Struggling with Doubt – Dr. Keith Hess’s Story 

Keith Hess grew up in a Christian family but began to question whether or not what he believed was real or true.  His doubts went unanswered for years until he was finally introduced to solid reasons for belief.  Now a professor of philosophy and apologetics, Dr. Hess helps others find answers to the big questions of God and life.

Resources Mentioned by Keith:

• J.P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind
• William Lane Craig, The Son Rises
• William Lane Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz
• Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator
• Robin Collins, “The Fine-Tuning Design Argument: A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God” essay
• Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, authors on the resurrection of Christ

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. We’re also beginning to include those who struggled with doubts and deconstruction within the Christian faith yet found their way back to solid belief. You can hear more of our stories on our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com or our YouTube channel. We also welcome your comments on our stories on our Facebook page and again on our YouTube channel. You can also email us at [email protected]. We always love hearing from you!

We all struggle with doubt about different things that we believe. There are so many conflicting and competing narratives we hear about people, about events and issues in the world. These days, it’s hard to know what is real or true. The problem amplifies when we’re trying to figure out answers to the biggest questions in life, especially the biggest question of them all: Does God exist? For every other question is answered in light of how that one big question is answered.

So what happens when you really want to know the answer to the God question, but no one seems to be giving you a satisfying answer? When those around you don’t seem to be struggling with that kind of question, but you are? When unrelenting doubts move into angst and discouragement, when you feel the foundation of your childhood faith crumbling beneath your feet?

In today’s story, as a Christian, Keith Hess wrestled with his doubts for several years as to whether or not Christianity was true or worthy of belief. After all, belief came at a great cost. Believing in Jesus was no simple assertion. It required everything. So he needed confidence that Christianity was worthy of belief. His intellectual honesty led him on a pursuit. He wanted to find some solid answers, so he could know which way to go. Now holding a PhD in philosophy and a university professor of philosophy and apologetics, he found the answers he was searching for and now helps others do the same. I hope you’ll come along to hear his story.

Welcome to Side B Stories, Keith. It’s great to have you with me today.

Thank you. Yeah. Glad to be here.

Wonderful! I’d love to know and for the listeners to know, really, about who you are now, where you work, perhaps where you live, a little bit about what you do before we get started into your story.

Okay. Yeah. I live in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and that’s a recent thing. I’ve been here for about a year. And I work at Oklahoma Baptist University as a professor of philosophy and apologetics, associate professor. And I have a wife and four kids, three daughters, Ali, Sophie and Zoe, and a son, Eli, and they range from sixteen down to five. We’re so glad to be here, and I’m looking forward to what God has for us here.

Well, I’m glad you love where you work and the community there. That’s terrific. I would love to know more about your story, Keith. Let’s back up to your childhood. Tell us what that looked like. Tell us about your home, your family, where you lived.

Okay, yeah. I grew up in California, in northern California, the Stockton area, which is near Sacramento. And I liked it. It was what I knew. I enjoyed going to the coast, Santa Cruz or Monterey, Sunset Beach, and even San Francisco, going to do some touristy stuff there. I had a lot of brothers and sisters.

Wow.

I have five brothers and… yeah, yeah. I grew up in a house with two sisters and then, when I got out of the house, my parents adopted two more kids, so ten total. Ten.

That’s amazing!

Yeah. I know. It was amazing, actually. I really enjoyed having all the siblings to just hang out with, and we got a little rough, and we got a little out of control, but it was still a lot of fun.

I imagine holidays are amazing at your house.

Yeah, yeah. And we actually did some cool stuff. We went backpacking a lot and camping a lot and road trips, that kind of thing. Even though we had so many people, it didn’t stop us from getting out there.

That’s fantastic! Yeah.

Yeah. And it was a Christian house. We were Christians. My parents raised us that way, and we went to a church in Galt, California, and it was called Galt Bible Church. It’s part of the Independent Fundamental Churches of America. So it was pretty conservative—theologically yes, but also socially. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but culturally conservative, like in terms of the music that they played in church and the way that people dressed and that sort of thing, pretty conservative, but they also preached the gospel there. And so it was formative for me. I didn’t think it was…. It didn’t give me a negative taste of Christianity.

