure on kids to take this and they feel motivated to do so because they don't want to send the message to their peers. They don't care about sexual purity versus a young person, which is the way true love weights intended it, who says, I understand what God's design is and I want to make this commitment and I'm choosing to wear the ring.

Studies don't reflect those nuances. So I thought that was a very helpful perspective by him. He told the story of how true love weight starts. He said it didn't start as this big campaign, but actually some students in his youth group came to him and said, We want to be a part of a movement encouraging other young people to choose sexual purity. So there's just a lot of narrative that's left out.

Now, I think sexual purity is a whole the sexual purity culture deserves some criticism, but it was very helpful to hear from them to kind of clarify what some of the original intent was. All right. So let's say that you're sitting down with a high school kid and what you're what you're going to do is kind of disciple them through the material in this book. So just start off. You start off with with an invitation. You divide the book into into three basic parts, but you you start off with an invitation and opening chapters.

Who will you trust? The sexual ethic of Jesus. So have a conversation with a young person about the beginning contents of your book. Well, what I would do this young person, I would sit down and I would just ask him questions like what do you want out of life?

Who do you want to become? What role does God play in your discipleship and life as a whole? Because sexuality is one piece of a larger life committed to Jesus. In fact, how we act out in our sexual lives, I think is really reflective of our larger commitments.

So I would probably ask a young person a lot of those questions and listen. And then ultimately, I might bring it back to the garden, because one thing that's really interested me, Michael, is why is the first commandment in Genesis? And as an Old Testament scholar, I'd love to know what you think about this. Why is the first commandment to Adam and Eve not to eat a fruit? Why didn't God say, Adam, don't murder Eve or something like that? Like, that's an easy commandment to follow. And by the way, not eating fruit. Fruit is meant to be eaten.

It seems counterintuitive. But to me, what I think it is, I think God gives a commandment that seems counterintuitive to us, because that's the only way an infinite creator God can be in a relationship with a finite creature. We have to trust God, even when we don't understand and things don't make sense, are we going to trust God? So with this student, I would have questions. I'd say, who do you think God really is? Do you think God is good? Because at the end of the day, every kid is listening to something.

They're listening to TikTok videos, Netflix, stars, sportscasters, podcasts, you name it. The question is, are they going to listen to God and believe that God is really good? So I would start with their bigger questions of discipleship and ask how sexuality fits into that. And I would bring them as quickly as I could to the character of God and just say, who do you want to be in your life? Do you really trust God? And then that would play itself out in the specific conversations we have about God's design for sex. All right. So you're assuming well, you're not you're not assuming anything.

You're trying to reach as many people as you can. But obviously, you have to deal with the issue of forgiveness, because a lot of kids have messed up here. They've been exposed to all kinds of things. And again, even good, godly parents often don't know the pressure kids can can get under what their peers are doing, what they've been exposed to themselves. Do you think that these kids even though they they may have pushed away some of our ideas of God are still dealing with a lot of guilt?

I do think so. I think there's some guilt with non Christian kids, and they might not always understand why. But there's something in their heart that tells them they shouldn't look at pornography. There's something that tells them they shouldn't hook up with a lot of different girls or boys. So I think there's some surface. There's some deeper guilt we can bring up.

But I think a lot of Christians who've been taught this explicitly, definitely have some guilt. So one of the things I say I got an email from a girl maybe three years ago, and I don't get an email exchanges for obvious reasons, girls, and I connected her with another woman to kind of help her out. But I just sent an email said, Hey, I want to connect you with this friend. And I tagged her an email. But I said, I just want you to know one thing. I said, God loves you deeply.

Please know that amidst your guilt. And this other woman took over and handle the conversation. I didn't hear from this girl for three years.

She just sent a message into my website. She said, I just want you to know that that comment wrecked me. I felt so dirty. I felt so sinful. I didn't think that God could love me.

And the fact that that's all you said to me. She said, I haven't looked at porn since. So yes, there's a lot of kids hurting. And there's never I mean, you know, this, there's never been a time where sexual pressure is so in the face of young people, just one click away than the history of the world. The question is not has, you know, which young people have regrets and made mistakes in the area of sex.

