Why are Youth Leaving Church? #apologetics #church #youth #theology

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today

I have with me Keith Foskey, who I'm going to introduce in more detail in just a few moments.

I'm sure those who have been following this channel have recognized that I went from a gap of not having shows to like bombarding

YouTube with a bunch of interviews these recent days, and next week

I have a couple of great interviews coming as well. So I wanna make sure that folks know that next

Tuesday I will be interviewing Anthony Rogers and Jeremiah Nortier on the discussion of the doctrine of original sin.

What is the biblical basis for that doctrine? Apparently this doctrine has been coming under attack in recent times, and so I thought that would be a great topic to cover.

On Wednesday, I will be rejoined by both Dr. Jason Lyle and Dr.

James White, and myself will be doing a live Q &A, so make sure you get your questions and you can bombard us with all the questions you like for that Wednesday live stream.

So Tuesday's live stream is at 9 p .m. with Anthony Rogers and Jeremiah, and then on Wednesday it's 6 p .m.,

and that's Eastern time. Also, just to give folks a heads up, and I've been saying this at the beginning of my other programs, that I've started a second

YouTube channel called Revealed Apologetics Plus. There are only two videos up there right now, but the goal there is to do these somewhat short videos, five to 10 minutes answering theology questions, apologetics questions, and just general

Bible questions. And so show me a little bit of love if you can go over there and subscribe. If you've subscribed to this channel, you can do me a solid and subscribe to that one as well.

And hopefully those brief responses can be shareable. You can point people to those videos as I cover kind of general topics that I think are related to questions that a lot of people are asking in those areas of theology, apologetics, and the

Bible. Lastly, if you're looking to support Revealed Apologetics, my new course is now available for purchase on revealedapologetics .com.

It is called PreSupp Applied, and basically it is a five -lecture presentation on how to apply presuppositional apologetics in different contexts, and so I cover how to navigate apologetic conversations, how do you apply presuppositional apologetics to atheism,

Roman Catholicism, and presuppositional Eastern Orthodoxy, that's an interesting one, and the cults.

So all of the information there is in the description of this video and my past videos as well. If you're interested in supporting

Revealed Apologetics in that way, it would be greatly appreciated. Well, without further ado, I'd like to formally introduce my guest, who is the host of the

Your Calvinist podcast. And I'll give Keith an opportunity to kind of tell you guys a little bit about himself, and then we'll jump into this very important discussion.

Keith, why don't you say hi to folks and kind of tell everyone who you are and how they can find you? Well, thank you for having me on the show today.

Again, my name is Keith Foskey, and I am the pastor of Sovereign Grace Family Church, where I have served for 18 years now as the pastor and have been at the same church since I was seven.

So it's interesting that I pastor the same church that I grew up in, and I am full -time as the lead pastor of the church.

And I serve with two other pastor elders that the three of us lead the church, and we're thankful to God that he brought us together to do that work.

And I am also the host of Your Calvinist podcast, as you mentioned, as well as being basically what

I call a humorist. Some people might use the word comedian. I do stand -up comedy, but very, very irregularly.

So I'm a little hesitant to call myself an actual comedian. Not when you're preaching, of course, right? No, no, no, don't do that.

You're gonna open up this sermon. So a rabbi and a priest going to walk into a bar, okay. No, but I do enjoy stand -up, but I consider myself more of a humorist.

A lot of my videos have humor in them. I've just begun writing articles for a new media outlet that's actually starting in July, and it's gonna be, my contributions are going to be more satirical, truthful articles, but articles that have a little bit of a satirical bent to them.

And so that's kind of my contribution to the conversation is trying to use humor to point toward truth and using humor as a tool to point people to truth.

And it's a very powerful tool. I think it's a lost art. A lot of people kind of see me, and I kind of talk about serious topics and stuff, but I actually have a background in theater and physical comedy.

So I'm a really goofy person in real life. Trying to mix humor with conveying truth can be tricky, but if you're able to do it, it's a very effective way to communicate what you want to communicate, especially,

I'm a teacher, so I teach middle school, seventh grade Old Testament Bible, and eighth grade logic and debate.

And I have to talk about these topics and somehow incorporate ways that help it stick with the students.

And so humor is a very powerful tool to that end. So I think what you're doing is something that's very needed and can be done very effectively, which

I think you do very well. Well, I appreciate that. I always like to remind people of a quote by G .K.

Chesterton and I like him for one reason, we share the same name, the K in G .K.

is Keith. So people often don't think about that. So Mr.

Chesterton said that, funny is not the opposite of serious, funny is the opposite of not funny.

And so I hold onto that pretty tightly because I tell people just because I'm being funny doesn't mean what

I'm saying isn't serious. That's right. And so, yeah, I think it's, like you said, it's one of the lost tools in our belt of truth.

Okay, awesome. Well, you and I have something in common. We both grew up in the church. So you said you're a pastor at church that you have been going to since you were seven, is that what you said?

Yeah, my dad's mom got a divorce when I was six. My dad met my stepmom and got married when

I was about seven, about a year later. And she brought me to church really for the first time consistently in my life when

I was seven years old. And the church was much different then than it is now. The church I grew up in was actually part of the old

Disciples of Christ Church, which is a very liberal denomination. But we left that denomination in the nineties and we became more and more conservative in our theology.

And now we are actually confirmed and confessional as a Baptist church. We hold to the

First London Baptist Confession. And that's the direction that God took us.

So he took us from liberal theologically all the way to conservative Calvinistic Baptist theologically, which is a major shift, but it just shows how

God can bring revival over time as his word is preached. That's right.

I grew up in a Spanish Pentecostal church, very, well, yeah, it was pretty strict.

We had, I always tell people, we had wooden benches. That was like how we kind of old school constructed purposefully to not be comfortable so that you don't fall asleep.

It didn't work. Sometimes I fell asleep and we were in church Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays and two services on Sunday.

So we were in church a lot. So I'm very much familiar with kind of that experience of growing up in a church and things like that.

Now, did your church have a youth group or any youth ministry that you participated in or were involved in in any way?

Yeah, I grew up going to a youth Sunday school and then also we would have youth events.

We didn't really have a strong youth like Wednesday night youth group, like a lot of churches did in the nineties, but I would visit friends churches who had those types of things.

So I was very, very aware of the youth group culture and watching it grow, but I didn't know anything about it.

