In our world today, many people never give the Christian faith a moment’s consideration because they assume it makes no sense and doesn’t fit the realities of life. Simon Edwards would point people in the exact opposite direction - that faith makes sense and makes the most sense of our world and our lives in this world.

Recommending Reading:

The Sanity of Belief: Why Faith Makes Sense, by Simon Edwards. 

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter. I am your host, Randy Newman. This is a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute, and my conversation partner today is Simon Edwards. Simon is an apologist and an author and a speaker for OCCA, The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. He's just written a great book called The Sanity of Belief: Why Faith Makes Sense. Simon Edwards, welcome to Questions That Matter.

Thanks so much, Randy. It's an absolute pleasure and a privilege for me to be here.

About Occa

Well, I feel the need for us to begin—I think our listeners, some will know about OCCA, some will know absolutely nothing. So can you tell us what is this organization that you work for and serve with?

Yeah, so we're a center based in Oxford in the UK. It's a rather magical place to visit, if you haven't been there. I know you have. And if listeners haven't been there, well worth a visit. But from this center, a team of speakers and writers who are grappling or helping people who are grappling with the big questions of life and its meaning and why we're here as human beings.

And so, as speakers, we find ourselves going off into schools and universities and workplaces and government institutions. Engaging people with the big questions that really matter. Listening to people's heartfelt concerns and intellectual objections and walking them through them and just really helping people to see how Christian faith not only makes sense of the big questions of the heart and of our head. But also that Jesus is the ultimate answer to life's quest to make sense of all these things.

We also run a wonderful, or have run a wonderful training program over the last few years. We have students come from all over the world, and that's so exciting when you've got different cultures and lots of people with English as their second language. And we look at Christian apologetics, explaining the Christian faith and working through the big questions and objections, theology, philosophy, church history, spiritual formation. It's a wonderful nine-month program, and it's been a real privilege as a tutor as well, and a speaker, to be a part of that as well.

I love it. Okay, so your main product, sorry to put it that way, is a nine-month training program. Do you still do some shorter things?

Yeah. So historically we've run training weekends, training days. We've had one-month business programs. We’ve had a one-week summer school. And I think, with COVID, it's been very challenging. We actually managed to run the nine-month course throughout the year, even when people were mostly zooming in. And it was only at the end of the nine months that we were all together in Oxford. So we're in the process at the moment of really thinking through how do we leverage the opportunities that are available with Zoom technology and Microsoft teams and all this sort of stuff to make the sort of training we do broader, more accessible, but without losing that wonderful community aspect where that real spiritual formation takes place as well.

I love it. I love it. Well, Lord willing, I hope to get back there, whether it's part of that Belfast Oxford study tour we do or on my own. But I really love what the Lord has worked out for you guys there. Great facility right on the campus or very, very near the campus. So I hadn't thought about the wonders of having people from all over the world there. So that becomes its own kind of laboratory. You're sitting and getting really great information and training, but you're sitting next to someone from a very different part of the world, a very different culture, presuppositions, and so that just forces a greater level of engagement.

It really does. And on top of that, people from different church backgrounds, Christian traditions, all adds to the sort of richness of mix, and iron sharpens iron as we work out really tough questions together, tough theological questions and tough questions that people who aren't in the church are asking about the church and about faith in God.

You know, it’s a wonderful time for us, I think. It’s a difficult time for us, in our world, with a lot of hostility and attacks against the Christian faith. But not all that long ago, if you were going to be witnessing and talking to people, you felt this need to… you had to be a master apologist and memorize lots and lots of answers to lots of questions. And we still need to grow and develop in those areas as individuals. But there's this resource now, or resources, available to us. When we're talking to someone and they raise a question and we go, “Boy, I haven't really studied that. I don't know,” but here's a YouTube video, and here's the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics Channel on YouTube or wherever. I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of places people can find these things online, and all of a sudden we've got some of the best people on our side delivering the information better than we could. So I want to commend this to our listeners, that here's a magnificent resource to take advantage of and send these links to some friends.

But let's dive into your book, The Sanity of Belief. Two questions: So who did you write this book for? And what was it that prompted you to write it? Because as I understand things, writing books is a lot of work.