They all have. The question is, how much have they and are they willing to come forward regardless of their past and experience that forgiveness? My friends, I'm speaking with Sean McDowell, brand new book, cut off the press, chasing love, sex, love and relationships in a confused culture.

And of course, in the book, Sean, you do deal with the issue of porn. And you know, my testimony before I came to faith, I was a heavy drug user. So from 1969 to 1971, ages of 14 to 16, I started getting high and quickly was doing hard drugs, shooting heroin, using LSD day and night and smoking pot, shooting speed, whatever, you know, broke into a doctor's office with a friend, just do some crazy and steal drugs. And, you know, we were reckless.

And of course, heavy drinking and all kinds of wild things. And kids suddenly became very promiscuous during that time in the late 60s, you know, watch the shift in front of my eyes and fell into the sin of the day. And yet if someone was interested in porn, maybe you have to find, you know, your friend's dad had Playboy magazine, maybe, or you can go to a porn theater, you know, too young to get us around shooting heroin. And I got basically no access to porn.

There's a whole world out there barely even know about. And yet you get eight year olds with cell phones that are seeing porn. And the average age of exposure is maybe 11, some say it's even getting lower.

And you mentioned a gal, teenage gal watching porn. So and your dad's put out stunningly staggering statistics about this. So just talk straight about the real pandemic of porn that's infecting young people right now.

Oh, my goodness, this chapter was just heartbreaking to research, just to see the number of young people, Christians and non Christians who wrestle with this. Number two, how deeply it affects young people and all people the way they see the world. And number three, even how it affects porn stars. I did some research on some porn stars who've come out and reflect back on their experience and say, this is not what you see on camera. There's physical damage, there's emotional abuse. And so it was a sobering chapter.

When I do a chapter like that, I always tell my wife, I say, I'm researching this, I just want you to know, because it can start affect you not even looking at it, but just researching it. And the bottom line is the truth is young people are getting their script about sex from porn. And porn says sex is just a fun act. Nobody gets hurt. It has no consequences.

It doesn't mean anything. And so kids bringing this into their marriage relationships, or their future relationships, and it just damages them. So this is one of the epidemics with this generation is pornography.

Yeah. And friends, this is why the book is so super important. You may think of adults dealing with these issues.

Of course, they do right in the church, pastors, leaders deal with them right in the church. This is the real world in which we live. But there are couples, married couples in their 20s that are basically in sexless relationships because they burnt out with a false meaning of sex in their teens and can't even live.

Normally young men taking Viagra in their 20s, literally. All right, we'll be right back. 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.

Hey, friends, welcome to The Line of Fire. Michael Brown here, not taking calls today and not commenting on breaking news, however massive it might be. Actually, this show with Sean McDowell talking about his brand new book, Chasing Love, Sex, Love and Relationships in a Confused Culture. We have prerecorded this to air while I am away for a week, just getting away to pray, be with the Lord, do some writing. So literally, I don't know, the moon and sun could fall from the sky, but we won't be talking about it on the air because today as we're recording this broadcast, the book's about to come out by the time it airs. The book will be right out.

It's one of these things. We could air this in 10 years. It's going to be just as relevant, maybe even more relevant. We're focused on this one topic, so whatever else is going on in the world around you, boy, this is urgent. Sean, you're especially targeting high school kids with this book, which I'm just so thrilled with. As I mentioned earlier, I've recommended a number of your books when people say, hey, that's good for young people and answering the questions and things.

I'm frequently recommending your stuff. So to have this one focused on the subjects is so important. But before we dig in deeper to what went wrong with purity culture, emphases in the past, what was right about them, I want to just throw out a larger question and then use this to refocus us. Why do young kids cut themselves?

Oh, I think that's a great question. I think the research shows at the heart of it is just a crying out and a pain that's deep. I've had some young, even girls who cut themselves say, my pain hurts so much and I can't control it. But when I physically cut myself, number one, it feels like I'm relieving that pain.

Ironically, the pain feels good, but I feel like I can control this as well. I think the cutting is a symptom of a deeper loneliness and brokenness in the lives of young people. And how pervasive is this? Gosh, I don't know studies on cutting exactly how many young people do. You heard a ton about cutting 10 years ago and five years ago.