I just was watching it sort of from a distance, but our church didn't really, it was a small church.

So it didn't have a lot of youth. So what I experienced was mostly by going with other friends like to First Baptist Church of Callahan, which is the little town

I was in and that kind of thing. Yeah, same for me. I went to an assemblies of God church and we were part of what was called the

Spanish Eastern District. And our youth group was really small, but we were very, very close. And so thankfully by God's grace, the context in which

I grew up in, we were very close. We often spoke about the things of God outside the context of the church.

So it wasn't just something we did when we went to church. So I had a very strong base socially and spiritually, but you made mention of the youth group culture.

And so that's very different in the different churches that you visit and things like that. So you, especially in the nineties, youth group was a big deal.

I'm not sure how it is now, these days. And I know Sunday school is kind of an old school thing that you don't find in a lot of churches too.

I mean, I'm sure you had Sunday school classes. I had Sunday school classes. So the scene is very different.

Now we have some trends of people, young people leaving the church, which is really the topic of our discussion today.

So I wanna open up by asking you this question and it's kind of the general question and the obvious question.

Why do you think significant numbers of young people are leaving the church today? What are your thoughts on that?

Well, a few years ago, I was invited to speak at a homeschool convention and I was asked that question as the topic of my speech.

Why do young people leave the church? And I think that my answer was considered by some people to be somewhat offensive.

So I do wanna sort of preface this by saying, my answer is not an answer that most people like. Because the answer that a lot of people give is lack of discipleship, lack of apologetics, lack of training in theology, the introduction of university professors, the introduction of foreign thought, as far as like thoughts that they haven't gotten, when they go to college, they get all these thoughts that are different and outside of what their normal things are.

And a lot of people think that's the reason. And I say all those things are part of that, but they're not the cause.

They're outliers. The root cause is most of our kids don't really get converted.

And so the reason why they leave the church is because they're not really in Christ. And so that's my answer, is the reason why so many young people leave the church when they become adults is because when they become adults, they realize they really don't have a relationship with Christ.

They really don't have a relationship with the God of the scriptures. And so they tend to simply jettison that part of their life because that part of their life, which was integral in their youth is no longer integral in their young adult life.

And they see it as something that's unnecessary because it hasn't changed their life. That's what conversion is.

Conversion is a life change. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation,

Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter five. And many people have not been made a new creation in Christ, even though they were confirmed in that conversion in some kind of experience.

And that's the thing, whether it was confirmed in that conversion through an actual confirmation class, or they were confirmed in that conversion through some type of baptismal exercise, or they were confirmed in that conversion by some type of going forward or praying a prayer or going down during a revival meeting and having an emotional experience.

And they say, this was my conversion. And yet Christ didn't change their life, didn't change their heart.

And so that's what I think is the big problem is we have created, especially in the nineties.

And I wanna go back to this because you said something earlier about the difference. The youth group of the nineties is the church of today because all those people who were enjoying the youth group in the nineties wanted to maintain that same atmosphere.

And so a lot of the churches today are grownup youth groups. They're 40 year old adolescents. They're midlife crisis

Christians who are trying to get back to something they enjoyed in their youth. So they model their churches around that youth group model.

And that's why when you go into churches, you see people doing youth group games during worship and things like that. Things that you were like, well, this isn't worship.

This is goofiness. Yeah, it's goofiness because that's what they had in the nineties. That's what they had in the early two thousands.

And they wanted to keep that going. And youth pastors are now senior pastors. Youth pastors are now taking the youth that were their youth and now they've made them into churches and the churches have no tie to history.

They have no tie to any foundational theological truth. And so many people are leaving those types of churches and actually going back to churches like the

Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Church and the more high church of the Protestant denominations because they're hungry for some type of grounding in history because Pastor Spike, who's been a pastor for who's got his

Mohawk and his loud, crazy t -shirts and all that.

Pastor Spike appeals to a certain demographic and the younger people today aren't interested.

And so I just answered a lot of questions at one time and I know I kind of sporadically went out and I hope - No, that was excellent.

And one of the things I love about your answer is that you didn't provide a superficial answer.

You gave kind of the divine commentary on why people leave the church. This channel is predominantly focused on apologetics and apologetic method and things like that.

And I made mention in a past video when a famous Christian apologist was asked, why are you a

Christian? And they gave this answer. They said, I'm a Christian because of the evidence. And I thought to myself, well, hmm, that's not what the

Bible says as to why you're a Christian, right? His spirit bears witness to our spirit that we're children of God, right?

So he did an answer in a way that was consistent with the theological divinely inspired commentary as to why he became converted.

And what I appreciate about your answer is that why are young people leaving? The same reason why anyone leaves is because they were never converted to begin with.

And I just, that's such a Calvinist answer, isn't it? Very first John two, they went out from us.

I mean, that's our answer, right? And it upsets people. When I said that at the homeschool convention,

I mean, it was almost like, oh, hold little Johnny's ears. He doesn't need to hear this. He doesn't need to hear that he might not be a believer because we've confirmed him in his faith.

And we don't want anybody to make him question that. I've actually seen pastors who would say, if you ever think you weren't saved, go back to the day you wrote in your

Bible, the day you got saved, and you'll know, you'll go back to that time and you'll be reminded that, hey,

I actually got saved on June 2nd of 2000, whatever, 2004, and that's your spiritual birthday.

And don't let anybody ever make you question that, even though the Bible says to actually seek and know if that is actually the case, that you make your calling and election certain.

But they'll say, don't do that. Don't actually question whether or not you've actually come to faith. Sure, and I love the way that their answer is an answer that is consistent with our broader worldview, which is based in scripture.

So we focus a lot on this in this channel, is that anything we say about anything, whether it's science, history, the all, everything needs to be rooted in the scripture.

And that fact impacts how we answer these questions. And so I really very much appreciate the fact that you answer that.

Now, it is true that the reason why people leave is because they haven't been converted, that there's a certain level of that that's true.

However, that doesn't mean, oh, well, there's nothing we can do about it. Well, they were never really converted. So yeah, there's nothing we can do because conversion is kind of on God's side of the ledger.

So how do we respond to that line of thinking and maybe explore other aspects that contribute to that fundamental biblical answer that you provided?

For example, what role do cultural influences and social media and entertainment play in compounding that fact and catering to someone's non -converted state, if that makes sense?

