Apologetics with Kevin Conover of Educate for Life

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Welcome to The Wrap Report with Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Okay, welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. I'm glad to have you with us.

I am your host, Andrew Rappaport. I am with Striving for Eternity Ministries, and today we are going to talk about a topic that I love, which is apologetics.

Now I got to meet our guest out in California. I was actually on his show, on his podcast,

Educate for Life and his radio show, and now it's his turn. It was kind of,

I think maybe I guilted him to come in. Since I was on his show, he had to come in here and give you guys some great education for life.

I am joined by Kevin Conover. So Kevin, welcome to The Wrap Report. Hey, thank you so much for having me on,

Andrew. I really appreciate it and looking forward to having a good conversation here. Yeah, we were out in California. I was trying to take a vacation.

Doesn't usually work that way with me, but I did a lot of ministry during the vacation. But one of it was to be out with you in the radio show, the radio station there, and be able to record for your podcast.

And so if folks haven't listened to that, and I think I did share that when we were doing the video, but if you haven't heard it, go to Educate for Life, How Kinds, Not Species Originated.

So that's the episode to look for. When we were out there, we were together, for me at least, the time went really quick and I wanted more time with you.

So having you on here gives me that advantage. So let's start off from my audience who may not know you, know your background.

You were sharing with me a little bit in the studio, but can you give your background, your testimony, what got you into apologetics?

Yeah, well, you know, I grew up in a Christian family, but for me, I kind of took it for granted when

I was growing up that, okay, Christianity's true, this is what my parents taught me, this is what it is. But as soon as I started going to school, you know, starting in elementary school,

I began to be presented with, obviously, information that was contradicting what my parents were teaching me.

I went to public school my whole life, and so elementary, then junior high, then high school. And in high school, it really started to heat up because I had a teacher that was very hostile to Christianity.

He used to quote, he actually misquoted the Bible frequently in my class, that was in 11th grade.

And I ended up deciding to start bringing my Bible to class because I wanted to make sure that whatever he was quoting was actually in the

Bible. And lo and behold, one day he's quoting the Bible again, and he was always being derogatory towards the

Bible. I open the Bible up, I look for the scripture, it's not there. And I'm thinking to myself,

I can't believe this. And I raised my hand and I said, you know, that's actually not in the Bible. And he said, yes, it is.

And I said, no, it's not. And he said, well, how do you know? And I said, well, I have a Bible right here. And he said, bring it up here.

I brought it up to him. This was in front of the whole class. He looked at it. He said, oh, I guess it's not in the

Bible. And from then on, he was much more careful about what he presented as scripture because he knew that I was checking up on what he was saying.

And I had several conflicts with him throughout the year. But that caused me to really start to look into Christianity more in depth because I had friends,

I had a good friend from Bosnia who had come here as a refugee. And she was telling me that Islam was true and had another guy in my chemistry class who was a

Jehovah's Witness. And he was telling me that, you know, the Trinity was false. And so all of a sudden, I was kind of back on my heels and felt like, man,

I better really take some time and look into how do I know what I believe is true. And what was amazing to me is that as I began to look into these things and started doing research,

I started reading books, I started, you know, buying DVDs and or not DVDs at the time it was

VHS, but I started looking at these things. I was amazed at the amount of evidence that demonstrated that Christianity was true.

And these other perspectives, these other worldviews were actually not true. And for me, that boosted my confidence in the

Lord and in the Bible and actually caused me to want to tell more people. I was like, man, more people have to know about this.

And ultimately, I ended up through some friends encouraging me. We together started a club called

The Answers Club my junior year of high school. And the whole thing revolved around we want to provide answers to people's questions about God and the

Bible. And we ended up in the yearbook and everything. And I had amazing stories of how

God worked through it. And people came to know the Lord because of just being challenged by these questions and then taking the time to go out and find answers.

It absolutely blew me away. And I saw so many people excited to know the

Lord as they realized, hey, this isn't just some mythical fairy tale or something that I have to blindly believe in.

This is clearly abundantly true. And that really started me down the whole road.

I'm 43 now, and that was all the way back in high school. And that passion has just flowed out into my life because I just, you see the

Lord change people's lives. And there's nothing really more fulfilling than seeing somebody come to know the

Lord and their life radically changing from potentially, you know, going in a bad direction, hopeless to hopeful and excited and their relationships getting better, their families getting better, people, you know, just growing in the

Lord and just having a positive influence for the kingdom of God. Now, clearly you have exposed that you're of a older generation like I am, because we both understand what

VHS is. Yeah. Beta and VHS, right?

Oh, yeah. I understand that debate. Some of the younger listeners go, beta? What's that?

Betamax? They don't even know that one. Well, beta is now a video game term, meaning the pre -

Well, it's a software term. Yeah, a beta version. For some of the younger generation that may understand, it's kind of like when they had

DVDs and there was HD -DVD versus Blu -ray. Kind of think there. All right.

And now everyone's going HD -DVD? I don't even remember that. Yeah. That's even the younger generation. So, doing apologetics to the generation we have coming up,

I mean, you think about those that are in high school, college right now. It seems like there's been such, and I know every generation probably thinks this, that there's been such a radical change since they were kids.

But I think with technology, we really have seen a shifting that we've never seen before because of some of the technology and the way the world is connected together.

And really, what we're seeing is a worldwide anti -Christian message, whether it be from Islam or from professing atheism.

So, how do you think we could try to reach this next generation that's coming up?

Yeah, I think that's a really good statement. It's something that's really important for us to know.

I mean, the Bible's very clear. We need to understand the times, right? We need to be able to identify what is going on.

And things have definitely changed. They're not the same. I think in the past, I look at my parents' generation, and people generally believed in God.