So I don't know the numbers to it, but I'll tell you something really interesting is I'm sure you've seen the book Irreversible Damage by Schreier. And she argues that this 4,000% increase in what they call rapid onset gender dysphoria. 4,000% increase in the UK is driven by the same brokenness that in the past a lot of young people would turn to cutting. So I think both of these are larger symptoms of a loneliness and brokenness in the lives of our young people. And you think of it that it goes from cutting. So you're cutting your arms, your legs, and either trying to feel because you're so numb, you can't feel anything. You're trying to feel something, or it distracts you from the agonizing emotional pain. And you think, why are kids hurting so much?

The last thing you're going to do is criticize them. It's like, why are you hurting so much? But then you think go from that to having a doctor cut off breasts or healthy body parts or mutilate or change. It's another form of cutting. It's a shocking thing. But I raise it just to say that there's a certain pain, loneliness, despair that many young people are going through that we might not know.

Looking at them from the outside, we might not know that. And one of my younger colleagues was a youth pastor some years back in Texas. And he had a good-sized youth group. So these were the older youth and into maybe college age years. And he asked them out of curiosity, how many of you have ever cut yourselves thinking it'd be a handful of the kids there?

And they were most raised in church and stuff. And it was like 80, 90% raised their hands. He was completely shocked.

He was absolutely shocked. And again, it's just one anecdote and I don't know stats, numbers, et cetera, but there's something going on. There's a pain. And then when you add sex, sexuality into it, as powerful as that can be, the pull, the relationships, the desire to please, the instant gratification, whatever it is, now you've got this toxic mix.

You get the loneliness, the pain. Now you've got the perversion of what sex is about, kids growing up with porn as a model. So you've got massive confusion. And in the midst of this, for some years now, there's been the purity culture to say, hey, I kissed dating goodbye, the Josh Harris book. Now he's renounced all of that. So there was obviously a reaction against just the promiscuity and sex for recreation. It's separated from procreation.

But what was right in the purity culture and what went wrong? You know, the question you made a moment ago about cutting, I think the way I try to frame it in the book and help kids realize is that an addiction is something that's used to fill a void that a relationship is meant to fill. In other words, we are made for relationships with God and with other people. And when those relationships aren't there and they're not healthy and intimate, we suffer.

And we've all experienced this during the quarantine and the COVID outbreak, because you can only stare at a screen so much. So what happens is something like cutting or something like, say, pornography or sexual activity becomes a counterfeit to fill what a relationship is meant to fill. And that's why it might soothe them temporarily, but ultimately leaves them even more broken and hurting and desperate for the real relationships God has meant them to have. Now purity culture, I think when you talk about purity culture, there's so many different things that are thrown into this.

It's somewhat nebulous. It's come to mean any bad experience somebody had with a book or a speaker in church can be thrown into the lump of what's called purity culture, often without careful nuance. So we have to keep that in mind. But I think one of the messages that was so often proclaimed by the church, unfortunately, was what's been called the sexual prosperity gospel, that if you just follow this formula, which typically meant don't have sex, that's basically what it meant, then you'll find that spouse in the future and you will have endless sexual bliss in the future. It wasn't worded that way.

But that was a message that was often given. Well, five, 10, 15 years after that, you have a lot of people saying, look, I'm still single. You never taught me how to love God when I'm single. People say I got married, but my marriage and the sex life didn't work out as I thought it would. And that's because that aspect of purity culture was not teaching a biblical sexual ethic.

So that's one of the problems. And I don't look, I think the studies show pretty consistently that people who follow a biblical pattern for sex, one man, one woman, one flesh, one lifetime, are more likely to report higher satisfaction in their sex lives. A lot of studies show that. But that's not the motivation for somebody to be sexually pure. That's the fruit and the benefit, because it makes sense if God designed sex, then those who follow it would be most likely to experience a kind of blessing of living according to our design. The motivation is, and you know this, Leviticus 18, be holy because I am holy.

Follow me because I am good and my commandments are for your good. So purity culture got some things right, but didn't always root it in God's character and ultimately root it in scripture. In fact, one more thing it almost feels like to me, sometimes in purity culture, we took the script of the world and the world kind of sends a message that sex outside of marriage is exciting and fulfilling and awesome. And the church kind of said, oh no, no, you think you have good sex, come to church and we'll give you better sex.

