Category Archives: Mentoring

Mentoring

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less

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Buddy breathing
Buddy breathing

Note: I am re-posting a series of five Bible studies this week that I wrote last year. Every 2 PM post Monday to Friday this week will be a Bible study.

I have been getting into disagreements with the woman I am mentoring in apologetics, where she has been telling me that accurate assessments of my strengths are “proud” and that I need to be more humble. So I thought I would explain what I take humility to mean.

Here’s something from J. I. Packer:

“Being humble is not a matter of pretending to be worthless, but is a form of realism, not only regarding the real badness of one’s sins and stupidities and the real depth of one’s dependence on God’s grace, but also regarding the real range of one’s abilities. Humble believers know what they can and cannot do. They note both their gifts and their limitations, and so are able to avoid both the unfaithfulness of letting their God-given powers lie fallow and the foolhardiness of biting off more than they can chew.”

— J.I. Packer, “A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah”

I think I can give an example here. Ever since I was young, I have wanted to do the PhD in computer science and become a Christian professor. I already have the BS and MS and I have been working in industry full-time for over 10 years. The money is there to do the PhD in computer science five times over, but I have not done it because I am not sure that I have what it takes to be a researcher. Sometimes people ask me what I studied and what I do for a living. I am accurate about my degrees, my resume and my savings, and what I am doing and can do with my resources. But I am also accurate in saying that doing a PhD takes a whole different level of commitment and sacrifice. And I am humble enough to know that it is beyond me, at least at this time. I lack the support to do it. God hasn’t given me a mentor or a wife. So I am humble about not “biting off more than I can chew”. That is real humility. But trying to pretend I don’t have any skills, haven’t made any good decisions, or that I am lousy with money is not humility.

Here’s her most favorite theologian, A. W. Tozer:

“The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God’s estimate of his own life. He knows he is as weak and as helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at the same time that he is of more importance than angels. In himself, nothing; in God, everything. That is his motto. He knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has stopped caring.”

— A. W. Tozer, “The Pursuit of God”

So let’s talk about some cases where I feel I am humble, but my apologetics mentoree doesn’t see it.

I know that there were things that I wanted, and things that I wanted to do in this life. Getting married early was one of them, and keeping chaste as my 20s passed by has been hard. I really wanted to be married by now and to have children and a home. If you are looking for some sort of evidence of humility in a person, that is a good place to look: how far has this person been willing to go along with God’s purposes and rules, even when it meant not fulfilling their own needs and goals? Humility means not thinking of your own goals and needs. It means following the rules even when you know you aren’t being fulfilled. Although I have the resources to just grab for happiness, I won’t break God’s rules to do it.

Let’s get specific with that. There are lots of things that I would like to do for fun that cost money – like learning how to fly a plane, or buying an even faster car than I have now, or taking scuba diving lessons. For some people, it might be surfing, hang-gliding or skydiving. These entertainments cost money, but that money could just as easily be donated to a Ratio Christi event or a Faith Beyond Belief event. That’s humility – putting God’s needs above your own needs in stewardship of resources. Even though you have a right to be happy with what you earn, you can humble yourself and share and go without thrills and entertainment. I almost never spend money on entertainments. The argument “but you only live once, you have to experience this now” means nothing to me. I like to stay home.

Humility also comes into play when deciding what I should do with my life. I think all of us would like to be William Lane Craig or Stephen C. Meyer or Jay Richards or Michael Licona. Standing up on stage, smashing atheism into the floor with both hands. I would love to be that. To do that, though, I would have to go back to school and spend tens of thousands of dollars on PhDs, and then write books and papers. That would eat up the savings that I need for a family. Then I could be famous and awesome, like my heroes. But I choose not to sacrifice tens of thousands of dollars on my dream, when my money and the money of other Christians who might support me could be better used for God’s Kingdom by the more skilled scholars who already exist. Maybe there is someone getting a PhD in Biochemistry who I could help out instead, just by keeping my job and doing with a little less entertainment. Humility means being content with your part in the Kingdom, and not trying to be something you’re not. Letting other people have the spotlight, while you just quietly help them from the shadows. It takes real faith in God to be that humble… to work in secret, and to depend entirely on Him for your accolades.