It was something that was a part of your family, a part of your home culture. I presume it was an active or integral part of your life? Was it something that you you attended frequently, and it was seen in your home or through the lives of your parents?

Yeah.

Or was a living kind of faith like that?

Yeah. In a lot of ways. Well, we did go to church very regularly, Wednesdays and Sundays, Sundays in the mornings and the evenings and then Wednesdays, we were a Christian family. We prayed, talked about Christ, that sort of thing. And yet we could have done more. I remember… I don’t think there was a time where we ever really had a consistent devotional time, for example. Fits and starts where my family, my dad, would try to lead us through that, and then we would stop.

So as you were growing up in this house and going to church, was it something that you just embraced personally? You just went along for the ride and believed? Or were any doubts or questions as you were growing up? Or what did that look like?

Yeah. So I have it written in a Bible that I’ve had since I was a kid that I gave my life to the Lord in 1987. And I think that was genuine, definitely genuine. However, like I said, my parents didn’t—that I recall—lead us in those family devotionals, and neither did I do my own personal… have my own personal devotional life. I mean, I prayed, right? But that was not… I didn’t set aside times to pray. I just prayed as I remembered to pray. So it wasn’t intentional on my part. But I think I really did believe. And that was how things were for years, until I became a teen, I think?

Probably around the age of fourteen, I just began to doubt my faith. And it wasn’t like… I don’t think there was an outside catalyst. I think it was just a natural process of development, where I was taught all these things—and this is a very common story, right? I was taught all these things, and then I started to wonder like, “Well, do I really think those things are true?” And so I wondered, “Is there a reason? Is there a reason for thinking God actually does exist?” And so I was thinking in terms of like, the same way you would say, “The earth is round.” “Is God really out there? The earth really is round. Is God really out there?” And it’s like, “Well, how would I know that?” We can see that the earth is round, but how do we know God is really out there?

So I had a couple of questions. My main questions were just the fundamentals of Christianity: “Does God exist?” and, “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” I don’t think I was really bothered too much by things like the problem of evil. It’s not comfortable to think about suffering and those sorts of things, but I don’t think it really made me question whether, if God did exist, whether God would be good. It’s just like, “Is He out there?” So that…. I just found myself asking those questions, and I really wanted to know if Christianity was true.

So did you share those doubts with anyone? To bounce ideas off of? Or was it something that you were just going through independently, just questioning on your own? Was it safe to ask those kinds of questions in your church culture or even your family culture?

In my family culture, probably safe, but I didn’t think so. I mean, not that I thought, “Ooh! I shouldn’t share that.” I just was timid, kind of scared to talk about that, right? And I approached a couple of people in my church and in my school. I went to a Christian school, so I approached my Bible teacher, approached some people in my church. And I don’t know if I communicated very well what I was going through, but they didn’t really take me seriously. And I think, thinking back, they probably would have if they knew what I was going through, but I didn’t judge that they took me seriously. And so I didn’t get the kinds of answers I… not even the same…. They didn’t even answer what I was asking. So maybe it makes me think, “Could I have communicated the question better?” So I did, I tried, but I didn’t feel like I got any assistance. And my parents, they didn’t…. My parents got a Bible certificate when they were out of high school, but they didn’t do any formal education after that. And so I wasn’t raised in a house where we were reading a lot of books all the time and where we were… certainly not doing apologetics or anything like that. So I didn’t know. I basically didn’t know where to look to find answers for these questions. Maybe I thought they were beyond us.

During that time, was the internet available to you?

I mean the internet existed at that point. It was the nineties at this point, but we didn’t have a computer in our house, so we didn’t have internet. So I didn’t have that resource. I had the books available at my house, the people I knew, and my own thoughts, basically. And I want to emphasize something about my struggle there, because part of the reason I was wondering, “Does God exist? Did Jesus rise from the dead?” is because I’m reading the gospels, I’m hearing sermons, and I’m seeing the sorts of things that Jesus says about Himself and to those who would follow Him. And they’re not easy statements to digest, right? “If you would follow Me, deny yourself, take up your cross.” And I thought, “If Jesus never even existed or if He died and didn’t rise from the dead, why am I going to deny myself?” There’s no reason.