They believed in God. They believed in Jesus Christ. They might not be followers of Christ, but they believed. And you didn't have to persuade somebody that, for example,

Jesus was a real person. All you had to do is say, well, do you want to give your life to him or not?

And some people said no, but they didn't say, oh, Jesus is a real person. Today, you have people saying, well, how do we know

Jesus even existed? Now, as crazy as that sounds, because it does sound very crazy, and it's interesting because there are so many myths out there on the

Internet that people just take for granted. So you'll have somebody just go, Constantine is the one who put all the books in the

Bible. It's pure silliness, but because it's over the

Internet, it's all over the Internet. And because, like you said, you can mass -produce information so quickly, and it's integrated into the whole world, people just go, hey, that's what

I heard. I guess it's true. And they don't even think to question it. They just think, okay, the Da Vinci Code, when that book came out, it just reanimated all these ridiculous lies about the text, about scripture.

And so technology is good and bad in the sense that, well, you have ideas that are completely wrong spread like wildfire.

And that's the horrible thing. I think of Bill Nye's video when he made the video about evolution, saying that it was basically true, and that you couldn't be a decent scientist unless you believed in evolution.

And I looked at the hits on YouTube on that particular video, and at the time, there were over 7 million hits on that video.

Well, another group put out a video showing that there are scientists all throughout history who have believed in creation, and most of the founders of the different areas of science were

Christian. And so the reality is, of course you can be a good scientist and believe in creation.

I would say you can't fully embrace science without being a Christian and believing in God and creation.

But the video they had put out, this other group, the Christian group had put out, only had about 500 ,000 views.

And so what happened was you're basically overwhelmed by a tidal wave of misinformation. And so my challenge to people out there who want to make a difference is, you know, it's not just a fair fight between truth and error.

What it is, is we're also dealing with essentially a propaganda war. If you have so much misinformation out there that people have given up even trying to find the truth, well, then you're in a bad situation.

So I think a lot of what we need to do, you know,

Christ said, The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out more workers into the harvest field.

And to me, what that's saying is, hey, there's a lot of people that know they need God, but they haven't heard the good news, and they don't know the truth of the gospel.

It's amazing to me how many people don't know the truth of the gospel in our supposedly Christian culture.

But I think for Christians, we have to get more comfortable with sharing the gospel and being able to share it in a way in which the skeptical culture can begin to listen and hear.

And that takes knowing how to respond to some of the questions that people ask about, you know, how did all the books get put into the

Bible? And if we want to be an effective Christian, if we want to be salt and light in this culture,

I find it almost impossible to escape apologetics. You must at least have a small degree of understanding of apologetics, and you must also be able to answer some of the most common questions that people have in a way that's intelligent, loving, and clear.

And that takes time, you know, that takes time to learn about that.

And that's a big part of what my ministry's about as well as I know your ministry also. Yeah, I mean, one of the things

I think is so lacking nowadays is the idea of critical thinking. And I would argue you can't teach critical thinking and evolution at the same time because people would quickly realize evolution's a fraud.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. And so what they do, like your professor in school, you know, teacher in school, appeals to false claims of what the

Bible says. It's amazing how just doing original research, this is what

I always focus on, is not just taking what someone says verbatim, but that's where we have a whole generation that's not taught how to critically think, that's what they do.

We had a guy who used to work for us, and he was in the Word of Faith movement, and he came out of it because he basically said because of some crazy street preacher.

I used to be in New York every week sharing the gospel, just put up a little stand and share, and people would shout out a scripture verse saying, oh, the

Bible says this, and they'll give some verse. And all I would do, literally all

I would do is back up a few verses and read it in context, and the entire crowd realized that, yeah, that verse does say that, but the verses around it make it clear that's not what it means.

And he ended up doing that at his church. He'd go to church and start practicing that, and went, oh, wait, this pastor's taking everything out of context, and left the

Word of Faith movement and went to a biblical church. That's a great point.

I think the same thing can be said of a lot of the subjects that people are asking questions about.

One of the big ones that comes up frequently by atheists like Dan Barker from the

Freedom from Religion Foundation or others is that the Old Testament teaches slavery. Well, the word slavery is definitely in the

Old Testament quite a bit, but if you understand indentured servitude, and then you also understand what was going on in Canaan at the time, and you understand the relationship, and you understand the culture, you have to have that in context.

If you don't, you're in big trouble. But, you know, I was handcuffed to an atheist by BuzzFeed.

They wanted to handcuff a creationist and an evolutionist together, and we were there for 24 hours.

We were handcuffed. His name was John Rail, and it's on YouTube. Your listeners can check it out if they want.

I actually was going to assume we were going to do it in a later segment, but we can do it now, because I will have the link in the show notes for folks for that.

Yeah, it's hilarious. But what's interesting about that particular conversation is that partway through, what

BuzzFeed wanted us to do, and you don't see this in the video, but they said, what we'd like to do is we'd like you to take

John Rail to church. Now, the night we were doing it, it was a Monday night, I believe. We couldn't find a single church service on a

Monday night. So, you know, that's the day all the pastors get a day off. But we ended up doing a

Bible study at my house, and I said to him, before we got here, I said, what would you like to cover?

What would you like to do? And I gave him a whole list of different topics that we could cover, whatever it was.

And the one he picked out was slavery in the Bible. And he picked it out because he thought for sure, oh, this is going to destroy the

Bible, and I'm going to be able to, you know, continue my attacks on Scripture.

Well, I went through the whole study on slavery, and at the end of the handcuffing, the producer, the

BuzzFeed producer said, so John, how did the Bible study impact you? What do you think about the issue of slavery?

Does the Bible teach slavery? And he kind of hemmed and hawed for a little while, and I said, John, come on. Give us a straight answer.