So how to be more humble? One good way is to sit down with someone you trust and confess things that you have done wrong, or things that you failed at. That’s what I do with her, and it helps to remind me of my limitations. I try to confess my failures in achieving the things that I wanted to achieve all the time. I recommend that to everyone. It’s not hard for me, I think a lot about my failures. The missed opportunities, the things I never got to do. Sometimes, you can have the best of intentions, and things just don’t work out. It’s good to confide in someone else when that happens. So if there is someone who you would like to be more humble, maybe the best thing to do is to ask them about their mistakes and regrets, and then just listen to them. That will work.

Mentoring

Tactics: the worst mistake a Christian can make when doing apologetics

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I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

So, this is just an advice post for doing apologetics.

Here are three situations I’ve run into while doing apologetics in the last month.

First situation. I was talking with a lady who is an atheist. I had a copy of “God’s Crime Scene” in my hand, and she asked me about it. I told her that it was a book written by the guy who solved the homicide case that I asked her to watch on Dateline. She remembered – it was the two-hour special on the woman who was killed with a garrotte. She pointed at the book and said “what’s in it?” I said, it has 8 pieces of evidence that fit better with a theistic worldview than with an atheistic one, and some of them scientific. Her reply to me was – literally – “which denomination do you want me to join?”

Second situation. I was talking with a friend of mine who teaches in a Catholic school. She was telling that she got the opportunity to talk to her students about God, and found out that some of them were not even theists, and many of them had questions. So she asked them for questions and got a list. The list included many hard cases, like “what about the Bible and slavery” and “why do Christians oppose gay marriage?” and so on.

Third situation. Talking to a grad student about God’s existence. I’m laying out my scientific arguments for her, holding up the peer-reviewed papers for each discovery. I get to the Doug Axe paper on protein folding probabilities, and she holds up her hand. One question: “Am I going to Hell?”

So think about those three situations. In each case, the opponent is trying to reject Christianity by jumping way, way ahead to the very end of the process. When you do Christian apologetics, you do not take the bait and jump to the end of the process dealing with nitty gritty details until you have made your case for the core of the Christian worldview using your strongest evidence. Let me explain.

So, your strongest evidence as a Christian are the scientific arguments, along with the moral argument. Those would include (for starters) the following:

  1. kalam cosmological argument
  2. cosmic fine-tuning
  3. galactic and stellar habitability
  4. origin of life / DNA
  5. molecular machines / irreducible complexity
  6. the moral argument

The problem I am seeing today is that atheists are rejecting discussions about evidence because they think that all we are interested in is getting them to become Christians. Well, yes. I want you to become a Christian. But I know perfectly well what that entails – it entails a change of life priorities. Both of the women I spoke to are living with their boyfriends, and the kids in the Catholic school just want to have fun. None of them wants to believe in a God who will require self-denial, self-control, and self-sacrifice. Nobody wants God to be in that leader position in their lives. Christianity is 100% reversed from today’s me-first, fun-seeking, thrill-seeking, fear-of-missing-out travel spirit of the age.

So, how to answer all these late-game questions? The answer is simple. You don’t answer any late-game questions until the person you are talking with accounts for the widely-accepted data in your list. These are things that have got to be accepted before any discussion about minor issues like one angel vs two angels at the empty tomb can occur. When we discuss all the basic issues where the evidence is the strongest, then we can go on to discuss issues where the evidence is debatable, then finally, in the last bits before the end, we can discuss these other kinds of questions.

How to explain why this process must be followed to the person who asks specific questions about minor issues? Simple. You explain that your goal is not to get them to become a Christian right now. That you want to let them believe anything thing they want. That’s right. They can believe anything they want to believe. As long as what they believe is consistent with the evidence. And what I am going to do is give them the evidence, and then they can believe whatever they want – so long as it’s consistent with the evidence.