So the motivation for writing the book—when you ask who did I write it for? I actually wrote it for my former teenage non-Christian self. I grew up in quite an ordinary, happy, but nonreligious Australian home. We never talked about God or faith or the big questions of life or anything like that. But I well remember standing in the school playground at lunchtime, as about 14, 15 years old and just wondering to myself, “Is it true that we just live for 80 or 90 years and then we die and then we're dust and that's it? And everything that we've loved, everything that we've achieved, everything that we are just inevitably dissipates into nothingness.” And I remember this strong feeling, just wondering, “If that's true, it renders life rather meaningless because nothing that we do in the end ultimately lasts.” And I thought to myself, “If that is true, it's a sad story.” And something in me said it actually doesn't feel like it is the right story.

So, for me, that was actually the beginning of my quest to really work out what life is all about. I was helped along this quest by the fact that I was really into sport. I was playing tennis, cricket, rugby, athletics, martial arts. It was my whole life. And I had this knee injury which took me out, which meant that I had all this extra time on my hands. I went from extremely busy to almost listless, not much to do. And I think this is where the reflecting about life sort of kicked in. So I started going to the library, and I started getting interested in these things, because at the time I also was forced to sit in religious education classes. I went to a nominally Lutheran school, and so we had to do religious education classes. It was just the closest school. That's why my parents sent me there.

But I don't even think the teachers who taught the classes were Christian, but what I was receiving was Christianity 101. I was learning that there is actually a different story, that we’re not here by accident, we're here on purpose, because somebody, God, wanted us to be here. Your intuition that this world is broken and not as things should be is absolutely right. It is broken. Christianity calls it sin. But God loves us so much that He sent Jesus into the world to bring us back to God. And I started hearing the gospel story, and I have to say, something in my heart sensed—and this is an intuition more than anything—that this was the true story. The one that we're just here through a random combination of time plus matter plus chance is not the true story. This feels like the true story.

So I started going to the library, and I started reading, and I read books about Christianity, because it was quite well resourced, the library, which was helpful. I read books about other religions and other philosophies. And long story short, I came to the intellectual conviction that Christianity made far and away the best sense of the world around me, with its overwhelming impression of order and design, as well as the world within me, my deep longings for meaning, for love, for significance. And the other thing that really stood out to me as I researched all these things was that all the other religious worldviews seemed to be saying that, if I thought the right things or did the right things, I could work my way up to heaven, nirvana, salvation, whatever it is. But this one religion was saying, actually, there's nothing that we could do. We're helpless, we need rescue, and God has come down to us. And I remember thinking, “That doesn't feel like a humanly constructed idea,” because I was very competitive, and I really resonated with the idea of wanting to work it and earn it. And this seemed totally not from human origins that we were helpless and needed rescue.

And over the number of years that I've been working with OCCA, I've had the pleasure of speaking on lots and lots of university campuses and workplaces. And I've just discovered that there's so many people just like me from nonreligious backgrounds who are trying to make sense of what life is all about, but they just don't know where to start. And they're generally under the assumption, thanks to the cultural milieu that they live in, that belief in God is irrational, irrelevant, or possibly even immoral. And so I've written the book for people such as I was as a teenager, and such are many that I meet in my conversations on campuses and workplaces, to help them see that Christian faith, far from being irrational, irrelevant, or immoral, that actually trusting in Jesus Christ is the most sensible, rational, and wonderful thing that you could possibly do with your life. So that's my motivation for writing The Sanity of Belief.

Do you think there's a growing number of people who are asking that question, like, “Why am I here? What's the purpose?” Or has that always been the case? And perhaps we just haven't addressed that question as directly as we need to? Or does it matter?

It matters. And my own view is that those questions have always been there. But because we live in the type of society that we do, that we have very little time for reflection and for thought. We're so distracted, you know, mobile phones, internet, TV. We’re just constantly distracted. Entertainment at the click of a button. And there's just very little space for reflecting. But it's so interesting, isn't it, that when COVID hit us last year and suddenly we were forced to slow down, we were forced to think about the fragility of our own lives. You research the Google Analytics, and the amount of people who are typing in questions into Google, such as, “What is the meaning of life?” “Is there a God?” And over here in the UK, I don't know what it was like in the States, but we had unprecedented numbers of people tuning into church online, just three, four, five times the amount of people at different churches reporting the same thing, of people tuning in.

So I think those questions are always there below the surface, but for most of us, we're so busy that it's only times of… It’s crisis moments that force us to think about those sort of things. Or if you're in conversation with people, because these things are below the surface, if, as Christians, we are in the habit of entering into deep conversations with our friends who don't go to church, you soon discover that those questions are there.