And he said, okay, you know what? I don't think the Bible teaches slavery anymore. And this is a very, very committed atheist who mocks

Scripture on a regular basis, who had his mind changed by an hour -long Bible study showing that if we look at it in context, it's very clear that the

Bible is actually anti -slavery. It is not a support slavery. The whole reason slavery was abolished in Western civilization is because of people who are committed to the reality that God has created all men equal.

And so the sad thing is, is that if you were to go out on the street, or just talk to people, you know, on the

Internet especially, and ask them what is the Bible's view towards slavery, they would say, oh, well, the

Old Testament supports slavery. And this is blatantly misunderstood.

And so, like you said, everything's got to be taken in context. And I think that's a lot of what apologetics is.

It's taking the questions that people have about suffering, evil, and hell, or homosexuality, or the abortion issue, and it's taking those and putting them in the proper context, proper perspective.

And I think once you do that, what happens is people's minds are changed really quickly. But the sad thing is, is that a lot of people just aren't exposed to good information.

They're overwhelmed by the massive misinformation, and they give up actually taking the time to look for truth and get to know

God, you know. Yeah, and this is the thing that when you think about slavery,

I'm going to end up, I'm sure, having to deal with this. I have a debate coming up September 29th. I love this, that someone challenged me on the debate topic, is secular humanism better than Christianity?

Oh, wow. I love that. That's a softball pitch right there. Yeah, it's like saying, hi,

I want to come debate you and lose before we get started, because my whole worldview requires yours.

That's fantastic. And I'm sure he's going to bring up slavery, and what he wants to refer to is the

African slave trade and things like that, and he probably doesn't know that the Bible actually condemns kidnapping people, that the

Bible doesn't actually refer to slaves as property, because if you had property, if you had a cow that went astray from a neighbor, you have to return it, but if you have a slave that runs away, you don't return him, because it's not property.

He probably doesn't know that slaves were paid in Old Testament Israel. They were paid a half day's wage.

I always say it this way. Slavery in the Old Testament is similar to what we think of Japan in the 80s, where you worked for a company, the company owned your house, bought your clothes, paid for your education.

You worked for the company for generations. It's not like you get a job and you just shift. Everything's owned by the company, your car, everything.

So the better the company does, the better you can do was the mindset, but they sort of own you.

You can't just pick up and go somewhere else easily, and they have a responsibility to take care of everything.

So the focus they like to do is to focus on, well, you don't have freedom, and they don't focus on the fact that the person in charge has responsibility.

Yeah, and Exodus 21 -16, this is the one I say, if somebody just says, oh, the Bible endorses slavery,

I just read them Exodus 21 -16. Death is the punishment for kidnapping. If you sell the person you kidnapped or if you're caught with that person, the penalty is death.

And antebellum slavery, prior to the Civil War, the way slavery got off the ground is because of kidnapping.

It was kidnapping people from Africa. So if you just followed that one admonition in Scripture, all of slavery would have been impossible in America.

But the slavery in the Old Testament primarily is a form of paying off your debts.

They didn't have banks like we do today, and they didn't have debt collectors.

And this was the method through which they satisfied a debt that had to be paid off. And a lot of people just don't understand that.

And if you killed your slave, you yourself were put to death. So again,

I think it's context, context, context. And I think that's one of the things we're battling in our culture today.

And when I teach my students, because I'm a

Christian high school teacher, I've been teaching for 12 years, seniors, 12th grade students.

When I teach them, my goal is to put a problem before them and say, okay, how do we solve this issue?

How do we read this in context? Let's get it in context of Scripture. And then rather than cherry picking things, which is what, you know,

I mean, that's the devil's strategy. That's what he does. He's the father of lies. He cherry picks things, pulls them out of context, and then tries to get people to doubt the

Word of God by giving them half -truths and so forth.

Well, yeah, slavery was more of a way of taking care of people, which it seems strange for folks to think of.

After this break, I want to talk about the website, some of the resources you have there, because you have put together some coursework that's on your website.

And people can check the website out at educationforlife .org. But I want to talk about some of those resources after this break.

Ephesians 4, verse 25, Therefore laying aside falsehood,

Speak truth, each one of you, with his neighbor, For we are members of one another for his name's sake.

What's up, everybody? I'm Jamal Bandy, the host of the Prescribed Truth Podcast, where I seek to distribute the truth that the doctor prescribes to the church and the world today.

The Lord graciously brought me out of a coat in 2010, saved me in 2013, and in 2017,

Prescribed Truth began. My mission has been to spread the truth of God's Word while refuting dangerous lies affecting most churches and the culture at large from a biblical and reformed perspective.

Join me on Sundays at 6 p .m. Eastern Time for the live recording of the podcast on YouTube and download the audio version wherever podcasts can be found, including the

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And remember, this world is full of errors, but the only thing that the doctor prescribes is truth.

Blessings. Okay, that is

Prescribed Truth, one of the newest podcasts on the Christian Podcast Community. If you want to learn more about Jamal, check out my last episode that I had done with him, where we talked about a whole bunch of things, social justice, basically what is critical race theory, things like this.

We were all over the map on stuff, but it was very educational to seeing the, basically, the way the left tried to do it.

But what we want to talk about with Kevin here today is Education for Life. This is a website.

I encourage you to go out to educationforlife .org and the first thing you're going to come upon when you get there is basically four courses.

There's 10 classes each, short videos. It's not going to take a whole lot of time.

Very, very good videos. I don't know if they're all, they were about 15 minutes, the ones that I had watched, and I don't know if they're all at that same length,

Kevin. Yeah, well, actually, for those of you, it might take a bit of time.