Sure.

There’s literally no reason to put myself through a lot of pain, reorganize my life—well, it was organized around Christianity, but it didn’t have to be. And there are certainly, it seemed to me, easier ways to live, where you don’t have to dedicate your Sundays to going to church and you don’t have to deny yourself certain activities. And so I was like, “Well, I’m not going to go for this unless I have confidence that Jesus rose from the dead, that God exists.” And the problem was I just didn’t know how to find answers to those questions. So unfortunately I went through a lot of years of unnecessary angst about it.

So during this time, you didn’t know where to look. You asked people that you thought could provide answers. They didn’t.

Yeah.

You weren’t finding the authorities being sufficient to answer your doubts, and you’re at a time—like you say it, you’re fourteen, fifteen. You’re at a time where you’re developing an idea of really who you are and what you do believe, and to not have satisfying answers, I’m sure, was disconcerting. So what did that look like, when you say you kind of sat in angst over these years?

If you have a problem and you know how to address it, it’s not comfortable, but at least you can do something to solve the problem. I felt like I had a problem that I didn’t know how to address. And didn’t know what to do in response. So it led to a lot of times of just lying in my bed at night, thinking about the problem, and I was probably doing some of what you could do to solve the problem, thinking through the problem, asking the questions. “If this is true, then that must be true,” that sort of thing. And just feeling a lot of fear and a lot of angst.

But there was one way that I knew how to address the problem that I really did go for. And that was to call after God, right? And I knew enough about… I mean, raised in a Christian home, knew enough about the Bible that God wants people to follow Him. And Jesus says if you seek you will find, right? And obviously I’m not trying to deny God draws us, the theological truth that we wouldn’t come to God unless God drew us. But from my perspective what can I do but to call out, right? So it’s like the atheist prayer. I wasn’t an atheist, but the atheist prayer is, “God, if there is a God.” And I would think through those prayers, pray those prayers on my bed while I was feeling sick to my stomach really about this issue that I couldn’t figure out the answer to. And part of the reason I would feel that way, sick the my stomach is because, if there is no God, I didn’t think… Maybe, “I think this is right, but other people disagree.” I didn’t think there was much in the way of meaning in life. Or the meaning of life, certainly not. There is no meaning of life. We’re just here. But meaning in life, like certainly I could find some life that, at the end, I could say, “That was a decent life,” but I couldn’t have ultimate meaning, cosmic meaning.

Right.

So on the one hand, if God didn’t exist, then I didn’t know how to organize my life. And on the other hand, if God did exist and I didn’t believe in Him, because I couldn’t find out whether He actually did exist, then I’d be maybe on His bad side, on the wrong side of God, and you don’t want that. So, yeah. That was the sense of fear. It’s like, “Well, I want to believe, but I don’t know if I can.”

That sounds pretty honest. And also, I appreciate, even as a teenager, that you understood that if you took off the box of Christianity and you looked down into the bottom of the box at a life without God, what that meant, that there were implications to whether or not God exists or God doesn’t exist. It tells me that you are a very thoughtful person, in the sense that you’re kind of a critical thinker, and that’s why you’re sitting there as an associate professor of philosophy, I presume. So this is a natural state for you, and I do appreciate the honesty of the struggle. It sounds like it wasn’t something that you could just put aside and just do the normal teenage thing. But I presume that you were still going through the motions of church attendance and all of that, but yet still, underneath the surface, really not knowing what to do. I can’t imagine that.

Yeah. A couple of things: No, I couldn’t set it aside. This was a problem that was going to stick. I mean eventually I’d probably come up with some solution, whether that was reject Christianity or whatever, but I needed to come up with some sort of solution, right? I wasn’t just going to ignore it. And then the other thing is I don’t want to make too much of my doubts, in the sense that there were days where I was like, “Yeah, I think Christianity is probably true. Why? I’m not sure, but I think it’s probably true,” and like you said, going through the motions. It seems like I was more than just going through the motions like there was an an earnestness there to really believe it. So yeah.

