Just one question. That’s all it took. Honestly, I can’t remember when I’ve heard anyone answer so authentically, with such heart, and with such clear reasoning.

I met with Jeff Myers a few weeks ago to talk about his outstanding new book The Secret Battle of Ideas about God: Overcoming the Outbreak of Five Fatal Worldviews.

He’s the president of Summit Ministries. Based in Colorado, with locations scattered around the country, Summit offers high quality, highly relational training for young people, helping them develop a solid Christian worldview.

His answer to my question, like his Secret Battle of Ideas book, reached straight to the heart of today’s most basic, most crucial questions about God. I asked Jeff this opening question:

I notice you wrote the book less to show that Christianity is true, than to show that Christianity is good: that it fits human realities. It fits better than the other major worldviews. Why did you choose to take that approach?

I Thought I Had It Locked Down

Jeff explained that when he became president of Summit, he wrote three big books laying out the biblical worldview. “I felt I had really locked down a defense of a biblical worldview and how it applies to culture,” he said.

Then four years ago, some hard things happened, including the end of his marriage. “It’s hard enough to go through a divorce when you don’t want it, when you want this marriage to work, and it’s not going to.” He tried to save his marriage while running the new ministry and raising four teenage children.

“I was trying to be a super-dad with four kids in four different schools and four different PTAs and four different sets of sports activities, running Summit, writing six hours a day. I had gotten really overwhelmed. I started to sink into a depression.”

Then his pastor asked him, “Are you angry at God?”  Jeff said he wasn’t. “But I realized it’s because I didn’t care about anything. I had no anger because I didn’t have any concern. I was really beyond caring.”

Is God Good?

Jeff went on a long run in the country — after his MP3 player died. “I was left alone with my thoughts,” he says. “I began to pray, but my prayer really came out in a weeping way, a very sad spirit, as an accusation: ‘God, you are a bully! That’s what going on here!'”

After two hours of talking with God, he saw that having a biblical worldview wasn’t enough. He was saying, “I love you God. I’ve served you. Why this is happening? Why are you kicking me when I’m down?”

He began to write the book. “I decided not to ask the typical questions worldview people ask, which are, Where did we come from, What is the nature of reality, What is ethical, How should we live, and Where do we go when we die? I decided instead to ask the questions that I knew in my heart I was asking, and that everybody I’d met in all the world wanted answers to.”

Jeff asked questions like:

Am I loved? Is there anyone who loves me for who I am, not just what I can do for them?

Why do I hurt? Pain is real. Horrible things happen to people. There are religions out there that say to just put a happy face on it, but Christianity is not one of them.

What is my purpose? So many of my students had asked, “If I were to disappear would anybody even care?” And I found myself asking the same question, crazy as it sounds.

Why can’t we all get along? Why do we have to have all this conflict?

Then, ultimately, What hope is there for the world, and what hope is there for me?

“These are the questions that were on my heart and in my mind,” Jeff says. He saw he wasn’t always thinking like a Christian. “I realized I’d been infected by little bits of other worldviews that were dormant in my soul, and didn’t really spring up until these tough moments in my life when my spiritual immune system was compromised.”

Restoring Life, Purpose, Peace and Hope

His own experience led him to do something different. He examined all the “counterfeit worldviews.” He wanted to get their answers to these questions and then ask “What does Jesus say?”

He saw once again that Jesus’s teaching “restores a sense of love, healing, and life, and purpose, peace and hope.” He answers the question, Is God good?

So, yes, the question was, Is God good? And the answer is: Jesus is good. Jeff realized anew that only Jesus truly answers those five big life questions. “But it took a crisis for me to even go there and begin asking those questions.”

Authority and Authenticity

The Secret Battle of Ideas is just as real as the story its author shared in answer to my first question that day. In the book as in face-to-face conversation, he speaks with both authority and authenticity.

I’ll bet you’ve asked yourself these questions. I think you’ll want to read the great answers Jeff Myers discovered.