Right? That's the message we sent to kids. And I just don't, that's playing by the rule book of the culture rather than saying actually God's commands are good and he's worthy of trust.

Yeah. I mean, I love the way you put it, but you're absolutely right. It is playing into the mentality of the culture. And the fact is we serve God, whether it brings us great benefits or not. I mean, look, you think of a culture where you know, if you follow Jesus, you're going to get persecuted. You may, you may lose your family. And I remember hearing one preacher say this, he said in America, we tell people, you know, you're having problems on your job, come to Jesus or bless your job problems in your marriage, come to Jesus or bless your marriage problems in your family, come to Jesus or bless your family. And there can often be truth to that. We know when the Lord works in our lives, he said, but the country I preach, he said, we have to tell them, if you have a job, if you follow Jesus, you're going to lose your job. If you're married, your spouse is going to turn against you.

If you have family, they won't talk to you. You know, I work in India every year and my friend that baptizes people, former untouchable stone for preaching the gospel, men that we've laid hands on and sent out to preach. I mean, at least five so far have been martyred. And when he baptizes people, he asks them at the end of their confession, are you willing to follow Jesus to your, to your last breath, to your last drop of blood? Another brother working in the Muslim world, the middle East said that when they baptize people, a former Muslim, before they baptize them, they ask them, are you willing to suffer for Jesus? Are you willing to die for Jesus?

So here in America, we have to tell them, Hey, I'm staying now. You'll have the best sex later. It's like, obviously we haven't done the best job of really making disciples. But that being said, what you emphasize in your book Chasing Love is that there is a divine order of things. So for example, if, if there's a husband and wife that have kept themselves pure to marriage, and now they're happily married and have a healthy sex life, they'll never get an STD from one another. They'll never get a sexually transmitted disease.

But if they do the same thing with someone they're not married to, they might. It's just one of these things that within God's order and parameter there's blessing. So in Chasing Love, you talk to young people about God's design for sexuality and Jesus' ethics. So unpack some of that for us.

Yeah, I'd be happy to. One of the questions that I ask audiences, actually Christian and not, especially young people, I say what would the world be like if people actually followed the sexual teachings of Jesus? One man, one woman, one flesh, one lifetime. And just like you said, there'd be no, there'd be no pornography or victims of sex abuse. There'd be no divorce. There'd be no sexually transmitted diseases. There'd be no crude sexual humor.

There'd be no husbands trading in their wives for younger trophy wives. I mean, it's obvious that Jesus' teaching would be for the collective good of all of us as a whole. And by the way, he taught this 2000 years ago, long before the word homosexuality, at least in the modern sense was even used, long before the Me Too movement. And that's because there is a design and a purpose for sex. That's really where I go in this book. And I know you do this a lot, Michael, in your writings is, is there a designer?

Has he created us to live a certain way? And what is that design? So I had a smartphone students this week and I said, it's only when you know the purpose of smartphone and use it accordingly. It's not a scuba tank.

It's not a Frisbee that it's actually set free. Well, the same is true with us. We've been made by a designer who wants us to flourish in relationships. But that only happens when we orient our lives to his design and live accordingly.

All right, friends, the new book, literally hot off the press, Chasing Love, Sex, Love and Relationships and a Confused Culture with Sean McDowell. And the thing that blesses me the most is not just what he's talking about, but who he's talking to. Parents get this. Plenty of time to get this for a holiday gift.

The world can't cancel that, right? Get these into the hands of young people, the youth pastors, buy them by the bunch. 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. Well, still got a few minutes left to get into the contents of this very important new book by Sean McDowell, Chasing Love, literally hot off the press. So you can get it wherever you get it online, Amazon, Christian book, Barnes & Noble. If you use Christian bookstores, you'll have it there. Also, Sean, there's a special offer that you have on your website. Tell our listeners about that.

There is. So this book is on sexual purity for students. So I thought it'd be interesting if I went back to three of kind of the fathers of sexual purity in the church, my father Josh McDowell, James Dobson of Folks in the Family, and Richard Ross, who started the True Love Waits campaign, and interview them and ask them how the conversation has changed, wisdom for today, but also get them to respond to some of the critiques of purity culture. So if you order it through my website, we will send you those three interviews, and they're pretty interesting and fascinating. All right. So the website again. Oh, I'm sorry. Sean McDowell.org. Got it.