So then how did you make your way forward? You had mentioned that sometimes just a calling out to God, “Are You real?” There is validity to that, certainly. It is not the intellectual journey, but it is…. The reality of God is more than just believing in propositional truths about God. If God exists, then He exists in this Person, and if He exists, then the supernatural realm is real, and He can interact with you. So did you go that path, then? Tell me: How did you make your way forward? Was it both/and?

So I think it was both, and I think God met me where I needed it, which was at the intellectual level, and so my crying out to God was answered through scholastics.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Learning. But it didn’t happen in high school. So I cried out to God through years of being at home. And I didn’t think God was really doing much about it. Because I didn’t get answers. And then I didn’t even think I wanted to go to college. I mean, it was an option, right? But it wasn’t a big—that I recall—a big emphasis in our house, that we would go to college. But then my counselor at school, academic counselor, she said, “Hey, you have a pretty good record here, with your grades and everything. Have you considered college?” And I was like, “Not really.” And she said, “Why don’t you just go on this college view trip? We’re going to southern California. We’ll look at some Christian schools down there. And then you can see what you think.” So I went. My dad went with me. It was a lot of fun. And we went to several schools around the southern California area, and I settled in on Biola University and The Master’s College, now The Master’s University, and it’s just like…. It was not for the right reasons. I was like, “Well, it would be kind of cool to go to college.” It looked like… Master’s was reminding me of camp, and then Biola, it was like, “Wow! An institute of higher learning.” So it was just a feeling. And I liked their T-shirts in bookstores. It was like, “Maybe I should go there and spend $15,000 a year,” at that time, “because they have cool t-shirts.”

That’s a good reason.

And so I went to The Master’s University, and I didn’t know really what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t know what I would have to study. So I thought, “What if I just become a Bible major and learn the Bible?” And so I did that, but I was also taking, with my elective options, philosophy, literature, and I took this class, God in Philosophy and Theology. The professor was Brian Morley, and I still keep in touch with him from time to time, but I realized, when taking that course, there are actual methods for getting at answers to these questions. There’s a method, or methods, in the sciences. But I thought, “Well, yeah. But not when you’re talking about, ‘Does God exist?’ or what’s right, what’s wrong.” But I realized, “Hold on! There are actual methods of getting at answers to these questions,” and part of that method is the rational process which I had been doing to some extent on my own but not in any…. Because I had no training, not in any formal way, and so when I got to that class, I got excited because I was like, “I can actually try to answer these questions that I’ve had,” and I read people that then became sort of like mentors, because they had already thought through these questions. And I mean I was so naive, not realizing that for a couple thousand years people have been answering these questions, and I just didn’t know that those people existed.

And so that was really encouraging. I still didn’t know whether Christianity was true, but a light bulb went on there, in that class, God in Philosophy and Theology. And I read this book which no doubt you’ve read as well, or at least heard of, Love Your God with All Your Mind–

J.P. Moreland, yes.

… by J.P. Moreland. Yeah. And that was part of the process, where I was like, “Okay, there’s this whole intellectual life that I was largely unaware of, and I can actually be intentional about pursuing this and in a way that would honor God. Reason is not opposed to Christianity.”

I’m sure that was relieving in some way, when you started finding these mentors of sorts.

Yeah.

You saw that, no, faith and reason are not disconnected, that there’s good reason to believe that God is real and that Jesus rose from the dead. So you were-

Well, I wasn’t there yet.

Okay. Okay.

I hadn’t come to those conclusions yet. But I knew there was a way I could try to solve those problems.

Wonderful! So walk us through that, then. So you started reading?

Yeah.

Some of… like J.P. Moreland, and you started appreciating that there was a way. There was a method in which you could solve or resolve this issue or these doubts in your mind. So tell us how you did that. Yeah.