So I developed this specifically for essentially a curriculum. So I've been teaching now for 12 years, and about six years ago,

I had a group of parents come to me, and they said, Hey, Kevin, we can't afford to send our kids to a private school, but we really know that they need this information.

And they said, Would you mind teaching on the weekends? This was in North County in San Diego, and they asked me if I would come up and teach about 20 families the stuff that I teach every day at the private high school.

And I got my wife's permission, right? That's important, and got her permission to be able to do that, and so I was teaching on the weekends.

But I was teaching six classes every day, then I'm teaching on the weekends also, and it was kind of overwhelming, and I thought, you know, this is too much.

And so a friend of mine said, Well, why don't you work on putting this together online?

Take the content that you teach all year and put it online, and then people can utilize it wherever they're at.

And so that's what I ended up doing. And so the 15 minutes you're watching is actually a preview, Andrew, so it's a little longer than that.

Okay, so the paid, because I was going to get into the payment that you have. So the paid gives you how long are the episodes if folks pay?

So every video is about an hour to an hour and a half long. Okay. So it's broken up into actually a two -year curriculum, four semesters, 100 series, 200 series, 300 series, and 400 series.

Created or evolved, 200 is religion, who's right, 300 is Bible myth or fact, and the last one is culture and the

Bible. So for folks, basically what it is, you're going to have about 10 classes, it's broken up in kind of four courses, each working off of the other.

You get this for less than $5 a month. And so you could preview it to see, these are high quality videos.

This is not, you know, Kevin's not in his backyard or in his basement. Well, he could be because it's green screen.

But it's very well done. The couple of the videos that I saw were enough information that they could easily be shared online to answer questions.

Exactly. And that was the whole goal when I put these together, because what

I was having happen was, I had students who would graduate. I'd get messaged on Facebook or wherever, and they'd say,

Mr. Conover, I'm in class. We've just been told we have to write an assignment on why creation is false and evolution is true.

I need my notes from your class. And I thought, you know, I need to make a way where these students can access this information, basically forever.

And they know if I go here, I'm going to get what I need. And so now I've had many students take the classes again afterwards and go, okay,

I'm going to use this to write a paper, either against abortion or against evolution or whatever it might be.

And so they're very high quality. The information in them is sourced and cited, so you can use it for research papers.

You can use it to actually have intelligent conversations with people and not just be hearsay, but you can reference people and go, you know,

I'll give you an example. One of the scientists I reference in the course on genetics is

Dr. James Torr. He's an organic synthetic chemist. He's ranked as one of the top 50 scientists in the world.

He's actually a messianic Jew like you, Andrew. And he met Christ in college, and today he says there's absolutely zero mechanism for evolution to work.

He literally makes molecules for a living. He says if you can't do this on the molecular level, there's no way you can do it on the biology level.

Evolution cannot happen. And so when you begin to use, you know, references to somebody like Dr.

James Torr, you look at his information. He's a very credible source. And then you begin to share that with your peers in class or your professor or whoever it might be or your relatives.

I tell people, you know, this is how you crack the door of a person's heart. What happens is they begin to go, you know what?

Maybe I need to give God a second chance here. Maybe I need to give the word of God a second chance. I need to go back and take a little bit more time because this person is giving me some solid answers here.

And, you know, that's how a lot of people end up coming to know the Lord. Lee Strobel and a lot of these famous apologists you hear about, that's how the door of their heart got cracked, and ultimately as we water and plant seeds, ultimately

God draws them to him. So that's what these courses are meant to be, is an easier way to water and plant.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but these are videos in HD quality videotaped with a 4K camera, and they're meant to be very engaging and also help people be able to more easily share the gospel with people around them.

Well, this is one of the things we said earlier, how do you reach this generation? And we realize that we're going up against people who have money, and Christians focus their money on donating to church and things like this, and not as much on video production and producing things that wow people.

But that's what the next generation, they're interested in. And your classes that you have are geared to get them to, wait a minute, this is really cool, this is really entertaining and educational.

And so there's 40 classes that you have broken up into four courses. So if people have an interest in creation and evolution, course 100.

Religion, which one's right, course 200. The Bible, myth or fact, course 300.

Culture and the Bible, myth 400. And you're dealing with a lot of different topics that I see in here.

Yeah, exactly. And what's happened is over the past 12 years of teaching, students bring stuff up.

When I started teaching, I basically got thrown into the classroom. It was in the middle of the year, they said there's no curriculum, can you do this?

And I said, oh, pray for me. And so I hopped in there. And what happened was students immediately began asking me questions about all the things that they were personally concerned about.

How do I know Buddhism isn't true? Buddhists seem really nice. They're very peaceful. They don't judge anybody.

And how do I know Buddhism? Why should I believe Christianity over Buddhism? And just on and on and on.

One of the biggest topics, and you know this, Andrew, today is our postmodern culture.

Relativism has become almost a de facto go -to philosophy.

People don't even realize it. But what's happened up in Canada with Bill C -16 that was passed,

I believe, last year, and this movement towards the whole gender issue where I can be whatever gender

I want to be. It's just a matter of my preference. And then everybody else has to essentially bow down to what

I've decided I am. That's a philosophical perspective. C .S.

Lewis called it perspectivism. It's also called solipsism. And today we know it as relativism, which is that all truth is relative.

Well, I deal with that in these courses, and I give students the ability to refute that.

It's class 202. It's called refuting relativism. And C .S. Lewis said it's the most dangerous perspective.

It's the most dangerous philosophy there is because essentially what it does is it says there is no such thing as truth.

And if truth can't be known, then why argue about what truth is? It's the devil's way of shutting down conversation.

Essentially what he's trying to do is, he's not trying to have an open dialogue about truth. He's trying to say there is no truth, so why even have this discussion?

