Humans are not merely reasoning and thinking beings; we are also desiring and believing beings.

We don’t give our children rules to suppress them; we give them rules so they can live well. In the same way, the Bible doesn’t give ethical commandments to restrict people from flourishing—the very opposite is true. God, who is good, gives commandments because they are the only way to truly flourish. God’s rules point us to a deeper wisdom that

For many people, the communal practices of the church can serve as a powerful visual appeal to humans as worshiping beings.

The unbeliever’s problem is not knowledge; it is submission.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Our fundamental problem is vertical, which results in the horizontal issues we see all around us.

The wager. Perhaps the most familiar of Pascal’s apologetic methods is his wager, in which he essentially says to the unbeliever, “You cannot be completely certain that Christianity is or is not true. You have to make a bet either way. On the one hand, if Christianity is true and you reject Christ, then you will be faced with eternal damnation. On

in today’s social media-driven world, any argument that amounts to nothing more than, “You’re stupid and we all know it, so your claim cannot be true” is still generally considered a logical fallacy. The Christian virtues of gentleness, kindness, and compassion more effectively persuade skeptics of the truthfulness of the gospel.

Perhaps most alarming is that the majority of the young people interviewed in this study were unaware that they were practicing something different from historic Christianity. They assumed that the way they see God is the way Christians have always seen God. Yet what they adhere to is a hollowed-out version of Christianity that places self as the