Well, this is where, going back to the first things I was saying about, well, we didn't do apologetics or we didn't do theology or we didn't study doctrine.

That's why I say those things still matter, but they're not the root. They're the outliers that need to be considered.

And that's why in that talk that I gave, and it's been several years now, I started with the problem.

We have young people that aren't converted. So the second question is, are we confirming them in an unconverted state?

That was my first question. Are we telling people they're saved without actually giving them any type of examination?

And I'll give you an example. There's a big church in our town and it's a big church.

It's one of those ones that I say really literally was a youth group that became a church. And the guy who was the pastor used to be a youth pastor and it has blown up.

I mean, it's got like nine campuses and each one, he gets beamed in via video every week.

And in that church, they have beach baptisms every couple months.

And in these beach baptisms, they'll post on Facebook, hey man, we had 300 people be baptized today.

We had 400 people be baptized today. And everybody's like, oh, praise the Lord, amen. But when you ask the question, okay, how many of those people actually went through any form of question with the pastor or any type of discipleship to see if whether or not they were truly converted or whether or not they're just responding to the call of baptism?

And the answer is they didn't. Because, and we know this to be true, because they literally have on their website, if you wanna be baptized on so -and -so day, go sign up on our website and we'll see you there.

There's no like we're gonna, before you get baptized or before you become a Christian by your confession and receiving the sign of the covenant, you're actually going to demonstrate your faith by actually showing that you understand what the gospel is.

So my first question to families, when somebody says, hey, little Johnny wants to be baptized, my question is, can little

Johnny articulate the gospel? You would be surprised how many Christians today, adults who've been in church for 20 years, if you ask the question, do you understand the gospel?

They'll say, yes. Okay, can you explain it to me? Pretend I'm a non -believer and explain the gospel to me.

And they'll fall all over themselves. They'll explain all kinds, they'll either show legalism or licentiousness. They come with all kinds of bad examples.

I remember one time, because we do a booth at our church. We go out to fairs and other things and we set up this booth and hand out gospel tracts, offer to pray with people.

We have this, it's like our evangelism booth. We call it the fishing hole. Like we're fishing for men, right? Like this is our fishing hole.

And I have a sign that I made, I do woodwork. So I carved this sign, it's about four foot wide.

And across the sign, it says, do you understand the gospel? And we hang it above the booth.

I remember one time a guy walked by, he looked up, he read the sign and he looked at me and he said, that's a hard question.

I said, okay. And he said, and I said, well, what do you do? He said, I'm a pastor. I said, it shouldn't be hard for you.

Like, and even he was like, well, I don't know how I would answer that. How do you understand the gospel?

I was like, dude, this is your job. Like you, ostensibly you should be the one who has no trouble answering that question.

But because we have a problem defining what the gospel is, because we have a problem asking people, hey, can you actually define this thing that you say saved you and is the most important thing in your life?

Sure. We're afraid to ask people that question. We're afraid to actually realize that they may not even know the answer.

Right. Now, just to clarify, I know this is not what you're saying. You're not saying that there's a way to determine who's the elect, who's saved.

What you're asking for is evidence of the fact that they understand what they claim they want to do.

Hey, I want to be baptized. Okay, well, what is the evidence that A, you understand the gospel and B, that this isn't just kind of like you're just going with the crowd, so to speak, because it's popular to kind of say, hey,

I want to be baptized, especially if there's a thing on the website, people are promoting it, you get the claps and the feels when you do it, especially within a big context, a big church context.

So that's not what you're, you're not saying we need to identify the elect first before we baptize, anything along those lines.

Yeah, no, I'm not a hyper -Calvinist. I'm not a hardshell Baptist, as you know, those who would say we should only preach to the elect or anything like that.

No, I'm saying that if a person says they believe they are saved, they ought to at least be able to say what they were saved from.

They ought to be able to say how they were saved and what, and by whom they were saved.

You know, that can be a seven -year -old child who says, I recognize that I'm a sinner. I recognize that Christ is the only savior that can save me.

And I realize that if I do not repent of my sin and trust in him, then I will not be saved.

I mean, just those three things. If I heard a young people, if I heard a young person say that, that would be a big, a big indication that, hey, this kid understands what we're actually saying.

And just because somebody can articulate it doesn't mean that they're necessarily saved.

And just because someone has a struggle articulating it doesn't mean they're not saved. But if they can, then that's helpful.

That's something that I think if a person can't articulate those things, that's a place to start.

And I think that's where we have to start. Now, then we move into the area of apologetics and stuff.

I'm sorry, go ahead. No worries. What do you say to someone who says, well, listen, in the New Testament, people didn't have to take these long classes before baptism.

They believed, they repented, they were baptized right there on the spot. And so that's the biblical model.

We just want to see people, we just want to obey the command by proclaiming the gospel and baptizing people in the name of the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It's more of you kind of legalistic, kind of two, two, two. Hello?

Yeah, unplugged myself. I can hear you now. Yeah. Okay, cool.

Sorry about that. I have to not move my hands because then I disconnect myself. So, but yeah, so the

Bible's, the biblical model is that believe and you're baptized on the spot. And so it's these kind of stuffy,

Calvinist Christians who think, well, they need to go through this long theological test before they could even get baptized. How would you respond to something like that?

I think that's a legitimate question. I do think we have to be careful not to become, as there's a term, fruit inspectors, right?

Like we're ensuring that the fruit is good before we're willing to baptize someone.

I'm not endorsing that, but I'll say since we are talking about children, I think this is something we have to consider that the

Bible doesn't really have a model for. And that is, we don't see a biblical model of the second generation church.

Everybody that's being saved in Acts is first generation believers, right? And so either we take the

Presbyterian view that their children were baptized on the faith of their parents, which is the family covenant view, right?

That if dad gets saved and is baptized, then his wife and children are also baptized because they're brought into the covenant through the faith of the parent.

So I don't accept that because I'm a Baptist, but that's one model, right?

But the other model is, we have the first generation believers who are hearing, believing, and being baptized, and there's no indication of how they handled the conversion of children in Acts.

So we don't see that. So we have to make some assumptions. One thing we do know is this, children by nature have a desire to please their parents on a certain level when it comes to this issue.

So children will affirm what their parents believe so as to be accepted within the family.