I remember being invited to speak to a youth group of sort of 15, 16 year olds who were on the edge of gang related violence and knife crime in inner London. And the youth group leader said, “Look, these guys, they don't have any of these big questions about life and God. They're only interested in chasing girls and running with gangs, all sorts of stuff.” Anyway, within about ten minutes of just chatting and asking them questions and getting to know their story, we were talking about the meaning of life. We were talking about how, as human beings, we got here. We were talking about whether we had free will or not. We were talking about whether the choices we make ultimately matter, if there really is such a thing as right and wrong, good and evil.

One of the young guys even started talking about the multiverse and wondering how that fits in. And the youth leader was amazed. And the reality is, teenagers present a face that says they're not interested in these things. But from where we sit as Christians, we know that our hearts are absolutely restless until they rest in God. So we're meaning-seeking creatures. We were made for eternity. We were made for God. We were made for relationship. And the questions are there. That's my experience.

What are we to do as Christians in a culture that keeps changing so constantly and becoming more and more hostile to our faith and our values? Well, the first step would be to get a better handle on how we got to this point in the first place. And someone who knows about that and articulates it so very, very well is Dr. Carl Truman, and he's going to be with us for a special event and talking about ideas on gender, sexuality, history, cancel culture. These things are really not new, but they've been percolating for quite a long time. And so we really hope you can make it to that event. It's an online event. There’s no charge for it, but you must register. So please go to www.cslewisinstitute.org/self-identity, and that's with a hyphen in between self and identity, self identity. It's on Thursday, October 28, at 8:00 p.m. in the evening, Eastern time. We sure hope you can join us for that. Just for your background information, Carl Truman is now a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He's written several books, and this presentation, this conversation with him, flows out of his very recent, excellent, and challenging book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

You have a quote toward the end of your book. You're quoting the famous artist Damien Hirst. And I must confess, well, you say he's a famous artist, and I believe you, but I'm afraid that I don't know who he is. So I'm sorry. But regardless of who he is-

He’s famous in the UK.

Why Do I Feel so Important when I'M Not?

Okay. Well, it’s so intriguing what he says, “Why do I feel so important when I'm not? Nothing is important, and everything is important. I do not know why I am here, but I am glad that I am. I'd rather be here than not. I am going to die, and I want to live forever. I can't escape that fact, and I can't let go of that desire.” I think that’s where… yes, a lot of people, they're told, “Well, we're just matter. There's nothing eternal. There’s nothing significant about us. We're just dust.” And yet something inside of them is saying, “Really? So then why do I keep coming back to this question? If I'm just dust, that question shouldn't rise up, right?”

There is often in people's lives a huge incongruity between their instincts about life—I mean, we all live as if life has meaning. We all live as if our choices matter, that there is such a thing as right and wrong, good and evil. Most of us live on the assumption that not just our own lives, but other human lives are significant, of inestimable value. We live as if the world around us that we experience is true. It's not just an illusion. We assume that our brains are telling us true things about the world around us. We can't really live without meaningful relationships. And so we believe in love and we look for love and we long for love and we cling and looked for hope even when life hits us curve balls of sickness and suffering and death.

And these questions of meaning and value and goodness and truth and love and hope make sense, so much sense, if Christianity is true. But if ultimate reality boils down to unguided laws operating on mindless atoms, it's very difficult to see how that worldview can sustain our intuitions about meaning and value and goodness, truth and love and hope. And so when we're in conversations with people as Christians, it's just such a wonderful opportunity to share with them how Christian faith makes sense of these things and they find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

I sometimes say to people who assume that life is meaningful, I say, “I agree with you, and I'd love to hear why you think it's meaningful. And my own view is that, in order for life to have meaning, it needs to be true that who we are matters, which is a question of value. That what we do matters, which is a question of goodness or morality. That what we experience is real, which is a question of truth. That our relationships are meaningful, which is a question of love. And that we have hope for the future, that not even sickness, suffering, and death can take away the question of hope.” And again, just trying to help people see that Jesus Christ makes sense of these nonphysical realities that we live our lives and orient our lives by.