Sean McDowell.org. And I'm thinking when I got saved, yes, I experienced the joy and goodness of God. And I realized it was something on a different level than any drug high I ever had or any music high or relation high, anything. I realized it was different. But it gave me a revelation of the love of God, which brought me into deep conviction of sin. And because of which I then turned away and said, I'll never put a needle in my arm again, etc. But it wasn't a matter of, wow, this high is better than the other highs.

So I'll exchange the one for the other. It was that the love and goodness of God revealed the depth of my sin and the depth of his kindness, because of which I turned away in the same way. Friends that were sleeping around and stuff when they got saved, they didn't stop sleeping around so that they could have better sex and marriage.

They stopped sleeping around because it was displeasing in God's sight. So be holy. That's the first and foremost incentive. So in your book, you've got you've got three sections to it.

I mentioned earlier some of the myths that you deal with. Marriage will fulfill your ultimate relational needs. Marriage will get rid of your sin. Marriage.

Sex is boring. But do you have a full chapter in the book just focused on the subject of pornography? I do.

Yes, I. So all right. Well, hang on.

I just want to run through this quick. What about cohabitation? You have a chapter just on that. Yep. How about divorce? Yep. Homosexuality? Yep. Same sex marriage? Yes.

Transgender issues? You got it. Sexual abuse?

Yep. OK, so friends, their whole chapters in the book talking to your high school kids or if you're a high school, I know there are many high schoolers watching. Listen, this book deals with it.

In other words, it's not that challenge is going to talk about lovely Christian principles and praise the Lord and we can be very happy in Jesus. He's dealing with real life issues, including sexual abuse. How prevalent is that today? Oh, my goodness, this chapter was heartbreaking. I've never written or spoken on the topic of sexual abuse. And really how I knew about this is my father, who, you know, he was sexually abused for seven years growing up on the farm where he lived till he was old enough to slam the man who lived there against a wall and say, if you touch me again, I'll kill you. So in writing that was long before he was a believer.

And writing the chapter, I talked a lot with my dad to just get his take and his perspective on the research. And it is incredibly prevalent. Now, there's different kinds of sex abuse, of course, from somebody who gets a rude, hurtful sexual comment to more aggressive physical kind of sex abuse.

But I forget the numbers. It seems like it's almost a quarter to a third of young women report some kind of sexual abuse. And it's high with men as well. So the sad part is a lot of people who are abused. Well, I just got a question this week from a student that said, if I was sexually abused, do I have to ask for forgiveness? And when I got that question, I instantly got teary-eyed.

I thought, oh, my goodness, you are taken advantage of. And you somehow think it's your fault. So that's a message we've got to get to young people that, as I heard you say in an earlier segment, you look out over any youth group, it is far more that have been sexually abused than you could imagine.

And many of them have told and shared it with nobody. Yeah. And then when you deal with other issues, homosexuality, transgenderism, I remember a few years ago I was in Italy and I brought our oldest granddaughter, who at that time was 16, I believe, and her cousin, who was 17. I brought them along with me for the trip. And the deal was that when we were in Sicily, they could hang out with the young people there by day after the meeting at night, you know, the Christian young people and just come to the night services.

And then we'd have a day to tour Rome together and just have some fun before we left. And one day they showed up, it was the late afternoon session, and I was teaching on, can you be gay and Christian? And I said, oh, girls, you didn't have to come for this.

They said, no, it just worked out better with the people driving us. And I said, I guess it's relevant for you too. Now, bear in mind, both of them raised in the faith, the 16 year old in Christian school, the 17 year old at this point was in a public school. So 16 year old granddaughter, she said, oh yeah, right at the end of semester, two girls in my class started dating. I said, does the school know about you?

She goes, no, it happened right at the end of the semester. So came out as lesbians. And then the other girl, 17 year old, she said, yeah, I got a few trans friends now and they think all Christians hate them.