Right. I started reading philosophy of religion, really formal academic stuff. And for and against Christianity. And I did want Christianity to be true. There’s no doubt about that. Why would I leave everything I…. On the one hand, when I say, “Why would I leave everything I know?” or, “I want Christianity to be true,” it’s like, “Why would I leave everything I know?” But on the other hand there is a big demand on a person if they truly want to follow Christ, and so there was…. When I say I want Christianity to be true, there was also the other side, where it’s like, “It might be nice if it’s not. Then, I can live how I want.” But also then it wouldn’t be too meaningful, and so it was-

Kind of a Catch-22 there. Yeah. Right.

Exactly! But I remember reading those philosophy of religion books and coming to the conclusion that God does exist. I don’t know why. A lot of people have a lot of trouble with the problem of evil. I don’t think I ever did. I’m very much bothered by the evil in the world, but like I said, it doesn’t really make me think, “Oh, God’s not good or doesn’t exist.” So that barrier to belief in God wasn’t there. I was looking for the positive reasons, and I really was impressed by the cosmological argument, or that kind of thinking, but I didn’t I have a particular argument in mind, that way of thinking about, “Where did everything come from?” And so I thought, “Well, there must be some sort of first cause,” and then also the design argument, the fine-tuning argument was very impressive to me, in thinking, “Okay, so this first cause is intelligent.” But I still had this issue of, “Did Jesus rise from the dead?”

And so the reason I ended up becoming a Christian is because I came to the conclusion that God exists and that Jesus rose from the dead. And part of that process was reading this book by William Lane Craig. It’s an outdated book, I think. But he has more updated materials now. The Son Rises. It’s called The Son Rises. I can’t remember what year it was published, but I remember reading that book and coming to the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead, like really did. And then feeling sick, sick to my stomach. Really feeling sick. You might think that’s a weird reaction-

Yeah, right! I’m surprised!

… right? Like, “You might feel happy.” Happy but just really joyful that Jesus rose from the dead. I kind of felt sick to my stomach. Number one, there’s like a gravity to it, that this is a very consequential event that now I know really happened, but also I had to believe it. I had to believe it, and then I had to act like it, right? And I realized my life was not my own. If Jesus rose from the dead, my life was not my own. And so I’m thinking back to those hard sayings of Jesus, He said, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.” And I’m like, “I’ve got to do that if He rose from the dead.” But one thing I’m realizing in the meantime is He also said, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” And so when you take up your cross, on the other side of that, you really do find something much greater than what you lost.

Yeah. That’s a huge cost, isn’t it? There’s something very, very different than intellectual assent that God exists and that Jesus rose from the dead. These are things that are true or false. And if you accept them to be true, that’s one thing, but it’s something very, very different to take that on in terms of then surrendering your life to the person of God and Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

And that’s what the claims of Christianity call for, right? As you say, that’s what Jesus Himself calls for. It’s not just easy. It’s not just, “Yes, I believe.” It’s, “Okay, now I give everything to You, just as You gave everything to me,” and now that’s a whole different part of the story. And I appreciate that you understood, like you say, the gravity of that decision. Because it is life giving in the sense that you give your life, but it’s also life giving in that you get more, like you say, than you give. So it’s an odd juxtaposition, isn’t it? So you were kind of in that place of trying to decide whether or not it was worth the cost.

Yeah. And it’s a risk because before you can save your life you first have to lose it, right? So I’m thinking of this statement—and I can’t quote it to you. But I’m thinking of this statement in Ecclesiastes. Cast your bread upon the waters and it’s something like after many days it’ll return to you. First, you’ve got to cast your bread on the water, and this seems like nonsense, to throw your bread upon the water. And so in order to save your life, you first have to just throw it away, and if you let it go you, you can try to get it back, I guess, but if you truly let it go, you lose it. And then what are you going to get in return? And yet if God exists and Jesus rose from the dead, what else can you do but throw away your life, in the sense of, “I had this other way of doing things. And I can see that that way of doing things does not really fit with the sort of life that Jesus is calling me to, and I need to get rid of those things. I need to lose those things, and I need to start modeling my life after the life of Christ.”

And that’s a painful process, because you’ve just lost your life, and then the process of discipline is never pleasant. So you’ve lost your life, and you’re disciplining yourself. Disciplining yourself to conform to the image of Christ. Obviously, it’s God who does it in you, right? But it’s not a pleasant process, at least at the beginning. So yeah.