I mean, you can have an Einstein… like, I love science and philosophy, but you can have an Einstein knowledge of the universe. And even with that level of scientific knowledge, that is not going to help you with questions such as, “Where should I live?” or, “What should I do for a job?” or, “Who should I befriend?” or, “Who should I marry?” or, “Should I even marry?” Those questions only make sense within the context of these bigger questions of meaning and value and goodness, truth and love and hope. And Christian faith makes sense of these in a way that an atheist faith or belief in life simply does not, in my view.

I wonder if you see this in the UK. And I wonder if I'm even accurate on this, but I think here in the US, in some circles, in some Christian circles, we've actually discouraged thoughtful, intelligent nonbelievers. We've discouraged them about asking the difficult questions. We've almost said, certainly not this blatantly, but we've implied, “Oh, you think too much,” or, “You’re too much in your head,” or, “You’re just delving into these things. You just need to have faith,” as if faith and intellect were these opposite poles.

And, well, first of all, in the Bible, we have the book of Ecclesiastes, which encourages that kind of wrestling and thoughtfulness. But I wonder if sometimes some of our best pre-evangelistic efforts are to say to people, “No, I think you're asking the exact right questions. Yes, I think it's the right question to ask, ‘Do we matter?’ or, ‘Is there meaning?’ And yeah, I agree with you that there's something there. Let's explore that.”

And I think that's a big part of your book, right? Or your thinking in this book?

Absolutely. Whenever I'm in conversations with people who—they’re not Christians, they don't go to church, I'm always trying to find common ground. And the fact that we’re both human beings means that there's going to be ample amounts of common ground. And so it might be that someone is struggling in a relationship. They thought that they could trust their loved one, their parent, and they're wondering whether love is real or the foundation on which they built their lives is real. And suddenly we have a connecting point. People let us down. Why is that? Why do we long for love? What is love? How would love make sense? And as Christians, we need to realize that we cannot give the whole… what the Apostle Paul calls the whole counsel of God. We cannot give the whole gospel, we cannot give all Christian doctrine in one go. There's so much to speak about, and so often it's where do you start? What's the best starting point? And I think sometimes Christians seem to go out of their way of choosing the starting point, choosing something about Christian faith which is the most difficult for someone they're speaking to connect with.

And my thinking is: Connect where there's obvious points of connection, and then lead people onto the next step and the next step and the next step, and then everything I'm doing, I'm trying to bring them to Jesus Christ. I'm trying to help them see that, like me, they're sinful. However, I'm not going to start with that language, “sinful” if the person hasn't grown up in church. But I might talk about how isn't it interesting how we all want to be a good person, but sometimes we find ourselves maybe lying when it would be inconvenient to tell the truth, or sometimes we short circuit our own good intentions. And so I'm just finding connecting points, if that makes sense.

Oh, it makes total sense to me, and I hope it makes sense to our listeners. People who've listened to this podcast or have heard me speak or read some of the things I've written, I’m a big, big believer in pre-evangelism. C.S. Lewis certainly was. When he was asked to do those radio broadcasts, he said, “Most Christian apologetics starts too far along. I want to back up further.” And so he did several weeks, four or five weeks, and even then got to a point where he said, “Do not think that I've even come close yet to the Christian God. I'm still 100 miles away.” And I think that that's just a tremendous need for us in our world, to back up further.

And you model it really well for us in this book. Looking at the table of contents, it's two parts. Part one is “The Things that Matter.” Part two, “Weighing Up the Evidence.” So you have a whole six chapters before we even get to, “Here, let me give you some evidence about why you should believe.” The first half is more, “Let me give you some questions I hope you'll ask. What on earth gives me meaning? What makes me special? Why bother doing the right thing if there is no right and wrong? Those kind of things. Tell us a little more of what you were hoping a reader would get out of the first half of your book.

One of my favorite Christian authors is Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician/philosopher, and one of my favorite quotes of this is that e as Christians, when we're talking of the gospel, we want to make people wish that it were true and then show them that it is. And I really resonated with what you had to say, Randy, about taking people through e sort of working from further back, because we live in a context where there are so many misconceptions about Christian faith, so many misunderstandings, and so part of doing evangelism well is explaining the gospel well, and part of explaining the gospel well is being aware of the misconceptions, so that you can avoid traps of saying things that don't make sense.

