It was mid-morning on a weekday. The kids were at school, and I was working at my computer. I hadn’t had breakfast, and my stomach started rumbling. As my thoughts turned to food, I realized I needed to go grocery shopping. I started thinking about all the delicious things I would buy and the dinners I’d make. But first I had to eat something.
I heated up some leftovers and promptly experienced a food coma from the abundance of morning calories. When I sat back down at my computer, I audibly sighed and thought to myself, “I don’t want to go to the grocery store. I’m not even hungry now.”
I actually laughed out loud at the absurdity of my thoughts. What does hunger have to do with needing groceries at any given time? And why had I looked forward to everything I could buy just 30 minutes before, whereas now grocery shopping felt like a chore?
This seemingly trivial moment is such an appropriate analogy for the role of desire in a person’s spiritual life
Why hope matters
Spend any time around Christians and you’ll hear about the “hope we have in Jesus.” But it occurred to me that day that we’re often trying to offer people—including our kids—something they’re not even hungry for.
In order to hunger for hope, a person needs to first have a sense of hopelessness. As parents, we often see that our kids don’t seem to care as greatly about their faith as we would want. They embrace the hope in Jesus we keep giving them as much as you might embrace the hope of a cure for a disease you’re not too concerned about—lukewarmly and from a distance.
And that brings me back to grocery shopping.
Hungering for hope
Objectively speaking, I knew I needed groceries that day, whether I was hungry or not. But I didn’t have the desire to shop because I wasn’t hungry for what I needed. Similarly, there’s a lot keeping kids in our culture full today, even if they’re Christians, and there’s a good chance they aren’t hungering for the hope of eternal life. Why?
Most of us have our basic needs of food and shelter met. We have the logistical luxury of getting almost anything we could want at the push of a button. We value material wealth and prioritize its pursuit. We glorify sports. We idolize entertainment. We’re consumed with social media.
If the things of this life don’t seem so bad to kids—and, on the flip side, seem quite enticing—why should they cling tightly to the hope of what happens after they die?
In other words, we’re thoroughly distracted by what this life offers us. If the things of this life don’t seem so bad to kids—and, on the flip side, seem quite enticing—why should they cling tightly to the hope of what happens after they die? They feel like they’ve got a pretty good thing going on right now.
This explains why we hear about kids dying with cancer who have a rock-solid faith many healthy adult Christians lack. And it explains why Christians in the world’s poorest countries often seem to express a joy and hope in Christ that is frequently missing in America. When people have had their earthly distractions removed—often without choice—they come face-to-face with the utter hopelessness of what the world has to offer.
They hunger for something more. And when their hunger is filled by the hope of eternal life with Jesus, there is joy where by all earthly appearances no joy should be found.
This realization left me with a parenting dilemma. I don’t want to force my kids into a desperate situation for them to hunger for hope, but I need to do a better job of helping them have a healthy sense of earthly hopelessness.
The hope of Easter
At Eastertime, perhaps more than any other time, we talk about the hope of Jesus. But if we want our kids to care about that hope, this is also the perfect season to talk about the hopelessness of the world. Here’s the lesson I want for my kids this Easter.
In an atheistic worldview, there is no ultimate hope. If God doesn’t exist:
- Life is an accident with no objective meaning.
- We’re chemical specks in a vast, indifferent universe with no more inherent value than rocks.
- There’s little reason to believe we can freely make choices.
- No one should live in any particular way because it makes no moral difference.
- No one has a responsibility to anyone else because we’re just molecules in motion with no moral obligations.
- There’s no such thing as objective moral evil, so we can’t even condemn even the worst actions of society as objectively wrong.
- No one should want this to be true.
But we should want our kids to understand just how hopeless such a world would be. If God doesn’t exist, then we experience enormous suffering during a crisis like the coronavirus, and that’s the end of the story. Large groups of molecules in motion (people) are simply disintegrating into the Earth more quickly than we collectively expected.
Most kids have never thought through the logical implications of an atheistic worldview like this. In my experience, many atheists haven’t either. We need to draw the connections for them so they can fully appreciate what would be true if God wasn’t actually there: utter hopelessness.
We should never want to put our hope in Jesus simply because it makes us feel better. We should only put our hope in Jesus because there are good reasons to believe Christianity is true.
Christian hope only matters if, and only if, Christianity is true. The last thing I would want my kids to think is that we are putting our hope in Jesus because an atheistic worldview is so bleak. Bleak things can be true things. We should never want to put our hope in Jesus simply because it makes us feel better. We should only put our hope in Jesus because there are good reasons to believe Christianity is true.
The truth test for Christianity is the resurrection. The previous point should lead us to ask how we would know if Christianity were true. In other words, we need to know what an appropriate truth test is.
Unfortunately, this is where many people go wrong today. They stop believing in Jesus because they haven’t experienced a certain answer to prayer, they haven’t experienced God in the way they’d like or any number of other reasons that have nothing to do with whether Christianity is true. The apostle Paul gives us the actual truth test for Christianity in 1 Corinthians 15:14: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (ESV).
The truth test is the resurrection. If Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, we can pack our Christian bags and go home.
There is much evidence for the resurrection. I spent hundreds of hours in church growing up and never once heard any “evidence” for the resurrection. Based on what I hear from parents today, things haven’t changed much in most churches.
But if this is the ultimate test of truth for Christianity, and it’s the target of much mockery in our culture, it’s a tragedy that Christians overwhelmingly aren’t equipped to articulate why we have good reason to believe it’s true.
I’ve identified six questions every child should grow up being able to answer.
- Why does it matter if Jesus was resurrected?
- What historical evidence is there for Jesus’s resurrection?
- Was Jesus’s tomb really empty?
- Did Jesus’s disciples lie about the resurrection?
- Were Jesus’s disciples mistaken about the resurrection?
- Did people invent the resurrection many years later?
In my book, Talking with Your Kids About Jesus, I include six chapters explaining this evidence for parents to discuss with their kids.
Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we have meaningful hope that should change how we live our lives. If Jesus was raised from the dead—and we have every reason to believe he was—it validated that he was who he claimed to be (God himself). His resurrection confirms we can trust in his promises of eternal life—an eternal life where every tear will be wiped away, and suffering and death will be no more (Rev. 21:4).
That’s a hope worth hungering for. That’s a hope that should change how we see everything in this life, as long as we’re not full on the world.
One of the greatest gifts we can give our kids at Easter is a profound sense of earthly hopelessness. It’s a gift that will whet their appetites for hungering after Jesus the rest of their lives.
This article is reprinted by permission.
Natasha Crain is a speaker, blogger, podcaster and author who equips Christians to think more clearly about holding to a biblical worldview in an increasingly challenging secular world. Her most recent book is Faithfully Different: Regaining Biblical Clarity in a Secular Culture. She is also the author of three apologetics books for parents. Crain will be a keynote speaker and workshop presenter at USMB Gathering 2024.