So, for example, I’m going to tell them 3 pieces of evidence for a cosmic beginning of the universe: the expanding universe (redshift), the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the light element abundances. That’s mainstream science that shows that the universe came into being out of nothing, a finite time in the past. And I will charge them not to believe in any religion that assumes that the universe has always been here. For example, Mormonism is ruled out, they believe in eternally existing matter. See how that works? Hey, Ms. Atheist. You can believe anything you want. As long as what you believe is consistent with the evidence. 

I think this approach of not letting them rush you to the end at the beginning is important for two reasons. First, we can get our foot in the door to talk about things that are interesting to everyone, in a non-stressed environment. Everyone can talk about evidence comfortably. Second, we show that we hold our beliefs because we are simply letting evidence set boundaries for us on what we are allowed to believe. We can’t believe not-Christianity, because not-Christianity is not consistent with the evidence. And you start with the most well-supported evidence, and eliminate worldviews that are falsified by the most well-supported evidence. Atheism actually gets falsified pretty quickly, because of the scientific evidence.

So, that’s my advice. Had a friend of mine named William try this out about a week ago. It went down like this:

William to me:

This guy I know messaged me and bragged for a while about how easy he can dismantle Christianity. He said: “present the gospel to me as you understand it. I’ll simply ask questions to demonstrate it is not worth your belief.”

WK to William:

First of all, he isn’t allowed to just sit there and poke holes in your case, he has to present a positive case for atheism. Second, don’t discuss Christianity with him at all until you first discuss the evidence for theism – start with the good scientific evidence.

And William wrote this to his friend:

The way I’m wired is that I process all competing theories and go with the best one. By doing a comparative analysis of worldviews I find that Christian theology easily explains the most about the world I find myself living in.

I’m pretty sure that a God of some sort exists because of the scientific evidence for the origin of the universe and the fine tuning in physics. From there I find it quite intuitive that if a God went through the trouble of creating and tuning a universe for life that this God likely has some sort of interest in it and has revealed Himself to humanity in some way.

From there I can look at the major world religions and compare them to see which one explains the past and the present the best. Christianity easily comes out on top.

And then a few days later, I got this from William:

I finally got the agnostic to tell me what he thinks about origin and fine tuning. When I started pointing out that his views were unscientific, he blew a basket, called me dishonest and told me he didn’t want to discuss anything further.

And that’s where you want to be. Cut off all discussions where the challenger tries to jump to the end and get you to debate the very last steps of your case. Present the strongest evidence for your core claims, and get him to account for this evidence within his own worldview. Lead the discussion with public, testable evidence. All warfare depends on picking the terrain, weapons and tactics that allow you to match your strength against your opponent’s weakness.

Mentoring

Men having a mid-life crisis are searching for meaning in all the wrong places

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Two Air Force JTACs discuss mission parameters prior to calling in CAS
Two Air Force JTACs discuss mission parameters prior to calling in CAS

I can always count on my good friend Dina to be even more angry at feminists and feminism than I am – she has to deal with young, unmarried women behaving selfishly and irresponsibly every day, and sees the trouble they cause for others.

So when she sent me this article from the UK Telegraph, and told me that I needed to write about how men are going terribly wrong, I knew it was time to balance things out a little on this blog.

Here are the parts I want to comment on:

Something strange happens to men in middle age.

[…]Aches and pains used to disappear quickly, now they hang around for months. Hair no longer grows on the head, you can’t stop it growing out of your ears. You can’t sit down, stand up, or pick up any object without emitting an accompanying grunt. But it’s not the age, it’s the anxiety; those ‘dark nights of the soul’, staring at the ceiling, pondering the ultimate question of middle age: ‘Is that it?’