And how do you communicate to somebody the truth of God's word? Jesus Christ said, I'm the way, the truth, and the life.

How do you communicate truth when somebody says there's no such thing as truth? And this is the way to get out of the conversation altogether.

So in that particular class, I show how faulty that is, and how it's absolutely ridiculous to make the claim that there is no truth, or morals are only opinions, and so forth and so on.

So these classes are meant to be extremely relevant. They're not ivory tower discussions.

It's streetwise apologetics. It's the discussions I'm going to have with my club soccer team, with my friend at work, with my relative over Thanksgiving.

These are real world issues and real world conversations that I put into here, and tried to make it as concise and valuable as possible.

That is so needed in this generation that has like zero attention span. Yeah, right.

So let's get into, after this next break, what I want to do is get into discussing something that's a passion on your heart is families and how to not miss the mark.

Because a lot of what you're doing, you're gearing it toward generation of people who are still really within their home.

I mean, you're dealing with high school students. That's really who I think you geared it toward, but it's not limited there by no means.

So let's talk about families and what role they would have.

Ding dong, Jehovah's Witnesses. Ding dong, Mormons.

Christian, are you ready to defend the faith when false religions ring your doorbell?

Do you know what your Muslim and Jewish friends believe? You will if you get Andrew Rappaport's book,

What Do They Believe? When we witness to people, we need to present the truth. But it is very wise to know what they believe.

And you will get Andrew Rappaport's book at WhatDoTheyBelieve .com. The good news is

Striving for Eternity would love to come to your church to spend two days with your folks, teaching them biblical hermeneutics.

That's right, the art and science of interpreting scripture. The bad news is somebody attending might be really upset to discover

Jeremiah 29 11 should not be their life verse. To learn more, go to strivingforeternity .org

to host a Bible interpretation made easy seminar in your area. And that was where we'll teach you more about context.

Now, Kevin, you know what the nice thing is about doing a podcast over a radio show? You and I are not tied to that time clock that you had when we were in your show.

Yeah. Where it's like, okay, okay, ready? Can I get this in in this?

Okay, got it. All right. So keeps you from talking too much.

See, you're talking about slavery on your radio show. You're a slave to that clock. You know it. Yeah, that's right.

So let's talk about families and the fact that, you know, there's something you had said off air that really struck me is that a lot of the

Christian families, and you didn't say this, but this is what I end up seeing.

It's almost as if they push the raising of their children's spiritual maturity onto the church.

Like, well, the kids go to church. They're going to learn everything there about the Christian faith and not have it taught at home.

And how important is that home element to raising children that understand the

Christian faith biblically? Yeah, it's so, so critical. Deuteronomy chapter 11 verses 18 through 20,

I think, illustrates perfectly what's got to happen. It says, fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds.

Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. You need to be putting this on the doorframes of your house, right?

And you know this. This is your Jewish background. I think it's so amazing how true this is because we literally,

I do this now in my own home. I have five of those frames you can buy now where you can change out the picture in it.

And what I do is I put in different verses in here. And then when my kids, so right now

I have some verses on taming the tongue and nothing should come out of your mouth except what is edifying to those around you.

Because I have a 12, 9 and 7 year old and it's very easy when they're angry and for all of us to say things that we shouldn't be saying.

But what we do is we look back at these scriptures and it reminds us, oh, this is what God wants me to do.

And so we need to be meditating on the word of God day and night. And you have to make a habit of having these scriptures all around you.

And you know, I think George Barna, he's a

Christian statistician. He does tons of studies on demographics and what's happening in Christian faith in America.

And he has this study that came out in 2017. And if you take it the wrong way, it can be kind of discouraging.

But let me read to you his conclusion here. This was from a survey he did in 2017. It says statistically a very small amount of younger people have a biblical worldview.

Only 4 % of 18 to 30 year olds and 7 % of 30 to 49 year olds. He says, we are in a crisis.

If the church does not wake up and solve it, biblical Christianity in the United States is in jeopardy.

And the fact of the matter is that people are not spending the amount of time in the word of God like they used to.

We live in, like you said, a culture now that has a very short attention span.

And so it makes it difficult for them to learn the word of God when they can't spend the time to sit down and read it.

And so parents need to be well aware of this. And they have to be proactive. You can't do accidental parenting.

You can't think, okay, my child is going to be a dedicated Christian who loves the Lord, goes to church, gets married, raises their own kids to love the

Lord, spends time in the word of God, is praying, is serving in their church, doing all these things. That doesn't happen by accident.

It's very, very particular ways of living and raising your kids and running your family, which is all biblical, that ultimately provides your children the best opportunity to grow up to be people who also love

God. And it's really about watering and planting seeds. I want to cultivate a garden, a family garden, that produces an environment in which my children have the best opportunity to grow up as adults who love the

Lord, who are dedicated to the word of God, who know what a biblical worldview is because they know the scriptures.

And again, like I said, that doesn't happen by accident. And I actually have a presentation that listeners can check out online, which is 7

Practical Tips to Raising Christian Kids. And they're basically drawn from George Barnes' research about what makes the biggest impact on a family for kids who don't just call themselves

Christian after high school, but actually are serving in their church, are living out their Christian faith, and they're walking with the

Lord. They have a true relationship with God. And this is where the attack, I think, is at, is on the family.

I mean, the family has been under attack so much.

Yeah, since the 60s, since the sexual revolution. 1970 was when no -fault divorce was legalized.

That sadly happened here in California. Not surprisingly, but sadly. And that decision essentially undermined the commitment of one spouse to another.

And that jeopardized the future generations. Because from social science, we know that broken families are what cause an increase in things like teen pregnancy, gang activity, school dropout, drug abuse.

