(From left to right) Alycia Wood, Abdu Murray, and Nabeel Qureshi spoke at the recent Truth Matters Conference to help youth to be able to confidently engage in conversations regarding their faith.
Church leaders and Christian parents share an increasing concern about children and youth, as they fear for the arguments against the Christian faith that they will be faced with from peers and teachers as they grow older. The Truth Matters Conference, which took place from March 27 to 29, aimed to prepare and equip the youth to be able to defend their faith in such encounters.
The conference, at which some 500 students from several different Southern California churches were present, featured speakers from apologetics ministries including Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), Stand to Reason, and Embrace the Truth International. These speakers addressed various questions that non-Christians may pose to Christians regarding their faith.
Alycia Wood, a graduate of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics (OCCA) and a fellow with RZIM, tackled the question, "If God is real, why would he hide himself and not show himself clearly?"
Wood explained that if God were to show himself completely, we would tremble and run in fear, as many who clearly encountered God in the Bible had done. She cited Exodus 20:18-19, one of the moments in which Moses, along with the Israelites, encounter the Lord, as an example:
"When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, 'Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.'"
Furthermore, Wood said, if God had to reveal himself clearly to us for us to then be compelled to be in relationship with him, we would not "be free to be our genuine selves."
"God can't reveal himself in such a forceful way," Wood said. "He is a relational God." Instead, God came as a baby, as a human, and allowed people to know him and walk alongside him in that personal way.
However, God has hidden clues of himself throughout all of creation, Wood added.
"God gives us enough of himself for relationship to be possible, and he hides enough of himself for the relationship to be possible in the first place," she said.
Nabeel Qureshi, author of 'Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus,' also highlighted the idea that God makes himself known during his session which covered the uniqueness of Jesus. God "makes himself tangible," Qureshi said, citing the story of Thomas, who doubted whether Jesus was truly resurrected after his crucifixion and was then able to touch Jesus' wounds and confirm that he did indeed arise from the dead.
"[Christianity] is not [a religion] that says you have to believe without reason," he continued. "As we see in Acts 17 -- there was reason being used to introduce people to the Christian faith. Jesus wants us to know, to test, to probe, to touch, to feel, to have reason, so that we can share that reason with others. There are so many worldviews out there that say you should believe x, y, and z, but Christianity says we have good, solid reason to believe."
Abdu Murray, author of 'Grand Central Question' and the president and co-founder of Embrace the Truth, went more in detail into the reasoning on which Christianity stands apart from other major worldviews.
One major worldview that Murray touched upon is pantheism, a worldview that strives to answer the question, "How do I escape suffering?" Pantheism in particular tries to answer that question by saying that "suffering is an illusion" and that "you have to wake up from the illusion that you're not God," Murray explained. He further explained that despite such a claim, people cannot reject the idea that suffering is indeed very real in life. Instead of dismissing suffering, Murray said, God affirms the desire to escape suffering, but says, "The answer is not in you. The answer is in me."
"See, a pantheist says you suffer because you forgot that you're God; the Bible tells us that we suffer because we wish we were," he said. "And Jesus comes, and he takes that suffering onto himself, and that's the historic reality. Suffering is real, and God himself proves it, because he enters into the grand central narrative of history and takes [suffering] upon himself."
Murray also discussed secular humanism, a worldview that rejects religion as a basis for moral decision-making, and said that this worldview argues that "human beins are inherently valuable for their existence," and that people "don't need God for their value." But Murray argued that an objective human value is impossible to achieve without a greater God to attribute it to us.
"We wanna value people, we wanna say we're equal, we wanna say these things, but secular humanism doesn't offer us the ability to do that," he said. "They will say human beings are objectively valuable, but without God, there is no such thing as objective human value. It all depends on human opinion ... So the atheist wants there to be objective human value, but you can't have it without God."
Organizers of the conference hoped that, through such explorations into difficult questions and worldviews, the youth would be better equipped to engage in discussions regarding their faith.
"I remember when I was young, I had questions too," Alycia Wood shared in an interview. "I personally had to do a lot of independent study. But when you go into university, it gets even harder because you start getting a lot of attacks from non-Christians. We want young people to be better equipped, and better able to defend their faith."
Kevin Yi, the youth pastor at Church Everyday, which hosted this event, said that during last year's conference, the students "got the idea that there are very smart Christians, who have thought about and written about these things."
"So if you're confronted by someone, you don't have to freak out," Yi said. "There are answers to these questions, and these answers make sense."