And parents will affirm that their children are believers because they want their children to be saved. So we have two sides of this coin where the children are affirming something that the parents believe, and the parents are affirming the child's belief because both of them want something.

One wants acceptance and the other wants salvation, right? So that is not something that Acts addresses specifically.

And so this is where, as a pastor, we have to have wisdom. I actually wrote an article years ago, and maybe

I should republish it, but it was called, When Should Little Johnny Be Baptized? When should little

Johnny be affirmed in his faith? And I have been in this situation, and I remember who it was.

Lady walked up to me and she said, my granddaughter's ready to be baptized. I said, okay, well, I'd like to sit and talk with her about her faith.

And she goes, you don't need to. I talked to her, we're good. And I said, well, I appreciate that you talked to her, but I'm the pastor who's gonna be confirming her before the church and baptizing her before the church.

I still need to talk to her, even though you feel confident that you talk to her, because I'm the one that's standing up and baptizing her in the name of the

Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And so I want to at least understand, or know that she understands the gospel.

And one thing I think would have been true, even though it's not clearly articulated in scripture,

I think it would have been understood that the people who were baptized at least understood what Peter preached on Pentecost.

They understood what he said. We know that in the case of Philip with the eunuch, that the eunuch at least understood what he said.

We don't know how much he said. We don't have the full orbed conversation between the two of them. What we do know is that he's reading a scripture he didn't understand.

Philip comes up and gives him an understanding of it. And based upon that understanding, he says, well, there's water, what preventeth me from being baptized?

And then of course there's a textual variant at the very next part where he says, well, if you believe you can be baptized. And I like to think that's actually part of the text because it lends credence to the baptist's view.

But there is a textual variant there. You know what I'm talking about, right? There are in Acts where he says, if you believe, cause that's what the

King James says, right? If you believe you can, then that's left out of like the ESV and other translations. But either way, whether he said that or not, whether Peter said or Philip said, you need to believe.

We do know that the eunuch understood enough to request it. He understood enough that I need this.

I don't have something, I need it. And if I had a 45 year old man come to me after service and he said, listen,

I heard your sermon today. I understood the gospel and I recognize I'm a sinner and I need to be saved.

Well, that guy's not, I'm not putting that guy through a six month class on salvation. I am going to take him to my office and I'm going to talk to him and find out what is the desire of his heart and why has he desired this?

Is it because he really heard the gospel and is saved or is it because his wife's been giving him a hard time because he hasn't been coming to church lately and he's trying to do something to satisfy her.

And that may create a conversation that lasts longer because I want to know that this is genuine and he's not just trying to satisfy men, but is actually trying to do something that he believes is right for his soul.

So there will be a conversation there, but, and I'll give you a good example. I know I'm talking a lot here, but a good example of this is a year ago about, we had a couple come to our church.

This couple had never been a part of a church, never been saved, never had anything in their life to do with God or the

Bible or scripture. Both of them got saved about the same time. And both of them came to our church and said, listen, we've,

Christ has changed our life. This is something that we, we didn't ask for this, but we are now desiring to pursue

Christ and we want to do that here. And what it was was they had a neighbor who had shared

Christ with them. They heard the gospel, they got saved and the neighbor pointed them to our church. He said, hey, if you want to go to a good church, it's this church, because he lived on the other side of town and Jacksonville is this huge city.

So he knew they weren't going to go to our, they weren't going to go with him. So he's like, here's a church that's a block away.

Go to this church because it's a good church. They show up on our doorstep. And so immediately

I begin asking them questions, make sure they understand the gospel. The lady is pouring tears because she's confirming everything that I'm saying, that Christ died for her sins, that Christ's blood makes an atonement.

Do you understand this? I don't really fully grasp it, but I believe it. And the tears running out of her eyes, we baptized her within a couple of weeks because that was the, we were satisfied that this woman truly understood, even though she was a babe in her understanding, she truly understood that God had changed her life.

And so, no, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a, well,

I don't think that there's, again, fruit inspection that has to happen. I do like the idea of a catechism class for kids, again, because there is some time to catechize the children so that they do understand the faith.

There's more time involved. But like I said, it's a different context when you're dealing with someone who's a child being brought up in the faith.

Sure. So the Alcoon Project asks, should people be catechized for at least six months and examined by the elders before they're baptized?

When they say at least six months, three months, two weeks, as a pastor, as a rule of thumb, how long do you think, or is it just on a case -by -case basis?

How would you speak to that? I would answer, just like you just said, I can't give an absolute on one or the other.

I think churches that make that a standard is fine, if that's what the elders have decided and come to that conclusion.

We don't do that for adults. We do have a catechism class for kids, and we do encourage any child who believes, or parent who believes their child has been saved to go through that.

Adults, again, it's a little different. And so it would be on a case -by -case basis. All right, someone is putting a link in there for someone there.

Okay, all right, so you did mention that the reason why young people are leaving is because they've never been converted.

And that was not inconsistent with the claim that there's a lack of biblical teaching, theology, apologetics, and things like that.

So you're not ignoring that, but let's kind of shift focus on the issue of apologetics.

What are, in your experience, some of the common things that young people are struggling with in the church that are apologetics -related, or being equipped with apologetics would help in terms of responding to?

I think one of the areas that is often not discussed is the issue of the existential dread which accompanies reaching adulthood.

And this is something that I can look back at my life, and I can point to very specific times in my life of early adulthood.

And I got married very early. I got married at the age of 19. And so I met my wife when

I was 17, we got married at 19, and we've been together, this year will be our 25th anniversary.

Congratulations. Well, thank you. So that in 1999 to 2000,

I went through this very real experience of not knowing whether God was even real.

I met my first real atheist when I was working I was working for America Online.

Do you remember that company? Yeah. AOL. Yeah, you laugh, because it was the first real like internet company where they gave you a thousand hours on the internet for free on these little

CDs. Well, I worked for America Online, and I sat next to a guy named Scott. And Scott was an atheist.

He was a former science teacher, now worked for America Online. And one day I was just talking about God because I'd been brought up in church.

Sure. And Scott said, I don't believe in that. I'm too smart to believe in that.

I know science and I know the history of the Bible. And I just, I'm too smart to believe in all that.

And I, for the first time, felt like asking myself the question, is believing in all that stupid?

Is that an intellectual deficiency that causes people to say God is real?

And I went home and opened my Bible. And the only Bible I had at the time, this shows you my maturity level.

The only Bible I had at that time was a comic book Bible. You've seen them lately, the action Bible. But it was helpful because when

I opened it up, the first story I looked at was the story of Adam and Eve. And it literally just had a picture of Adam and Eve.

Then you turn a few pages and there's no one in the ark. You turn a few pages and I get to the burning. I remember

I got to the burning bush. I closed the Bible and I threw it across the room. I remember,

I literally remember throwing it because that was like me throwing away the idea of faith.

I said, I just can't believe this. I can't believe anybody believes these. These are fairy tales at best.

And that opened the door for a time of genuine sadness and depression like I had never felt.

I had a genuine lost feeling that I had never felt in my life.

Like I was afraid to go to sleep at night. I didn't want to eat or drink.

The only thing I wanted to do is I thought about drinking alcohol and I never drank alcohol as a kid or as a teenager, but I wanted to then because I wanted this pain to go away and this sadness to go away.

And I remembered one guy in my life who I thought was a genuine Christian.

One guy who I'd seen stand up for his faith in Christ. And I said, you know what?

I'm going to go talk to that guy. I'm going to ask why he believes what he believes. And when

I met with him, I don't remember everything that he said. I remember a couple of things like he did say there's more evidence for Christ's resurrection than there is for George Washington crossing the

Delaware. I remember that particular statement. I don't remember upon what basis he was making that, but I just remember that statement sticking out to me.

It's like, oh, there is reason to believe these things. Like there are facts about Jesus that are true.

But I remember just being absolutely convinced that God wasn't real and that all of this was a lie.

And this was just something that people believed to get them through all the sad things in life.

And I think if we don't talk to young people about that, that there is a real sense in which intellectually you're going to struggle with the fact that you're worshiping a being you can't see, that you're worshiping a being you will never hear audibly, that you're worshiping a being that you have to trust is there, even though sometimes your brain will make you think he's not there.

If we don't deal with those type of things, that's the kind of things that people like Dan Barker, the head of the

American Atheist Association, the worst AAA in the world, right? I don't even know if that's what it's called, but do you know who

Dan Barker is? Of course, yes. Yeah, yeah, and then you've got guys like Matt Dillahunty and people like that who have a huge Twitter following, guys like Dan McClellan, who's this guy on Twitter who is trying to cause doubt and questions about the historicity and the authenticity of the biblical text.

And he'll say he's not, but that's exactly what he's doing. It's higher criticism. And if you have someone who isn't informed about things like the moral argument for God and the teleological argument for God and these things that do help understand why we can believe in a

God we cannot see, then you won't have anything to overcome when the evolutionist or the atheistic apologist comes to you and says, you have no reason to believe in that God who you say, and what's the difference between you and me?

You believe that all the gods are false except yours, and I just happen to believe in one less God, right? This is one of the arguments that the atheist makes is

I just believe in one less God than you. If you don't have a grounding in some understanding of why it is that the existence of God is necessary and why the existence of God is the presupposition that undergirds all other presuppositions, it's the ultimate axiom that creates our ability to even think and rationalize and come to logical conclusions about the world around us and have expectations and to expect that science and logic and all of these things have a basis.

If you don't have that, then I think when those existential fears arise, you're not gonna have any way to deal with them, and so I think that's something we really don't think about, and that's the fact that we all go through that.

We all go through that fear of what if I'm wrong and what if there's nothing and what if I die and it just is nothing, and if you don't talk to people about that, then they're gonna think they're the only one who has that fear.

I had a guy call me recently, and this is a sweet man, love this man, and I know he loves the

Lord, but he told me, because he'd heard me talk about this before, he said, you know,

I never really thought about that fear, he said, but it came on me recently. What if this is all untrue?

What if this is actually, what if I'm believing a lie? And how do you deal with that?

How do you deal with that fear? Honestly, Eli, that's something

I think we don't talk about much. Sure, so let's unpack that a little bit. So suppose I'm a young person at your church.

I'm the hypothetical Johnny, and I say, hey, I've been grappling with my faith.

I don't know if any of this stuff is true. I've been listening to some videos on YouTube and TikTok, and I'm kind of wondering, is the

Bible a fairy tale? We've got talking animals, I got a talking snake, and there's this couple who eats a stupid apple and ruins it for everyone else.

I mean, how would you kind of pretend that, let's give something really practical and tangible for folks to take away.

How would you engage me, the hypothetical Johnny, bringing that specific thing up?

Sorry for putting you on the spot, but you don't have to go into crazy detail. I've had this conversation, and honestly,

I would do some sort of like Columbo. R .C. Sproul used to talk about being

Columbo, being the investigator, right? And so I might say, what are the things you're really struggling with?

But if it is what you just said, if it's really just, I have trouble believing in this God I can't see, I would probably take them into Romans 1 and begin talking about what the

Bible says we can see. And it says the invisible attributes of God, namely

His divine power and eternal nature are clearly perceived in the things that have been made, and therefore we are without excuse.

And so that would give me at least a basis to begin to say, the Bible says we don't have an excuse for believing that God is there.

And so why? Why would it tell us we don't have an excuse? I actually had that conversation with an atheist who was in a hospital.

I visited an atheist, and you might wonder why

I would visit an atheist in the hospital. Well, he's a family member. And another family member said, hey, would you go visit this guy?

I said, sure. And when I walked in the room, he seemed happy to see me. He had had a major surgery and really had affected his health very much.

And in that conversation, we were talking a lot about our differences, but I did have to point out the fact that, hey, ultimately we don't have an excuse for not believing in God, because if all we needed was evidence, it's pretty clear that this didn't happen by accident.

It's pretty clear. As one person said, if you begin by drinking a sip of the natural sciences, that first sip might turn you into an atheist.

But when you get to the bottom of the glass, you're gonna find out that God's been waiting for you the whole time. Like you really -

It's a common misunderstanding, right? A lot of people, especially young people, they'll say, well, I don't know if Christianity is true because I believe in science.

I know that sounds really cliche, but I've literally had someone tell me that. We were at a, I was at a youth event and we were in a circle and we were gonna talk about things that folks were struggling with.

And there was this one atheist in the group. And when we got to him and he was kind of sharing his thoughts, he goes, well,

I don't believe any of this stuff because I believe in science. How do we, the quote you just gave is a great quote.