As the family goes, so goes the culture, so goes the nation. And you have to have scripture as the bedrock of the family, because there's nothing greater that can help a couple through their hard times.

We all go through hard times. We get angry at one another. We get fed up with one another.

And if it weren't for Christ, we would all kill each other. But the reality is that when we begin to turn our hearts towards the

Lord, when we make the scriptures the bedrock of our family unit, that allows us to be the kind of parents we want to be, to be the kind of spouse we want to be, and ultimately to raise the next generation to also be blessed and to receive the blessings that come from putting

God first in your life. This is where apologetics has to start. And it's not—this might upset some people— it's not your pastor's job to basically—

I mean, it really isn't. So many people think that, that it's, well, this is my pastor's job to do this.

No, it's not. This is your job, parents, to do this.

And this is what our responsibility is as parents.

And so— The fact of the matter is that, you know, the pastor or the youth pastor, let's say, only gets a kid for, you know, maybe an hour a week, maybe two hours if they go to church on Sundays and Wednesdays.

There is no way that that is enough time to counteract the complete flood of social media.

I think, you know, and I'm sympathetic to parents because I'm a parent and because I've taught teenagers for so long.

Because of phones and everything, what's happening is social media, the social media diet is more often than not contradictory to what

Scripture teaches and what a biblical worldview is. And so parents have a huge uphill battle when dealing with, okay, all of this information is coming in, right?

It's the whole, you are what you eat. The Bible says the eyes are the window to the soul. Guard your heart, for out of it flow the issues of life.

So the problem, the difficulty is, is okay, all this information, how do I counteract all this information that's coming in through my kid's phone, through their friendships, where, you know, it's harder than ever before to sift or to prevent bad information from getting into a kid's head.

And so this is all the more reason why apologetics is so necessary in our culture today. But I do want to encourage parents.

I don't want them to be, like, discouraged, our listeners. I don't want them to feel like, oh, well, it's, you know, it's doomed. What's really amazing is that it doesn't take a tremendous amount to make a huge difference.

This is a quote from one of Barna's studies. It says here, It was the extensive time spent studying the

Bible as a family that made the greatest difference in the emergence of children as dedicated followers of Christ and advocates of Scripture.

This was the number one thing that changed things. And we're talking about maybe 15 minutes twice a week where you sit down with your kids and you talk about the

Word of God. That right there has a gigantic influence. And I would encourage you, like a lot of the parents that use my curriculum, what they do is every

Sunday evening they'll watch one of the videos or they'll watch half an hour of the video. And that right there is incredible preparation.

You know, if you, I always tell people, you know, if you work out 15 minutes a day for a week, it's going to do pretty much nothing if that's all you do.

But if you work out 15 minutes a day, let's say three days a week for a year, it's going to have a huge impact.

That 15 minutes a day for three days out of a week adds up. It's the small steps in the right direction that consistently that make the biggest change.

And so for you parents out there who are listening, don't be discouraged that, you know, it's hopeless or you can't deal with it.

It's just about being proactive rather than trying to clean up a mess.

It's about preventing the mess in the first place. And that just takes small, small steps in the right direction.

So we tend to beat ourselves up over the head as parents in all the things we did wrong, but we need to focus more on, okay, what are the small things

I can do that are right? Yeah, and, you know, we've been talking about apologetics, which is something that, you know, really

I hope folks are understanding. This is not something that's just done when you're out on the street evangelizing with someone.

This is done in the classrooms, at home, everywhere. That's really the thing that I want people to see.

Now, I want to take a break, and when we come back, I want to talk about, you know, some of the things that you've got going on as far as the apologetics, and really want to talk about this, not only your courses you have, but this

Answers Club that you did back when you were in high school. So let's talk about that after this break.

Hey, I'm Daryl, and I'm here with my wife, Karen. What's up? And we're the hosts of the What Are We Even Doing Here podcast, the podcast that seeks to answer the question that we all ask, what are we even doing here?

We cover topics such as marriage, family, life, and living a Christian life in this crazy world. We don't have all the answers, but we know where to look.

Subscribe to us on iTunes and follow us on SoundCloud as we seek the kingdom of God and find out what we are even doing here.

Grace and peace. I'm Tim Martin.

As we discuss our favorite movies. And share critical thinking for the entertained Christian. So visit areyoujustwatching .com

to subscribe. And don't just watch. Speaking of critical thinking, there you go.

There is a podcast on the Christian Podcast Community about using some critical thinking when it applies to movies.

So critical thinking is something, Kevin, we need to apply everywhere, isn't it? Yeah, you know, it's amazing.

I think the whole love your God with all your mind, right? You can't do that unless you are able to think critically and logically and be able to come to good conclusions.

I think it's really interesting. I keep quoting George Barna here, but he said, he has this interesting quote about people basing their views not on Scripture, but on their feelings.

This is what it says. Six out of seven born -again Christians base their morals on their feelings because they don't have a strong enough understanding of a

Biblical worldview. And thus, skeptics are the fastest -growing segment of American worldviews and are currently at 11%.

A lot of the atheists I talk to, they start, it's really strange, but they start these groups and there are things called like, in San Diego they call it the coalition of reason.

And what they're trying to say is, Christians are not rational. We are. There's a billboard they put up around Christmas that says, this season celebrate reason.

And so, again, what they're saying is, Christians aren't very smart. They believe things without knowing why they believe them.

And interestingly, George Barna's study actually confirms that for many Christians, this is actually the case.

They don't believe the truth because they've actually thought clearly about it. If they believe the truth at all, it's just because they got lucky and they happen to be in a good church.

And this is why we have things happening with just recently Beth Moore, who

I don't have a lot of respect for what she does in the first place, but she just came out and said that anybody who believes that homosexuality is wrong is a hyper -fundamentalist.

And Josh Harris, a very famous author of a book that was popular when I was in high school, he wrote a book called

I Kissed Dating Goodbye. He just came out. He's now divorced his wife. This was just in the news last week.

And he just said, I'm no longer a Christian. And then he goes on to say,

I'm apologizing for my position on homosexuality, and I should never have been opposed to same -sex marriage.

And to me, this is all a result of people not thinking critically.

They're falling for this emotional trick which says you can't actually love somebody and be opposed to their lifestyle.

So this is a total misunderstanding of logic. Of course you can love somebody and not agree with their lifestyle.

God has called us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. So sadly,

I think a lot of the ground we're losing from Christianity and the culture is because of a lack of being able to, like you said, think critically.

Yeah, and this is really a core part of apologetics. Absolutely. I tell people

God has given us two things that draw us to him. Love and truth. When we experience authentic love, it's like a magnet.

We want more of it. When we experience truth, it's magnetic.

It draws us to him. And so I think our greatest tools are love and truth.

So let's talk briefly because I want to get to a game that we play here.

But before we do, I want to talk about this Answers Club that you have that you did when you were in school. So you're in high school.

You created this club. Explain this club to folks how it worked because as you and I talked, I think this is what people, maybe there's some parents out there who have kids who just can do this in their high school.

Maybe there's some teachers in schools that can do this. Maybe there's some people that just want to start a ministry that can do this.

But I would love to see what you did replicated in high schools across the country because I think it would change a lot of what we end up seeing when they get older in college and all that.

So describe that Answers Club for folks, and then I want to put a charge to folks. Well, it was just an outgrowth of my own personal need.

I needed answers. And I went out, you know, when I was talking to my friend about Islam, I went out and bought a book on Islam that showed why

Islam was wrong. When I was dealing with the issue of evolution, I went out and bought some videos on showing why creation was true.

And what for me happened was as soon as I learned this information, I was astonished at how amazing the answers were.

It just blew me away. And I thought, how is it that I haven't heard this before?

How do other people not know this? I just couldn't believe that there was such good information that people didn't know and that I didn't know.

And so for me, the natural reaction was, well, let's start a club that disseminates this information to other people so that people can make good decisions about whether they want to commit their lives to Christ or not, whether they want to believe in the

Bible or not, and where they want to go in life. And so I think, like you said, if somebody would start a group like that, you know,

Bible clubs are really good in the sense that it's great to have a place where Christians can go to have a

Bible club. But I talked to a guy that started about 300 Bible clubs in Southern California, and he said to me, he said,

Kevin, the Bible clubs are great, but he said, you know, we're not having that big of an impact.

He said, we are having an impact, but we're not having that big of an impact. He said because these clubs, you know, you might have somebody teach a

Bible lesson, and then you get 10 minutes for pizza, 20 minutes for the

Bible lesson. It's very hard to get to in depth. But if somebody started a club that was specifically geared towards addressing the immediate questions that young people have,

I think you could have a much more significant impact because this is what's happened in our culture is there's so much skepticism now that people, even before they step foot in a

Bible club, they're already thinking to themselves, I don't think this is true because there's so many walls built up in their minds about questions they have.

And so I think, like you said, if, you know, Gratio Christi is on college campuses, and that's a group that specifically does their best to answer questions for college kids.

But what we know from the studies that have been done is that kids start asking their questions.

Forty percent of questions start happening in middle school. Another 40 percent start in high school.

It's only about 10 percent that start questioning their first questions are in college. So we don't want to wait all the way until they get to college to start answering questions.

Like you said, we want to start that in high school and even middle school where they start getting good answers to their questions, and they're able to respond to their peers in a way that's both loving and intelligent.

Yeah, and my challenge to folks, maybe there's someone out there that has the resources to actually put behind Kevin and get him teaching because here's the difference.

What you did was you're doing apologetics. You're not doing pizza. That's the big problem.

These Bible groups are about pizza. They're about building a bigger group, and the real issue needs to be about the apologetics.

And so maybe there's someone out there that would be able to have the resources or whatnot to be able to get behind Kevin and help him do that.

That'd be really nice because the reality is we do need this. We need to get younger and younger folks that are going to be trained up in understanding

God's Word, in being able to defend God's Word, and not feel ashamed, not feel that they've got to back away.

As Kevin said, folks, we live in a day and age where they want to silence

Christianity. You're seeing it, as he mentioned, just with the whole issues of homosexuality.

It is not unexpected that they're coming after Christians because this has been their agenda all along.

And so they have to play the victim, and they can only do that if someone is victimizing them.

And they want to claim that you and I, those of us who know the Lord, are the victimizers.

And this is what is their game. So if you and I want to actually have an impact, we have to first and foremost know what we're up against.

What we're up against is a culture that hates

God and wants to silence anybody, and I mean anybody, who would support

Christ. And so that's why this is so important. So my encouragement to you is go to educateforlife .org.

There is a donate button there, by the way, so you can donate if you've been listening to him. You want to book

Kevin as a speaker. There's a page to do that. There's a way to get him to come to your church, to your conference, to where you are, and have him come out and speak.

There's a place where you can donate to help him more. Kevin, I want to play a game with you, and I want you to relax, because all the pressure is going to be on me.

It's time now to start the Spiritual Transition Game.

Okay, so this is a time where we play the Spiritual Transition Game. And Kevin, this is where I get to find out if you have listened regularly to The Wrap Report.

Because if you do, you know what's coming, and if not, you don't. So this is how we play this game. Most people, when they talk about sharing the

Gospel, the most difficult part for most people is to make that transition from the physical world to the spiritual world.

And so what we've done is made a game out of it. And I try to teach people that there's really nothing difficult with it, you just have to practice.

The more you practice this transition from the natural world to the spiritual world, you no longer have to pray, Please give me a conversation that leads to the

Gospel today. Because you can make every conversation lead to the Gospel if you so desire.

And so, Kevin, you're going to give me something. I don't know what it is, and this part of the show gets no editing, so if there's a long pause,

I leave it in there. And so, this is where you give me something, and I have to try to transition from whatever you give me to the

Gospel. And that's going to be my job. So you can give me anything. An object, or... Okay, my cell phone just broke.

The screen just broke. I just dropped it. And I'm wondering, do you know a good cell phone repair place,

Andrew? Actually, I happen to know a good cell phone repair place.

It is my son. He actually fixes iPhones. So if it's an iPhone, you're in luck if you want to ship it to him.

It's an iPhone. Okay, yeah. I was just at a friend's house, and I looked, and he had a cracked phone.

And my son was supposed to come over to his place, because I was out in Texas.

My son lives out in Texas. And my son was going to come over there, and I called him up. I said, you don't happen to have all your tools to replace a screen, do you?

He's like, no, because he had already left to come out. And so I was like, well, just figured you'd fix the phone right here.

And the thing, though, is that he was like, it's okay, that's a backup phone. He bought another phone, but he didn't want to get rid of the other one.

So he keeps it as a backup, even though it's cracked. And it was just interesting, the fact that here, people have things.

It's, nowadays, so easy to replace stuff. Even expensive phones, it's just, okay, it's cracked,

I'll go get another. And I'm looking at this and going, my son could probably fix that for less than $100, and you can go sell it.

Because it's cracked, it's not worth a whole lot, but replace the screen it is. It's all about what people value.

Everything in our culture has become disposable, almost. People just say, oh, it's cracked?

Yeah, it's true. Toss it, just get rid of it. I know, my wife and I take so many trips to the

Salvation Army to drop stuff off. I'm like, where does all this stuff come from? I know I didn't buy all this stuff.

But the reality is, that's the thing, is that we have, I had a printer that I got, and it was like, what, $50?

It actually was going to cost more to try to repair it than just buy a new one. And when we think of everything being so disposable, what it does is it gives us the sense like nothing matters, and yet there are things that matter.

But our culture wants to tell us things don't, everything just goes on, nothing has any real value, and yet there is value, because every one of us, we plan for things.

We plan maybe to get married or to get a job, to have a career. We plan for everything in life.

But you know one thing we don't plan? So few of us plan for what's going to happen a second after we die.

I mean, a second after we die, it's too late. That is the thing that's of most value, is to know what happens the second after we die, because when we die, it's too late to decide.

And what happens a second after we die? Well, God says it's appointed unto man once to die and then a judgment.

And so we're going to face a judgment of God based on, well, did we break his law?

Have we lied and stolen and done anything that is against his nature? Well, then we would have eternity in a lake of fire.

But God made a way of escape. God himself came to earth as a man, died on a cross.

Being eternal God, he can pay the eternal fine, but also being a man, never breaking the law, he can pay the fine that you and I owe.

So it's only in Jesus Christ that we can have the forgiveness of that sin. We have to turn from trusting ourself as a good person or good works and turn and trust

Jesus Christ. And then life is not a throwaway. Then we go from everything being disposable to having eternal life.

So that's how I would transition from your phone to the gospel. I love it. I love it.

That's awesome. And originally I was thinking I was going to go some way with my son and sonship, and I didn't think of a good way to do that.

That's funny. Yeah, I brought that up because that actually happened to be in a cell phone store.

I was in a cell phone repair store, and I just started talking to the guy, and he told me where he was from and everything.

And we just got on the subject, and I had the opportunity to share the gospel with him. And I was amazed because he gets a phone call, and he looks at me and he goes,

I'm going to take this phone call, but don't leave off. Don't remember where you left off because I want to hear the rest of this.

He was so interested in hearing the gospel that he was afraid to take the phone call because he was afraid

I was going to leave or whatever. It was amazing, but really cool. Well, that's good. That says that your conversation was engaging with him, which is a good thing.

Yeah, I'm a huge fan of, and I know you are too, of Ray Comfort, and he's really helped me to be able to get more people sharing the gospel.

Ray who? So, hey, Kevin, let me give you the last words.

If there's anything you want to share before we sign off, anything that you have going on you want to promote or talk about.

Well, I just want to encourage you, if you feel like you need, if you're listening out there and you have friends or family members, maybe a child or maybe it's just you yourself, my website educateforlife .org

is meant specifically to help you become more comfortable and confident in the word of God.

And I do charge $4 .99 a month, but it's full access to every single lesson on my website, over 40 classes, all on every subject you can imagine that you might have questions about.

And it's just a great way to get a firm foundation. And Andrew, I really appreciate you allowing me to be on your show and share with your listeners.

It's been a blessing. Yeah. And folks, I mean, $5 a month is not much. It's basically one Starbucks coffee that you shouldn't have anyway.

And you know, the reality is when you watch the videos, these are high end videos.

This isn't some cheap production. So you're supporting, you know, to produce more of these types of videos so that we can get more of this information out for folks.

So really consider going out to educateforlife .org, check out all the videos and the other materials that are out there.

So Kevin, I appreciate you coming on. It was great just being able to talk a little bit longer with you. I might have to have you on again, because I really wanted to get into some different discussions like we had after the radio show about presuppositional apologetics and classic apologetics.

We had a great discussion and I, I almost wished that I had to record a recording while we were sitting outside by the car.

Cause I was thinking the same thing too. So I may have to have you back on, but I really appreciate you coming on and folks, just want to encourage you to remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.

This podcast is part of the striving for eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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