Yeah. It is a risk, as you said. But it’s a worthwhile risk, I’m sure you would sit here and say. So I’m presuming, since you’re, again, sitting there as a professor of apologetics and philosophy, that you made the decision to give your life to Christ.

Yeah.

And that it was worth the cost. And I wondered how that has changed. Or what happened in your life and your perspective when you came to that place, not only realization that God exists and everything was true, but it was worth it all, and you surrendered your life. How has your life been since? What happened to those doubts? Do you still have doubts? What has happened in your life as a result?

Yeah. I don’t really have many doubts anymore. And that’s not true for a lot of people. I hear of apologists, they talk about their doubts, and I think doubts can be instrumental in helping you in your walk with God, in terms of trust and trying to go deeper, that kind of thing. But I don’t really have doubts much. Every once in a while. But I have a process that I go through to remind myself of the things that I know to be true that kind of helps relieve those doubts. And I had to do that a lot at the beginning, where the doubt started to creep up. It’s kind of like a habit. And so then I go through the process: Well, here’s why I know God exists. Here’s how I know Jesus rose from the dead. Those are some things.

And so, over the years, I’ve come to the realization that this is part of what it means to give up your life, right? This is part of what it means is to give God your first energy, give God your first time, and really it doesn’t come naturally to pray. It doesn’t come naturally to try to commune with God. You have to be intentional, and you have to have knowledge of how to do this. And my personal goal now is not to learn more apologetics, which is weird to say as an apologetics professor. That’s my professional goal. I’m learning more about apologetics all the time as I’m preparing for classes and doing research for writing and publication. But that’s not my personal goal anymore. Because I have answered those questions. I’m satisfied. Obviously, I can always adjust my beliefs and my credences and things like that. And I am open to that.

But my goal really now is to learn how to lay down my life my life and to make myself available to God. And that’s not something I can do, lay down my life. The best I can do is to ask, like Jesus says, to ask, to seek, and to knock. Because I think that…. The Bible says work out your salvation with fear and trembling, but it also says it’s God who’s working within us, right? And so I don’t think I can produce the transformation. I think what I can do is make myself available in the ways that have been shown to us through the scriptures and through the church, make myself available to God for Him to do that transformation, carry out that transformation within me.

And one thing that I’ve been struck with is by Dwight L. Moody. He said that the world has yet to see what God can do with a man fully consecrated to Him. And then he says, “By God’s help, I aim to be that man.” And yeah. Like we talked about, you’ve got to lay down your life, and you lose your life and everything. It’s something you have to do every day. It’s not like, “I did that. I believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and then I did that at 23. Now I’m moving on with my life. I’ve succeeded.” No. I’m trying to figure out, “How do I do this?” And also I take my life back a lot, in a sense of try to grasp for that old life. And so my goal now is really to try to continue to lay down my life and make myself available to God.

Yeah. That’s beautiful. That is the journey that we’re all on, the constant understanding of what it means to live as a living sacrifice. It’s not easy, but it seems like whenever you do lay yourself down, you receive so much more in return, as you spoke about earlier. It’s very soul satisfying.

I’m sitting here thinking: Okay, you’re a professor. You’re with college students all the time, and today there’s a constant understanding that there are so many Christians, teenagers, college students who are deconstructing from their faith because of doubts, particularly unanswered doubts, doubts that went unexpressed, doubts that went unanswered, and so they perhaps weren’t as intentional or persevering as you, to try to make their way forward if they couldn’t find the answers, and so they end up leaving faith altogether. And I wonder how you would… say a college student came to you and said, “I’m really, really doubting.” How would you counsel someone as someone who’s been a doubter yourself? And probably someone who’s surrounded by it at the college level, because that’s the reality that we live in now. How would you counsel someone who may be doubting or someone who’s interacting with someone who is doubting?