So I'm just loving on them. And I thought, yeah, that's, that's the world they're in. Parents come in to see me, pastor and his wife recently, and they've got a great relationship with their teenage daughter, but found out that she's got a very, very deep emotional bond with a lesbian girl online. And that's how they met and, and, you know, raised, raised in the Lord, a pastor in California, a fine church told me that all of his children are basically adult or, or, or very close to that, you know, so late teens and, and so on, early twenties. And he said, all my kids differ with me on homosexuality raised in the faith, but obviously more impacted by the culture.

So you tackle all of this head on from porn to sexual abuse, to homosexuality, to transgenderism. And yet it's a book filled with hope and encouragement, even, even shouting to the kids, you can do it. So give some encouragement. We've talked about a lot of heavy stuff. Give some encouragement. What's God doing?

What are you seeing? What are you telling these folks? Well, I, I would say a couple of things. I work on a smaller level.

I teach a high school class part-time in the morning at Biola full-time, but I teach at a private school where my kids are at because I have my son in class and I just enjoy working with students. And we, I've asked some questions recently. I said to my students, is it loving to take a girl to get an abortion? We talked about that.

We've talked about pornography. And I'm telling you that young people today, when you give them permission to speak, when you don't shame them, when you listen and you bring it back to biblical principles, they want to know how to navigate culture. I was at a Christian school speaking one time and I do this role play or I'll role play a Muslim, I'll role play a Mormon, I'll role play an atheist to get Christians to defend their faith. And I started to role play defending same sex marriage. And like two minutes into it, Michael, this girl stops and she goes, okay, I want to know how to defend a biblical view of marriage, but I don't even know where to start.

I think she summed up where so many young people are today. They're asking questions. They want help, but a lot of parents are not willing to have that conversation. They're not willing to step in uncomfortably and discuss it with kids. My dad and I were speaking at an event in another state all weekend on like a biblical view of sexuality. And this teenager came up to his mom and he just said, thanks for giving your talk on pornography, but not only saying it's wrong, explaining why.

Nobody explained that to me before. So I'm telling you, kids have questions and in the right context, they want to know what to do with their bodies. They want to know how far is too far. They want to make sense of the world.

And I'm telling you, adults can speak into their lives if we're just willing to do it. And one really interesting thing with young people today is that many of them, Christian and non-Christian, are delaying marriage. They can be 25, they can be 30 years old and they're not married and they seem happy to be single. Now, obviously some are not sexually pure, but others are seeking to be and just delaying marriage for various reasons. You talk about Jesus and singleness. What does Jesus have to say to us about singleness? I love that you asked this question because in previous sexual purity campaigns, oftentimes people wouldn't even mention singleness. But biblically speaking, Matthew 19, 1 Corinthians 7, being married and single are two equal ways of honoring and serving the Lord. I mean, like Jesus was deeply relationally fulfilled. He was fully in the image of God, if anybody can, and he was single.

So I don't think we've done a good job in the church. Singles get the second prize. You have your little single group over there. If someone's 25 or 30, they're not married, we're going to make jokes like, hey, I'm going to connect you and get you hooked up with my friend over here, whatever, without realizing if that sends a message, there's something wrong with single people.

I actually, at the school I work at, there's a single educator there, and I was printing out the book and I forgot it there. She saw the chapter of singleness, read it. And she told me, she goes, I was in tears because people don't talk about the challenges of being single, but also how beautiful it is. And it can be a way of honoring the Lord. And you and I know this, Michael, because we have both spoken on the LGBTQ issue. What happens is sometimes in the church, we hold up marriage so high without holding up the goodness of singleness. And then we tell people who are divorced, you can get remarried, whether we think that's right or wrong, that's what the church often does. But people with same sex attraction, you can't get married. And then the world says, hey, you can have everything you want, you can get married. And we wonder why people don't find the biblical narrative as compelling and powerful.

Yeah. So friends in Chasing Love, Sean McDowell doesn't just show us what's wrong, but why it's wrong and better still points us to what is right and why it's right and how God's ways are really best. So a super timely book, a super important subject and addressing the audience that I believe needs to get this the most because they've grown up in a confused culture and foundations have been destroyed.

Time to rebuild them. So Sean McDowell, Chasing Love, especially written for high school students. Hey, Sean, thanks for doing all this. May the Lord mightily bless the distribution of this book. Appreciate you, my friend. All right.