[…] Some take up the triathlon and wear unfeasibly tight Lycra. “I want to prove that I can still do it,” said a marathon running friend. “I’m fitter than guys half my age.” Some change their appearance. The jeans grow tighter than their lycra. A tattoo appears. Then there’s the sports car because they think that buying something will cure their sadness. But they end up just as unhappy, but at a higher speed.

[…]Studies show that in our forties and fifties levels of happiness and life satisfaction dip to their lowest levels psychological distress is at its height. Forty-five is the most common age for depression to be diagnosed. This is a complex situation with many factors, but in my many conversations with ‘men of a certain age’, I sensed an underlying lack of meaning and purpose, and a sense of having failed in some way.

Many of them had spent their life climbing the corporate ladder only to find out it was leaning against the wrong wall. At one event where I was speaking, I met a judge. He’d spent his life striving to reach that position, only to find that, when he got there, he felt as empty as ever. Another friend returned from a long career teaching overseas. He saw a TV advert featuring men admiring their DIY handiwork and saying, ‘I did that.’ He burst into tears: he felt there was nothing in his life of which he could say, ‘I did that.’ He was wrong. But it didn’t feel that way.

Men are wrong to think that they can produce meaning by achieving pointless worldly goals. Pointless worldly achievements don’t ward off old age, sickness and death. There is not some judging ceremony when you die where the person who has the most stuff, or who had the most sex, or who ran the most marathons, or who traveled to the most countries, wins anything. No man can really achieve objective meaning or purpose through material objects, pleasure, sex, triathlons, alcohol, drugs, sports, gambling, travel, or any kind of this-worldly achievement. The things you build in this world will stay in this world. If you want to build something that lasts outside this world when you die, then you need to get to work on finding out whether God exists, and what he expects from you. It is only by focusing your life on the bigger picture that you will achieve things that actually count.

So how to get a man thinking clearly about meaning and purpose?

First, you should have a serious conversation with him about his plans and goals, and get him to reflect on whether what he is trying to achieve is going to matter. Men like to think that they are living a good, meaningful, purposeful life. They need to be questioned about this. They get so distracted with the good feelings they have watching sports, playing golf, going fishing, home improvement, working out, etc. that they don’t think about the big picture. This article by William Lane Craig may prove useful (video of lecture). Sometimes, a man can decide that the big questions don’t matter at age 12, after he suffers some minor disappointment with God, and then never go back and re-evaluate until age 90. You need to point out to him how stupid it is to decide big questions as a teen, when he hasn’t uncovered any facts to would help him to draw accurate conclusions.

Second, men are often very impatient and dismissive of spiritual things, because they are very practical and evidential. Practical and evidential are good, and this is how they must be approached – they must be made aware of the areas of science, history and philosophy that touch on the big questions. I will never forget one of the engineers in my office asking me about the William Lane Craig vs Lawrence Krauss debate after I told him I blogged on it. This guy builds stuff, fixes cars, everything manly you can imagine. He asked me “did anyone win?” That’s what men care about. Your first goal in getting a man interested in deep questions is to show him how known facts arbitrate disputes, resulting in real winners and losers.

You cannot tell men the answers in advance, because they are explorers and adventurers. Men must be presented with alternatives, and left alone to explore and adjudicate winners and losers on their own, based on careful reasoning and evidence.

By the way, this MP3 file contains the testimony of one of my favorite 3 speakers, Dr. Walter Bradley – a mechanical engineering professor who reached the highest levels of his profession, and made a huge difference for Christ, speaking at dozens of university campuses. I have listened to this lecture dozens of times, and it changed my life. Really good thoughts about meaning and purpose in life.

Disclaimer

Now, as you all know, I do think men should study hard things and work hard jobs that they hate but that pay well, in order to provide for others. But there is a difference between getting your meaning and purpose in life from climbing a ladder at work, and getting your meaning and purpose in life in a relationship with God. The same thing goes for fast cars – I love them, I bought one the week after I started working full-time after graduating. Don’t confuse fast cars with the meaning and purpose you get from partnering to achieve results for your Boss.