Yeah. Well, I’d first probably have a longer conversation with them to try to figure out what really is driving the doubt. Is it something intellectual? Is it something moral? Are your doubts really just like this psychological angst, So try to get to what is the problem and then we can try to figure out what the solution is, but for everybody who came to me, I would encourage them to ask, seek, and knock. Whatever other things they need to be doing, or in other words: What is the asking and the seeking going to look like for them? I would encourage them to ask, seek, and to knock.

So I have this quote from the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you, then, who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him?” And the good things that the Father longs to give to His children is more of Himself. He’s not interested too much in making us wealthy. I mean, for some people He’s going to, they’re going to be wealthy. That’s part of God’s process for them. But I mean, the wealth is serving the higher aim of giving that person more of Himself and conforming them into the image of Christ, for those who are in Christ.

And those for those who were outside of Christ, it would be for them to enter the kingdom, to really give up their lives and enter the kingdom and take on the yoke of Christ. But I really would encourage them: Ask, seek, and knock, and not to have a short term perspective. Like I said, I’m still asking, seeking, and knocking And by God’s grace, I hope to ask, seek, and knock the rest of my life, and I’m being intentional about doing it. It’s not just a hope that I place fully outside of myself, because the Bible does put a responsibility on us to work out our salvation. And so it is an intention of mine to seek Christ.

So I would say don’t have a short term view here. You read two books and came to the conclusion that God doesn’t exist or something. Or you asked God to meet you, and it’s been a month, and nothing’s happened. Part of asking, seeking, and knocking—when He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you,” part of the asking is staying the course of asking. So it takes time, and it takes intentional effort.

Yeah. I appreciate that—I mean, that reflects your story really, that you were so persevering, despite the fact that you had some angst and doubting, and you had some unanswered questions that you struggled with for years, until you finally found some answers. You had mentioned earlier that there were some compelling arguments for you, like the cosmological argument, that there was a first cause, a beginning of the universe, that the beginning of the universe demands a cause, a sufficient cause to the effect, as well as the fine tuning argument. If there’s an apparent design that there’s probably a designer, and we live in an extraordinary and extravagantly fine-tuned universe. If someone’s listening, and they’re like, “Okay, I want to go look at that,” do you have any particular recommendations or resources, where someone can go, “Okay, I’ll go look at that question. Who should I read?” Who would you recommend?

If you want something really popular level, you can try out The Case for a Creator.

Lee Strobel.

Lee Strobel, right. The benefit of The Case for a Creator is that he does interview people who really know what they’re talking about, but if you want to challenge yourself a little bit more on that, you can read Robin Collins. He has an original article on the fine tuning argument, and there have been subsequent conversations since then, objections and replies, but it’s a good place to start on the fine tuning argument. Robin Collins.

For the cosmological argument, William Lane Craig has a history of the cosmological argument, a book, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz, I think it’s called, And he really does go into the weeds on that one. And yeah. Those are two resources that I would recommend for cosmological argument and then the fine tuning argument. In terms of the resurrection, Gary Habermas is always a good place to go. Michael Licona is a good person to go to, although that’s from a particular argumentative strategy, the minimal facts approach. And there’s a little bit of a debate over whether that’s the best approach. I like it. William Lane Craig does not take that approach, and he has The Son Rises, which is older, but he’s done a lot of work on the resurrection as well.

Those are excellent resources. I know a few people have also mentioned N.T. Wright’s work on the resurrection as well.

Oh yeah.

But those are really great places to start, especially-

N.T. Wright is one of those where you’ve got to really be up for the challenge.

That’s one of those deep dives. Right. It sure is.

It is. So I appreciate your advice to ask, seek, and knock, especially if you’re skeptical or wondering, and that you really are interested in seeking after answers. Is there anything else you would have for the skeptic who might want to take a next step?

Well, one thing that I thought of is that it needs to be in good faith, right? You need to ask in good faith. And so it can’t be half-hearted or insincere, right? And then another thing that a person can do is they can start going to church. That’s kind of a Pascalian approach, but surround yourself with believers and surround yourself by those who are worshiping God and worshiping God in community and see what happens. See what happens. See if the Spirit of God stirs your heart.

Those are both very good. And even what you mentioned earlier about just calling out to God to see if He’s real. And I think there’s something to be said there.