So my approach in the book, in the first half, I talk about the things that really matter to us as human beings. As I mentioned, meaning, value, goodness, truth, love, and hope in the midst of suffering. And what I try to do is to show people that Christian faith makes sense of these things that matter to us, it makes sense of why they matter to us, and that Jesus is actually the fulfillment of the quest to find these things that matter to us. So actually, what I hope will happen as people read those chapters is that they will say, “This book is diagnosing my condition and explaining me better than I have hitherto been able to explain myself before.” And actually that's been my experience on university campuses in particular, that students have come up after talks around these sort of subjects and said, “I felt like you're reading my heart, reading my mind.” Of course, I don't know them, right? I haven't met them. But I'm speaking truth that I know from the Lord, just Christian truth applied to our present circumstances, and because Christianity is true, the things that I'm speaking about are true. And they resonate in the deep inward recesses of the human heart as truth that connects and comes home.

So what I'm hoping in the first half of the book is that, when someone who hasn't grown up going to church or someone who's just struggling in their faith to believe that Christianity is even good, let alone true, that they'll read it and they will be thirsty, they'll be hungry, they'll be wanting this to be true. They'll see why Jesus Christ is actually good news for them today.

And then the second half of the book, I'm addressing the skeptical mind, which I am a skeptically minded person. My mum said I would grow up to be a lawyer because, whenever she told me something or anyone else told me something, I wouldn't believe them unless they could back it up with reason and evidence. And so I did grow up to become a lawyer. That was true. Mums are almost always right. So I address the skeptical person who, when you get told something that sounds so good, the natural instinct is to say, “Well, it probably is too good to be true.” And so in the second half of the book, I examine the claims of Christianity through the lens of science and philosophy and history and literary studies and archaeology and all these sort of things to show, “No, actually, you don't have to leave your brain at the door to believe these things. Actually, Jesus Christ would much prefer if you kept your brain in your head, because He wants us to worship Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

And then, at the end of the book as well, I sort of bring the reader to a decision that there actually is a choice in here. It's not merely an intellectual assent to a worldview, that Christian faith might make better sense than any other worldview. There's actually a Person waiting with open arms for you to come home, Jesus, and do you want Him to be Lord of your life or not?

And it's funny, Randy, as an evangelist, one of the feedback I got from the editor was I tried to bring the reader to Jesus in every chapter too early, and they said, “Look, actually, you've got a whole book, so just take them on the journey through the whole book. You don't have to win them every chapter.” And that was helpful advice as well, because normally when I'm having conversations with someone, it might be the only 20, 30 minutes I get with them. But the beauty of a book is you can take people on a journey. And that's what I love about books. They have a ministry life of their own, if that makes sense.

The Christian Faith Makes Sense

Are you a fisher of men? Do you want to be a fisher of men? Do you struggle with this call that Jesus places on us to be fishers of men? Discipling others is also a significant part of that whole enterprise, and it's a way to abide in Christ. It's a way for us to know Christ more fully, become more like Him, and participate in His work of building His kingdom. So as we disciple, we become coworkers with Jesus. As He helps us mature, He allows us to help Him mature others and nurture them towards reproduction and expanding of His kingdom. And so we have many free small group resources on our website, many different things to help you in this discipleship process, both to grow as a disciple and to disciple others. So please check out cslewisinstitute.org/products.

Oh, I'm really glad you mentioned that, because that was my observation of… You really waited quite a while to bring in Jesus, but I think that's right in a book. Now that may not be right in a conversation or depending on the setting. And I also want to say I sure hope people will buy your book, to read it themselves as Christians, to get training, role modeling of what this can look like, but then they'll also give copies to nonbelievers because… And I hope they won't feel like, “Gee, he doesn't bring them to Jesus at the end of every chapter.” You said that you did it first, and they said, “No, you don't need to do that in a book.”

So I know that this is true here on this side. I don't know how it is in the UK, but I'm guessing there may be similarities. There's an anxiety of, “Come on! We’ve got to close the deal. We got to close the deal.” And in some settings, we need to let people wrestle the way Jesus did in the conversation with the woman at the well. He talked about water for a while, and I think that that's just… Of course it's perfect, but it's just a great example of making people wish that it is true and then showing them that it is true. I think this is really, really great and important for our time. So you've really modeled it well. I want to keep asking you a million questions, but then this really horrible thing will happen. People will say, “Oh, I don't need to buy the book. I just listened to the podcast.” And so, no, we want people to buy it. We want attention on this book. We want them. So I'm going to draw to a close.

But any last things you want to tell us about this wonderful task of pre-evangelism or helping people see that the Christian faith makes sense and makes sense of our lives in this world?