I don't remember where it's from, but how do we engage someone who says, yeah, science kind of makes

Christianity and religion unuseful. There's no need for it because science answers many of the questions that religion has tried to answer and kind of failed in terms of giving strong explanations.

You'll hear it, right? The thunder and the lightning they thought was from the gods, but now we know what lightning really is, all that kind of stuff.

How would you interact with a young person who's bringing that up? Well, the first thing I would try to do is not discount the importance of science and simply say, oh, we don't need that, we have

God. Because I think that's a quick turnoff for young people who aren't necessarily being defiant of God, but they wanna know why

God is necessary if science explains everything. And so we have to begin by simply acknowledging science has done a lot.

Science has helped us in the creation of machines and technology and all kinds of things.

Just recently, we had a person in our church have a heart surgery that was done all with a robot.

Like the robot did the cutting, the robot did all this. You don't have to worry about a hand slipping or a shaky or a misplaced thought.

The robot did the whole thing. And so science has created a lot of positives.

And so if we are anti -science, then a young person is gonna pick up on that and say, why would you be anti something that seems to be so helpful?

But the other thing too is recognizing science limitations. And this is something that I like to point out and say, okay, there's a difference in appreciating what science can do for us.

And there's another thing to worship at the altar of scientism. And that's a phrase that,

I don't know if people understand what I mean by that, but when you make science, you're God. And that's what

Romans 1 says. And again, I point back to Romans 1. Romans 1 says, we're going to either worship the creator of all things, or we're gonna find something in creation to worship.

A lot of throughout human history, it's been animals and creeping things, but we'll find something to worship.

A lot of people worship themselves. Other people worship intelligence. And that's where science comes in.

People will worship this as an entity. When science itself doesn't really exist on its own, science is a tool that humans use to come to conclusions about the earth around them.

And one of the reasons why science works is because we live in an orderly universe that was created by a

God of order. And so the very reason why I know that water's gonna boil at 212 degrees today, the same way it will tomorrow, and the same way it will 50 years from now is because God has created an earth of order where we can do scientific inquiry and we can inductively research the world around us and come to conclusions based upon the consistency of the world around us.

It's not like today it boils at 220 or 212 and tomorrow it boils at 215 and the day after it boils at 220.

It's always gonna be this way because we serve a God of order who created an orderly universe. And so these again, this isn't proof.

I had this conversation on another podcast recently. I said, this is not a proof of God's existence, but it is an evidence that points us to the fact that God is the one behind it.

And so I'm not an evidentialist. I am a presuppositionalist because I think the ultimate presupposition is, and it was

C .S. Lewis who said this. He said, if I didn't believe my brain was created for thinking, then

I would have no reason to trust my own thought. I have to have a presupposition that my brain was made to think because if I didn't presume that, then

I'd have no reason to trust my thoughts. And so that's the ultimate presupposition is that I can't even think that I can trust what

I'm thinking if I didn't believe my mind was created for thinking. And if it was created for thinking, that's not an evolutionary accident.

That's a purposeful design. Now you did mention scientism and that is, this comes up a lot, especially with young people who really are big on science.

And scientism, just for folks who are not familiar, scientism is an epistemological position which states basically that all knowledge comes through scientific investigation, scientific inquiry, scientific experimentation, these sorts of things.

So if science hasn't demonstrated it to be true, then we really don't know it to be true.

So these are the people that will ask for, well, what's the physical evidence? What's the scientific proof?

Those sorts of things. I think another important distinction that Keith made is the difference between proving something and providing evidence for something.

They're not the same thing. Evidences are indicators. Proof is something that deals with kind of logical argumentation when you actually provide an argument to justify a conclusion, right, as something along those lines.

So those are great points to keep in mind, being familiar with these concepts, even though young people don't tend to use those words.

And oftentimes they're not even aware that they're holding to these philosophies. As parents and as pastors and leaders, we should be aware of these thought processes so that we can kind of speak into the lives of young people when they seem to be assuming or presupposing these things.

So I really appreciate you bringing those points up. Now, what are your thoughts then in terms of other things that young people grapple with?

For example, I understand that a lot of people are leaving the church and leaving Christianity, ultimately, of course, for the theological and biblical reasons you gave, but also questioning whether Christianity is good, not necessarily if it's true, but is

Christianity good? You have the God of the Old Testament apparently killing everyone in every chapter.

I mean, God is very happy with killing everyone. It's like, well, that's not quite right, but how do we speak to this idea that we hear a lot of young people, and they're really parroting the influencers, right, the people that are online and things like this.

How do we speak to the young people who are saying, I don't know if Christianity is good because when I read the Old Testament, there's a lot of death, there's a lot of wrath and judgment.

It seems like the God of the Bible is petty, all these sorts of things. How do we speak to that? It's so amazing how

God works this out because I literally had this conversation with a person yesterday. I was asked to speak to a couple who the wife in the relationship was having some struggles with faith, and so I was asked to meet with them and talk with them, and I'm glad God opened up that opportunity.

And one of the questions was, how do we justify the killing of the firstborn in Egypt?

One, it seems like the innocent are suffering for the guilty, which doesn't seem just, and we have to deal with the issue of a

God who would be so wrathful as to bring punishment that is so severe.

And this is where I think, and this was my answer because that was the question, and I said this is where I think we have to recognize certain aspects of justice which are beyond our understanding of how we think things should be.

I teach an ethics class at our, we have an academy. It's at our church.

It's a two -year ministry training program, and it's for people who want to do lay ministry.

It mirrors a seminary experience, but not a full seminary experience. So we have classes on New Testament survey,

Old Testament survey, apologetics, hermeneutics, but one of the classes we do is Christian ethics.

And I think, again, this is a lost subject. We tell people, hey, abortion is wrong, but we don't give them the ethical foundation behind it.

We just say, oh, it's wrong, right? Okay, but why is it wrong? Why, what are the biblical reasons why we should say this is wrong?

And how do we deal with those people who say it's not wrong, right? When they're trying to make arguments. And one of the issues that I bring up is how do we define justice?

Do we define justice and righteousness as a standard above God, or does

God himself set the standard? Is God the standard of justice?

And this is actually an ethical, somewhat of an ethical dilemma among Christian ethicists as they study the subject, because they say, well, if we say

God's the standard, then he can do anything he wants, and therefore there is really no standard, because if God does something that we would consider wrong or that it would seemingly be unjust, then we're just creating an unrealistic standard of righteousness.

There has to be something above God that he reaches up to. And that's the hard part, is asking the question, what is ultimate righteousness?

But the Bible gives us an answer. It says that he is righteousness, like he is the actual standard.

And so I don't mind saying there's not a line that God has to reach. I say God is the line. And when he decrees to do something, when he decrees to act in time, what he is doing is ultimately just, even if we have a hard time reconciling it with our understanding of justice.

And so I like Genesis 18 as a simple answer to a complex question.

When Abraham is speaking to Yahweh about the city of Sodom, and he's saying, hey, if there were 100 righteous, if there's 50 righteous, if there's 40 righteous, you know, he's narrowing it down, trying to, as it were, be a mediator for this wicked city.

At one point, Abraham says, will not the judge of all the earth do what is right?

And the implied answer to that question is yes. Will not the judge of all the earth do what is right?

And so when I look at something in the Bible that would affect me on a moral level and say,

I have a hard time justifying this morally, whether it's the killing of the firstborn in Egypt, or it's the destruction of the

Canaanites, man, woman, and child, right? Whether it's these things, I have to step back and say that there are certain aspects of morality that I do not understand and that I cannot understand because I do not have a divine mind.

And God's mind, which is greater than mine, is able to justify these things without my input, without my questioning.

And this goes to Romans 9, right? Who are you, old man, who answers back to God and says to Him, why have you done this?

And that's not always satisfying. I even said this to the lady. I said, this may not satisfy you. I said, but when you come to the point where you recognize the holiness of God and recognize

His righteousness as an aspect of His holiness, then you will begin to at least be able to appreciate things that you don't quite understand.

I've been asked to speak at a conference in Winter Haven later this year.

It's actually in September. And I was asked to speak on the subject of the holiness of God. And I'm going to be preaching on Leviticus 10 because Leviticus 10,

Nadab and Abihu bring an offering before the Lord. And it's an offering that He had not authorized.

The English Standard Version says an unauthorized fire. King James says a strange fire.

Many of you are familiar with that. They are consumed. There's a book on that as well. There's a book called.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, they're consumed and the father witnesses it.

Aaron sees his son's consumed. And what is the answer given to him by Moses?

Those who draw near to me, I will be considered holy.

And therefore hold your tongue. Like you have to recognize what they did was they violated my holiness.

And as such, they were immediately punished. Now, I thank God that not everybody who violates

God's holiness is punished in the immediate way that they were because none of us would be here. We would all be a smoking fire pot, right?

Like we would all be ashes if all of us who have violated God's holiness in one way or another are immediately punished.

And so there's some difficulty in that. And I do think there's, but I think there's important recognition is what we think is just is not always in line with God's justice and his justice is eternal and absolute.

Well, thank you for that. That's super helpful. And I think the holiness of God is a concept that the church really needs to get back on.

I think we've kind of lost view of its importance and what it actually means.

So I really appreciate you bringing that back into focus. Now we're at the top of the hour. I have one more question for you and then maybe we can take some of the comments and perhaps there are maybe a question or two that we can get in the comments and folks who are listening in, if you have a question that pops in your head as we're kind of going through this, please feel free.

Just be sure to preface your question with questions so that I can differentiate it between the comments and the questions.

But feel free to ask some questions. We'll take a few if there are any. But my last question is how can churches better equip parents to disciple their children effectively?

Because ultimately, obviously, conversion is going to be the work of the spirit, but we as Christian parents have a role to play in terms of being obedient to what

God has commanded us, in terms of how we should raise our children. How can churches better equip parents to disciple their children?

Focus on the father. So if the father is a believer and he's involved in their life, in their spiritual life, focus on training him and putting the onus upon him that scripture puts upon him, that he has a responsibility to raise his children in the fear and admonition of the

Lord. If his wife has a question about the faith, she should feel confident to come to him and ask him that question.

That's what 1 Corinthians 14 says. People always get upset about 1 Corinthians 14 because it says why women should be quiet in church and go, oh, people get upset about that.

I say, yeah, but because of what? Because it says if they have a question, they should ask their husbands, which assumes that the husband is not only a believer, but also assumes that the husband is competent to answer.

And so we should be training our men to be godly men who can, in fact, answer the questions that their children and their wives have.

And if a wife has a husband that she can ask theological questions to, and he doesn't say, oh, I don't know, but actually can take them to the scripture and answer with a biblical answer, that is a man who is, one, worthy of being followed because it tells her to follow him, to submit to his leadership, but it's also a man that is gonna, he is gonna be that man in the home that is going to be the person that his children need in those formative years.

So training the men in your church, making them aware of their responsibility is very important.

All right, that's excellent, excellent. Here's a question for you from Frank Hartman. Pastor Keith, do you think biblical language training would help in your academy to assist in understanding the

Old and New Testament in its original context and meaning, and therefore help in exegesis? The answer is yes.

Biblical language training is helpful. I do think, though, and I wanna, this is like where I'm gonna sound like I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth, so please forgive me if I do.

I think biblical language training is very helpful for anyone who's able to do it.

But I also think that hermeneutics can be applied even if you cannot access the original languages with the ability to really deal with them.

And so we teach a basic hermeneutics class that doesn't go into the original languages, but does teach a person how to use the

Bible in the language that they speak, which is English, obviously, for most of us, and still be able to come to the proper conclusion of what the meaning is of the text.

And do we point them to original language helps? Yes, but I do often tell people, be careful of, we have a whole section of the class where we talk about the danger of word studies, right?

A little Greek can be a dangerous thing, right? A little bit of language study can be a little dangerous, or very dangerous, because people say, because people don't really know how to interact with the language, they don't understand things like semantic domain, they don't understand things like understanding the nuances of different words and how the context sets the determination of how a word is being used.

Just because a word can mean something doesn't mean it means the specific thing that it can mean.

Yes, so like for us, in our academy, I do a Greek vocabulary class where I show how the vocabulary of the

New Testament works. It's not an exegesis class, it really is just getting them familiar with the words that are, there's like 200 words in the

Greek that are used 95 % of the time in the New Testament. Like 95 % of the New Testament's made up of about 250 Greek words.

So like if you can learn those words, at least you can look at a Greek New Testament and see those words being used and how they're being used, and that's helpful.

But you have to be careful of the guy with the strongest concordance who's like, oh, this is what it means, and well, yeah, maybe, maybe not, right?

You ever see that debate between James White and that black Hebrew -Israelite guy? There's like a clip floating around.

If you check your strong's concordance, and he goes, I read the language,

I don't use it. Yeah, yeah, I don't really need a strong's concordance, right, but to answer the question of Frank, brother

Frank, yes, original language is helpful. It is hard to do in the way that we do our academy, we do eight -week classes, so that's why

I just limited it to vocabulary, not really understanding syntax and things like that, I think that's just too much for that amount of class.

All right, thank you, Keith, for that, appreciate it. Thank you, Frank, for your question. Next question, Jonathan Myron asks, how would you distinguish an unbeliever who says that they are a

Christian, but they still go to church, live the Christian life, but they are not actually saved? I don't know that we always can.

I mean, just to be quite honest with you, it, the Bible says that you'll know a tree by the fruit it bears, and so I do think that there are aspects of a person's life that will demonstrate the fruit of unbelief, but it may not show itself, it may be subtle, and it may not show itself until over time.

I think that when we look at Scripture, the men in Scripture who did fall away from the faith that apostatized, like Alexander the coppersmith and Demetrius and different people who,

I think it was Demetrius, I'm not wrong about that, but there's a few people that are mentioned like as having walked away, and there had to have been a time where people thought they were believers, right?

There had to have been a time where people thought they were genuine, but there was something that demonstrated that they weren't, and so I don't think we always know who among us is an unbeliever.

If they're professing faith and they're behaving like believers, I don't think we can always know, and so we often get our hearts broken because of that.

I wish I had a better answer, but that's really my answer. A better answer would be to utilize the omniscience you don't have and read the person's heart.

We can't do that, so that's a great. If somebody's confessing Christ, I treat them as a believer until they prove otherwise.

That's right. I think this is a question for me, but feel free to chime in.

This is from Earth, the person, not the planet. It is questioned many times by atheists what the church or theology has ever done that can even be compared to science, but if theology and philosophy are implicit in science, isn't it true that any advancement in science is also a victory for theology?

Yeah, so I could think of a counterexample right off the top of my head. It is questioned many times by atheists what the church or theology has ever done in comparison to science.

First of all, the Christian theology and biblical truth provides the only necessary context for science to even get off the ground, so for theology to provide the very foundation for the meaningfulness of science,

I think that's a pretty darn big thing. Science owes its existence and its consistent application to the worldview context in which it is meaningful, and so I would say, yeah, every time science has a victory, it only has a victory in as much as it is standing on the shoulders of biblical theology, so yeah, it's a counterexample to that.

I know I hear that a lot. What has theology ever done for us? Produced science, that's what it's done.

That's what it's done. Any thoughts there, Keith? I was also, a very simple answer, but still yet kind of profound, is everyone who's ever gone to heaven has done so through the blood of Jesus Christ, and the church is what's proclaiming that blood, and so it's saved millions of souls, so it's valuable, but you have to believe that it's true to make that argument, but still, if it is true, then it is the only way that a man can be made right with a holy

God. Then it has value that's more important than any piece of technology that's ever been created. Okay, excellent.

All right, I don't see any more questions. I know this is in the middle of the day, so it's not during my normal hours, but I appreciate the questions that were sent in, and Keith, thank you so much for giving us a great interview, and definitely something that I'm gonna go listen back on and maybe share some clips of because this is a really important topic, and so I hope that this discussion kind of encouraged people to think more deeply about this issue about young people and leaving the church and what we can do as believers to be obedient to Christ in terms of what we ought to be doing and speaking into the lives of young people and things like that.

Are there any kind of last comments you'd like to share? Once again, just letting people know where they can find you, or any last thoughts on our discussion?

One last quick thought. I have six children, two are adults, and four are still young, and of my two adult children, one is a believer and one is not yet a believer, and I remember one thing that really was a profound realization when

I was thinking about my son who's not yet a believer, and I even said this in a sermon one time. I said,

I taught my son that God was real. I taught my son that God is true. I taught my son many things about God as he was growing up, but I don't think

I really taught him to love God, and I taught him all the things that we've talked about today, apologetics and presuppositionalism and all these things, but in the midst of that, it can become very academic.

It can become very cerebral, and sometimes we forget that the passage in 1 Corinthians which actually tells us that we must love

God, that we must love him, and what does that even mean, to love

God? So don't leave out that aspect when you're teaching your children the importance of knowing

God, but to know God is to love him and to receive his love as well, and so that's a thought

I would leave you with when you're thinking about your children, and yeah, and if anybody's interested in getting a hold of me, it's very easy.

It's just my name, KeithFoskey .com. You can send me emails through the website. It comes directly to me, and I'm happy to correspond with folks.

Also, I'm always looking for show ideas, so if you have something you'd like for me to address or a potential guest you'd like for me to have on, send me an email and I'll do what

I can. Awesome, and what was the name of your YouTube channel again? It's Your Calvinist.

If you just go to YouTube, type in Your Calvinist, it'll take you right to my page. Awesome, so folks who follow my channel, if you haven't already, if you can hop over to Keith's channel and subscribe, that would be awesome.

Support what he's doing. He's got some great content, especially as he's able to express truth in such a way that you'll also get a pretty good laugh, so, and I very much appreciate that.

So just a quick reminder then, if you are interested, I have two more interviews

I mentioned at the beginning of this program coming up next week. On Tuesday, I'll be having

Anthony Rogers. Folks who should be familiar with Anthony Rogers, he's an excellent defender of the Trinity and he's a pretty solid guy theologically.

We're gonna be talking about the doctrine of original sin with Anthony and Jeremiah Nortier, and then on Wednesday, I'll be having

Dr. James White and Dr. Jason Lyle back on, along with myself to do a live

Q &A, so bring your questions. They can be anything, theology, Bible questions, practical ministry questions.

Bring all the questions that you can and we'll have a great time then. And then lastly, just to remind folks of two more things.

The new YouTube channel, Revealed Apologetics Plus, find that, subscribe, and if you're looking to support Revealed Apologetics and things, everything that I'm doing here, one of the ways you can do that is signing up for my new course called

Presupp Applied. The link is in the description to this video. And so that's it for today.