And for us as Christians, again, you are someone who is in the midst of probably a lot of differing opinions about who God is in their lives and trying to work things out as late teens, early twenties. Some things. But I am also familiar with a lot of parents who have children who are at that age and have watched them leave the faith and are terribly downhearted about it. But we all want others to know Christ, even though belief in Christ comes at a great cost. We want to believe what’s real and true and what brings meaning to life. How can we best engage with people who don’t believe, in your mind?

I think the first place to start is in prayer, and I think again—you’re going to think that I’m just repeating myself, but it’s really important. They need to ask, seek, and knock for that person, on behalf of that person. Call out to God for them. So if you have a son or a daughter who has left the faith, that’s the positive side. On the negative side, you shouldn’t manipulate. You shouldn’t seek to bring them in by your own efforts. There’s nothing you can do to bring them in. At the end of the day, it’s all on them and God. And it is God Who draws people to the faith. So pray. Pray to the Father. He knows how to give good gifts, and He will. At the practical…. Prayer is practical, but I mean like you want to get out there and do something in addition to prayer, I guess.

Have a good conversation with them, a real conversation. Find out: What are they struggling with? Don’t get defensive. Find out where they’re at, and what might be best for them in terms of addressing the issues that they’re dealing with. It might not be intellectual at all. Maybe they’ve been hurt, and they need to deal with that hurt. And they’re placing the blame of that hurt upon God. And so find out where they’re at, treat them like a person, talk to them in sincerity, and don’t try to manipulate them. Don’t try to use your power over them, if you have power over them, to get them to do what you want. It won’t have a good result. And you won’t get what you’re seeking in that case. The way to get what you’re seeking is to go to the One Who can actually do something about it. And that’s not you.

That’s sage advice. I really appreciate that in so many ways. I think there’s something to be said for listening and seeing where the point of need or doubt lies. And yeah, again, not trying to be pushy or to get them to do what you want them to do. That ends up pushing away, rather than pulling towards. Wow. That is really, really great advice.

Keith, is there anything else with regard to your story or any advice or anything else that you want to say to tie this up? Or are we good?

Yeah. I mean I can ask for something selfishly.

Sure! Yes.

Pray for me. Dwight L. Moody, like I said, he said the world has yet to see what God can do with a man totally consecrated to Him, and it is only human to not be. But, well, it’s only fallen humanity, right? But God has designed us to be in perfect relationship with Him. And that’s what I’m looking for. And I falter. I fail. I’m not always seeking like I should. And so… prayer.

No. That would be a good prayer for us all. But I do appreciate, again, your honesty, your transparency there. It just fits so perfectly with your story, too. I think that you are someone who, from the very beginning, wasn’t willing to give up. You were willing to ask the hard questions and to seek after answers and to wait and to persevere until you found them, and I have no doubt, in your own personal and spiritual life, that God will honor your desire to continue seeking Him in the way of surrender and the way of costly grace, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer would say, that you understand what it means to follow after Christ in a very deep way. And I do pray that for you, and I’m sure our listeners will, too. But thank you. What a beautiful heart you have, a man of God that you’ve become. And I just love what you have shared with us today. I know that there are going to be many who connect with you, who are encouraged by your story and really, again, your wisdom, because it shows a depth of surrender and what you’ve received in return.

So thank you so much, Keith, for coming along and telling us your story and more.

Yeah. I do want to say one thing.

Yes. Go right ahead.

And you can have the last word after that. I appreciate the kind words, but I do want to emphasize that God does things in people, that I don’t have anything within me, I think, to make myself right and to make myself better. I think that God gives us that power. So what I want to say at the end is that everything comes from God. And so if there’s anything good in me, God should be given praise for that.

Yeah. That’s the beauty of the gospel, isn’t it? We can do nothing of ourselves, only what He can do for us and through us and in us.

That’s right.

And we just praise God for what He’s done in you and is doing. And thank you again. This has been an extraordinary time. I appreciate you.

You’re welcome. And thank you for having me.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Dr. Keith Hess’s story. You can find out more about him and his recommended resources in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our email. Again, that is [email protected].

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