Well, firstly, I just want to say how encouraged I am by your observations. Because my real hope for the book is that Christians buy it and read it and that it does model, actually, as you suggested, a way of engaging with people for whom the Christian story is just totally foreign and alien, and they have so many lies and misconceptions in their head thanks to the culture they're in, and they are starting so many paces back. I think it's a really great book for someone who has grown up in church all their life and finds that they struggle to do evangelism when they're speaking to someone who hasn't grown up in church and is asking all sorts of awkward questions which are completely unexpected.

But secondly, the other thing you said is, my real prayer for the book is that it makes its way through Christian hands into the hands of people who aren't Christians. That's the ultimate audience for which it's intended. And what I'm praying is that God does use it by His grace to open eyes to the wonders of His truth, beauty, and goodness, that He is the way, the truth, and the light, and that ultimate hope is found in Jesus. And you don't have to commit intellectual suicide to believe that. And I'm hoping that it might even raise up some potential C.S. Lewis like Christians along the way as well.

When I'm talking to Christians who are nervous about doing evangelism, something I try to encourage them with is just saying, “Look, the best thing that you can be, if you're doing evangelism, is, number one, prayerful. Just realize it's not on you.” So for me, that's just so freeing. It's not on me. I just make myself available, and the Lord helps me in those moments. And often as I'm talking to someone, and I realize it's become an evangelistic conversation, I shoot up an arrow prayer. Help, God. And of course, I don't say that out loud, because that would really freak out the person that I'm speaking to.

Yeah, okay. Important note. That’s not the application point we hope you take away from this.

And number two, be interested in people, because if you're interested in people and getting to know them. That is so great for evangelism. Maybe I’ll just finish with this: Another hero of the faith, William Wilberforce, the great slavery abolitionist. A lesser known fact about William Wilberforce was that he was a great, intentional, relational evangelist. Why? Because he was genuinely interested in other people. And so, when he would meet with people… Actually, there's an interesting story about a lady of high society who had dinner with William Wilberforce's best friend, the prime minister. And after having had dinner with the prime minister, the journalist asked her, “What was it like having dinner with the prime minister?” And she said, “After having had dinner with the prime minister, I'm convinced that he's the most interesting person in the world.” Well, the next week, she had dinner with William Wilberforce. And after having had dinner with Wilberforce, the same journalist interviewed her, said, “What was it like having dinner with Wilberforce?” To which she replied, “After having had dinner with William Wilberforce, I am convinced that I am the most interesting person in the world.”

Oh, nice.

And that's the sort of person William Wilberforce was. People found him interesting because he was interested, and he would have lots of conversations with people, deep conversations, because he would be interested in them. And at the same time, if things went in an evangelistic direction, he would often finish the conversation with an invitation. He had a whole library of books. And let's say someone had been talking about the relationship between science and faith. He would then invite them to take one of his books that he would have on science and faith and take it away. And so I say to people, the most important thing is to be interested, to ask good questions, and then if that takes you to a meaningful conversation, then pray and ask God that, in the midst of this meaningful conversation, you would be able to somehow point them to Jesus or to invite them to take a step to getting to know something about church, about God, about Jesus.

And what I say to people who are afraid that they're going to ask them questions that are difficult, I say, “It’s okay if people ask you difficult questions, because if someone asks you a question about your faith which you don't know the answer to, it's perfectly okay to say, ‘You know what? That's a great question. I don't know the answer to it. But I'll tell you what. I'm going to go away, do a bit of reading, speak to my pastor, hop online, look at some apologetics website. I'll come back to you.’” And nine times out of ten, when a Christian does that, the conversation is so much more fruitful, rich, and evangelistically meaningful in the end, because the person knows that you've loved them enough to care about them, to care about the question. You’ve taken the time.

So we need not be afraid. God is on our side. It's not on us. You don't have to know all the answers to the questions. You just have to be interested in other people.

Wow! Thank you. That is great stuff for us to conclude with. Helping people feel like they are the most important or the most interesting person, that is a great, great goal. And God can use us in that way. So, Simon Edwards, thanks so much for being with us. I do recommend his book, and please do check out OCCA’s website, and while you're on that thing called the internet, check out another website that I particularly like. It's called cslewisinstitute.org. We have a whole lot of resources there, and things that will help you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Thanks for being with us.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman.