The Charlie Kirk Show - Making the Case for Heaven with Lee Strobel

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, a hero of mine, someone who I have admired from afar and read his books for quite a while, Lee Strobel, who is the author of The Case for Christ and also The Case for Heaven.

00:00:10.000 If you have your doubts about the afterlife, your doubts about God, or if you're a Christian, you just kind of need a shot on the arm around these topics. 0.77

00:00:16.000 This episode will blow your mind.

00:00:18.000 I learned a lot and really convicted me to talk more about these topics, to be honest.

00:00:24.000 I think you'll really enjoy it.

00:00:25.000 You can email me your thoughts.

00:00:26.000 I love hearing from you.

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00:01:23.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:02:05.000 There are a few books out there that really change your life and change the way you view things.

00:02:11.000 And I remember where I was when I first heard about this book, and then I saw the movie.

00:02:16.000 And I just give it out to everyone that has questions about the Bible and about kind of their place in the world.

00:02:24.000 And the author, really, his story resonated with me because we're both from the same place, the suburbs of Chicago.

00:02:30.000 And the book is The Case for Christ.

00:02:32.000 And then there was kind of a sequel book, The Case for Heaven, which is now coming out as a movie.

00:02:32.000 It's phenomenal.

00:02:38.000 So I'm super thrilled and honored to have with us the author and kind of the mastermind behind it all, Lee Strobel.

00:02:45.000 Lee, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:47.000 Oh, thanks so much, Charlie.

00:02:48.000 I appreciate the opportunity.

00:02:50.000 I didn't know you were from Suburban Chicago.

00:02:51.000 Where did you grow up?

00:02:52.000 Wheeling and went to Willow Creek.

00:02:55.000 Come on.

00:02:56.000 And as well as Harvest Bible Chapel.

00:02:58.000 So we kind of live in the same area.

00:03:00.000 Oh, my goodness.

00:03:01.000 I grew up in Arlington Heights, went to Prospect High School.

00:03:04.000 I went to Wayne High School.

00:03:05.000 So we're awesome.

00:03:08.000 Same type of place.

00:03:09.000 So yeah, well, it's a great, great honor, Lee.

00:03:11.000 Tell us about the movie that's coming out.

00:03:14.000 Well, it's based on my book, The Case for Heaven, which was inspired by an incident that happened to me 10 years ago when I almost died.

00:03:22.000 My wife found me unconscious, called an ambulance.

00:03:25.000 I woke up in the emergency room, and the doctor looked down at me and said, You're one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying.

00:03:32.000 And so I hovered there between life and death for quite a while until the doctors were able to save my life.

00:03:38.000 And this is a very clarifying experience for me.

00:03:42.000 When you get in that kind of position, you really want to know for sure what happens when you close your eyes for the last time in this world.

00:03:49.000 And so I'm a Christian.

00:03:51.000 I believe what the Bible teaches, but I've also got a skeptical gear.

00:03:54.000 You know, my background's in journalism and law.

00:03:56.000 So I tend to be a bit skeptical.

00:03:59.000 So I decided to investigate what is the evidence, both inside and outside the Bible, that supports the idea that there is an afterlife that we continue to live on.

00:04:09.000 That resulted in my book, The Case for Heaven.

00:04:12.000 And then we produced a documentary based on that book.

00:04:16.000 It's going to be in movie theaters coast to coast for three nights only, April 4th, 5th, and 6th.

00:04:22.000 I say documentary, but that conjures up images of a grainy 16 millimeter black and white thing with talking heads.

00:04:32.000 This is a beautiful film.

00:04:34.000 The cinematography is breathtaking.

00:04:37.000 I hope people can see it on the big screen because I think they'll really be inspired by what they see.

00:04:42.000 Well, so walk us through kind of some of the questions that you try to answer in this film.

00:04:48.000 The movie Case for Christ, I thought was really well done.

00:04:52.000 Thank you.

00:04:53.000 And kind of introduce a little bit of your journalistic background.

00:04:55.000 You started as a skeptic.

00:04:57.000 And I don't want to mistell the story, but basically, I'm going to prove my wife wrong.

00:05:01.000 She believes in this kind of, you know, mystical stuff.

00:05:03.000 I'm going to go to do the research myself.

00:05:06.000 And it brought you on a fact-finding mission that really brought you to confirmation in your belief in Christ.

00:05:12.000 That's right.

00:05:13.000 I was an atheist at that time.

00:05:15.000 My wife started out as an agnostic.

00:05:18.000 I'm trained in journalism with a degree from the University of Missouri and in law, a master's degree from Yale Law School.

00:05:25.000 And I was legal editor of the Chicago Tribune newspaper.

00:05:29.000 And my wife gave me the worst news that an atheist husband could get.

00:05:33.000 She said she decided to become a Christian.

00:05:35.000 And that freaked me out.

00:05:37.000 And so I decided to try to rescue her from this cult that she got involved in.

00:05:43.000 And I figured that I could do that if I could just disprove the resurrection of Jesus, because even I, as an atheist, recognize that is the foundation of the faith.

00:05:53.000 So I took my journalism training, my legal training, and systematically investigated.

00:05:59.000 Is there any evidence historically for the resurrection of Jesus?

00:06:02.000 And of course, Easter's coming up.

00:06:04.000 A lot of people this time of year think about these kinds of things.

00:06:07.000 And my book, The Case for Christ, and also in the new book, The Case for Heaven, I deal with the evidence for the resurrection historically.

00:06:16.000 I found it to be overwhelming when I investigated it.

00:06:19.000 In fact, it was interesting.

00:06:20.000 One of my heroes when I was a student at Yale Law School was a guy named Sir Lionel Lucku.

00:06:26.000 Sir Lionel was the greatest defense attorney in history.

00:06:29.000 He won more murder trials as a defense attorney in a row than anybody in history.

00:06:33.000 He was in the Guinness Book of World Records.

00:06:35.000 And he, like me, was a skeptic for the resurrection at the time.

00:06:40.000 And so, but he was challenged to take his monumental legal skill and apply it to the historical record.

00:06:45.000 And he spent several years doing it.

00:06:47.000 And this was his conclusion.

00:06:48.000 He says, I say unequivocally that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof, which leaves absolutely no room for doubt.

00:06:59.000 The greatest defense attorney who ever lived.

00:07:02.000 So I came to a similar conclusion on November the 8th of 1981, that based on the evidence of history, that Jesus clearly claimed to be the Son of God.

00:07:11.000 And then he backed up that claim by returning from the dead.

00:07:15.000 And that's when I repented of my sin, received Jesus as my forgiver and leader.

00:07:20.000 And my life, my values, my character, my morality, my attitudes, my parenting, my relationships, I mean, everything over time began to change for the good.

00:07:31.000 And this is something I tell people all the time, which is you should want this to be true, right?

00:07:36.000 So you should be skeptical, but let's just ask what would you want for your life?

00:07:41.000 You should want this story to be true.

00:07:43.000 That means you get heaven.

00:07:44.000 That means you, that there's meaning to the universe.

00:07:48.000 And so what I love about the book, I know we're here to talk about Case for Heaven and we're going to keep talking about it.

00:07:52.000 But what I loved about Case for Christ is it really resonated with my analytical, more reason-based approach.

00:07:59.000 And, you know, my critique is that sometimes the church can be more about experience and renewal, which is phenomenal.

00:08:07.000 I mean, we believe in all those things, but there's still some of us that, you know, say, show me the facts.

00:08:12.000 I mean, come on.

00:08:13.000 And you kind of went through some of the great claims, such as, well, maybe Jesus wasn't actually killed or, you know, maybe that his body was just stolen.

00:08:23.000 And you go through those very analytically because as you went on that fact-finding mission, you were trying to say there's got to be some reasonable explanation.

00:08:32.000 There's no way this could be true.

00:08:34.000 Right.

00:08:35.000 Exactly.

00:08:36.000 I mean, when you examine the evidence, you look at things like the execution of Jesus.

00:08:41.000 Even the Journal of the American Medical Association carried an analysis of the crucifixion of Jesus and concluded that clearly, based on the historical and medical evidence, Jesus was dead after being crucified.

00:08:52.000 In fact, before the spear was thrust into his side, he was already dead.

00:08:57.000 The early accounts of the report, in other words, the early reports of the resurrection that come too quick to merely be a legend, took time for legend to develop in the ancient world.

00:09:07.000 But we have a report of the resurrection of Jesus, including named eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses that has been dated back by scholars to within months of his death.

00:09:16.000 That is a news flash from history.

00:09:18.000 And then the empty tomb that even the opponents of Jesus admitted was empty.

00:09:22.000 And then we have nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament confirming and corroborating the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the resurrected Jesus.

00:09:33.000 That is an avalanche of historical data.

00:09:36.000 And Josephus, amongst many others, and one of the ones in your book that just blew my mind, such an obvious point, which is actually a point that's used against biblical Christianity, which you, and you say, wait a second, so there's female witnesses.

00:09:51.000 If you were to make something up, why would you use female witnesses, right? 0.81

00:09:54.000 Exactly.

00:09:57.000 That's right.

00:09:57.000 In the first century, Josephus, the Jewish historian who worked for the Romans, and even the Jewish Talmud both say that the testimony of women in that culture in that day was not considered reliable.

00:10:08.000 It wasn't considered trustworthy.

00:10:10.000 And yet the gospels tell us it was women that discovered the tomb empty.

00:10:14.000 So if you're going to make up the story about the empty tomb, there's no way you would say women discovered the tomb empty.

00:10:20.000 You'd say John discovered the tomb empty.

00:10:22.000 Peter discovered the tomb empty.

00:10:24.000 But no, they say women discovered empty, even though it hurt their case.

00:10:28.000 And indeed, in the second century, critics of Christianity did attack it by saying, oh, well, you can't trust that.

00:10:34.000 Women are the witnesses. 1.00

00:10:36.000 Well, why would they do that?

00:10:38.000 If they were going to make it up, they wouldn't have said it that way.

00:10:41.000 And yet they did.

00:10:42.000 That gives you clear evidence that they just basically said, look, we're going to tell the story and just let the chips fall where they may.

00:10:49.000 And then we have the account of the apostles and the people that willingly died afterwards, the disciples that died afterwards.

00:10:55.000 The kind of whole body of work, Lee, that you've developed, I just want to say has helped strengthen so many people's faith because the monotony of secularism is a real thing, right?

00:11:07.000 It's an overwhelming amount of skepticism and kind of a smart alec attitude.

00:11:12.000 And your decades of work in these fields have really helped me personally.

00:11:16.000 I know so many of our listeners.

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00:12:33.000 Lee, walk us through some of the questions that you were trying to answer in this movie.

00:12:38.000 Yeah, I wanted, as someone trained in law and journalism, I wanted some corroboration of what the Bible says.

00:12:44.000 And so I explored an area that explored an area that I was really skeptical about, which are near-death experiences.

00:12:51.000 I thought these were overhyped.

00:12:53.000 I thought, you know, it was from fraud involved.

00:12:55.000 Some people claim they died and met Jesus and he's five foot 10, real nice guy.

00:13:00.000 I can't confirm that.

00:13:01.000 I can't corroborate that.

00:13:02.000 I reject that.

00:13:05.000 But I learned that there are 900 scholarly articles written about near-death experiences published in scientific and medical journals over the last 40 years.

00:13:14.000 This is a very well-studied area.

00:13:17.000 In fact, The Lancet, which is the famous medical journal in England, carried an analysis of near-death experiences that concluded that none of the alternative explanations account for this phenomenon.

00:13:30.000 So I looked at cases, you know, because the Bible says in a couple of places, for instance, the Apostle Paul says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.

00:13:40.000 Jesus told the repentant criminal on the cross, today you'll be with me in paradise.

00:13:44.000 So the Christian conception of the afterlife is two phases.

00:13:48.000 One is the first phase that occurs after we are physically dead, in which our spirit, our soul, our consciousness continues to live on.

00:13:57.000 And we live on either in the presence of God or away from God in Hades.

00:14:04.000 At the time of Jesus' return and the consummation of history, we are reunited then with our now resurrected bodies.

00:14:14.000 We go through final judgment and then we spend eternity in a very physical place, whether it's heaven or hell.

00:14:19.000 So I needed to know: is there any evidence from near-death experiences that indeed our spirit, our soul, our consciousness, does continue to live on after our physical demise?

00:14:29.000 And what I found to my shock were a number of cases that we deal with in the book and the movie where people saw things or experienced things or heard things during their out-of-body experience that would be impossible if it wasn't authentic.

00:14:45.000 I'll give you an example.

00:14:46.000 It was a woman named Maria.

00:14:47.000 She died in the hospital.

00:14:49.000 And yet she said later, I was conscious the whole time.

00:14:51.000 She said, my spirit separated from my body.

00:14:54.000 I kind of floated near the ceiling.

00:14:56.000 I watched the resuscitation efforts on my body being taking place.

00:15:01.000 And then my spirit floated up and out of the hospital.

00:15:04.000 But then when I was finally revived, when they brought me back around, my spirit returned to my body.

00:15:08.000 And she told the nurse, she said, by the way, there's a shoe on the roof of the hospital.

00:15:13.000 And it's dark blue.

00:15:14.000 It's a man's tennis shoe.

00:15:15.000 It's left-footed.

00:15:16.000 There's some wear over the little toe and the shoelace is tucked under the heel.

00:15:21.000 Well, they went up to the roof and they found it exactly as she had said.

00:15:25.000 This is the kind of corroboration.

00:15:27.000 There's no way she could have known that had this not been authentic out-of-body experience.

00:15:32.000 In fact, get this.

00:15:33.000 One study explored 21 cases of blind people, most of them blind since birth, who during their near-death experience were able to see for the first time.

00:15:43.000 They saw the resuscitation efforts going on in their body.

00:15:47.000 They met dead relatives and went to a place of bliss that they can interpret as being heaven.

00:15:52.000 And when they returned to their body and were revived, their vision disappeared again.

00:15:58.000 Medical researchers said this is medically impossible.

00:16:01.000 Another study showed, look, 90, let me see, let me get this right.

00:16:07.000 Over 90 cases where this kind of verifiable observation was made during out-of-body experience.

00:16:13.000 So almost 100 cases they explored.

00:16:16.000 What they found is that 92% of those cases, those observations were 100% accurate.

00:16:23.000 In another 6% of those cases, they were almost exactly accurate.

00:16:27.000 Just 98% accuracy.

00:16:29.000 So something is going on here.

00:16:31.000 So I think this is affirmation from outside the Bible that confirms the fact that after our physical demise, we continue to exist.

00:16:42.000 Our consciousness continues to live on.

00:16:45.000 And that's in corroboration of what the Bible actually teaches.

00:16:49.000 It's incredible.

00:16:50.000 And I hear stories like this as well.

00:16:53.000 And you also hear these stories of people halfway around the world that have the almost identical types of near-death experiences and they've never met each other and they've never, they're in separate cultures and they're almost identical.

00:17:07.000 And then I want to ask you about Lee, another phenomenon, which some people claim that they have seen hell.

00:17:15.000 And that's a separate issue.

00:17:16.000 I don't know if you've researched that or not.

00:17:18.000 I did, yes.

00:17:19.000 I'm curious about that.

00:17:20.000 That's not as uplifting.

00:17:22.000 But in some ways, people need to believe that there's something after this.

00:17:25.000 In fact, I believe it's one of the most important things for a society.

00:17:29.000 If you don't think there's an afterlife, well, then you're going to make really bad decisions while you're here, actually.

00:17:34.000 Exactly.

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00:19:56.000 So, Lee, some people will say the skeptics or the humanists or the atheists, oh, your mind plays funny games on you.

00:20:02.000 Before death, you get a chemical rush, and this is where you get the out-of-body experiences.

00:20:08.000 I've seen far too many of these skeptic videos of the quote-unquote neuroscientists.

00:20:13.000 How do you respond to that?

00:20:15.000 Yeah, and certainly there are those phenomena where people do have a sense of an out-of-body experience.

00:20:20.000 However, as the Lancet Medical Journal in England pointed out, none of these alternative explanations can account for the full range of this phenomenon of near-death experiences.

00:20:32.000 For instance, to have a perspective from above you, that you see things that you otherwise couldn't see, to hear things that you couldn't otherwise hear, and so forth.

00:20:44.000 So, those are things that I think corroborate.

00:20:47.000 I'll give you another example.

00:20:49.000 There was a girl named, I think her name was Katie, and she drowned in a YMCA swimming pool, massive brain swelling, zero brain waves, zero, no heartbeat for 20 minutes.

00:21:02.000 They take her to the hospital.

00:21:03.000 She's clinically dead.

00:21:06.000 And yet they keep her body mechanically alive as they're trying to figure out what to do. 0.98

00:21:12.000 She's ultimately revived.

00:21:13.000 And when she is revived, she said, by the way, I was conscious the whole time.

00:21:17.000 So one night when my parents came to the hospital to visit me, I followed them home.

00:21:22.000 And then she described what they cooked for dinner, what the children, her brothers and sisters were playing, what toys they were playing with, where her father was sitting, what clothes they were wearing.

00:21:33.000 I mean, things that she could not have otherwise known.

00:21:35.000 She even drew a drawing of the emergency room as she was taking when she was clinically dead and accurately placed everything in that drawing.

00:21:44.000 So these are things I think corroborate the fact that something extraordinary does take place upon our clinical death.

00:21:53.000 So what you've described so far is extremely compelling.

00:21:56.000 However, it doesn't get all the way to heaven, right?

00:21:58.000 So this might explain that we are a mind, body, and soul or spirit.

00:22:03.000 So walk us through then the actual heaven aspect, because some people would say, okay, Lee, I'm with you.

00:22:08.000 I think there is a spiritual domain, but who's to say our spirit just doesn't get released back into the oversoul?

00:22:15.000 Yeah.

00:22:16.000 So what I do in the book is I go on a journey to reason through the various options.

00:22:25.000 And I look at what I call the heaven pyramid.

00:22:27.000 And by that, I mean, if you picture a pyramid and the base of it and then goes up to a point.

00:22:33.000 And so I look at the base, which is what is truth?

00:22:36.000 That's the base.

00:22:37.000 Well, truth is that which corresponds with reality.

00:22:37.000 What is truth?

00:22:40.000 That's the best definition of truth.

00:22:42.000 Well, then you go to the next level.

00:22:44.000 Then what about different worldviews?

00:22:50.000 And you can look at the three main worldview possibilities, atheism, theism, or polytheism, pantheism.

00:22:58.000 That is, everything is God.

00:22:59.000 Those are really the only three choices.

00:23:00.000 And then I look at the logic and the livability of each of those worldviews and conclude that theism is the one that survives logic and livability the best.

00:23:10.000 Then you go on to Revelation and you say, you know, different worldviews have different books of revelation.

00:23:18.000 The Christians have the Bible.

00:23:20.000 I look at the reliability of scripture and say that it's unmatched by any other world religion's scriptures.

00:23:28.000 Then I look at the evidence for the resurrection and I touched on that a little earlier, but there is clear and compelling evidence that Jesus didn't just claim to be the Son of God, but he backed it up by returning from the dead.

00:23:40.000 And then ultimately the gospel that Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, that no one comes to the Father except through him.

00:23:48.000 And so we go on this pyramid and I reason through it all to come to the conclusion that, okay, if Jesus claimed to be the son of God and he backed that up by returning from the dead, then he's an eyewitness to the afterlife.

00:24:02.000 Not only that, but he is the son of God who created the afterlife.

00:24:06.000 And so we ought to look at what he says about what heaven is like.

00:24:10.000 And one of my favorite metaphors that Jesus uses in talking to the disciples is he uses the metaphor of home in talking about heaven.

00:24:18.000 And so I don't know if you've ever traveled internationally to maybe a third world country that was very primitive and difficult.

00:24:24.000 I know that as a new Christian, I went to India for quite a while to do ministry.

00:24:28.000 And, you know, you're living in very basic conditions.

00:24:31.000 You're sleeping on the ground.

00:24:32.000 You're living out of a knapsack.

00:24:33.000 You're eating strange foods.

00:24:35.000 And so you begin to have this homesickness.

00:24:37.000 You begin to long for home.

00:24:39.000 And when you finally get home and you walk in the door and it's such a place of warmth and security and familiarity and love and grace.

00:24:46.000 And then you crawl into your own bed and Jesus says, that's the metaphor I want you to carry with you.

00:24:52.000 That's what heaven is like.

00:24:54.000 It is your real home.

00:24:57.000 So talk about, I don't know if you go into this in the movie or not, but the importance of really trying to get people to think deeply about an afterlife because that's something that, you know, is on everyone's mind.

00:25:10.000 Everyone, whether we like it or not, is thinking about their death at least past the age of 30 on a daily basis, right?

00:25:17.000 And whether they realize it or not, it's like everything's building up to the fact that we're not going to be permanently here.

00:25:23.000 There's scientific pushes to try to make us live forever here.

00:25:26.000 None of them will actually succeed.

00:25:28.000 But talk about either the resistance or the need to have this conversation.

00:25:34.000 I think it's actually really healthy for a civilization.

00:25:37.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:25:38.000 And I think especially in light of the pandemic, this has become ever more relevant.

00:25:42.000 29% of Americans know someone who's died during the pandemic.

00:25:45.000 My brother died at the beginning of the pandemic.

00:25:48.000 I was talking to a waitress at a restaurant not long ago and she began to cry.

00:25:54.000 And I said, what's wrong?

00:25:55.000 She said, oh, I almost didn't come into work today.

00:25:58.000 We just lost a family member to COVID.

00:26:00.000 And I thought, here's a young woman, probably 18 years old, never probably thought about death before.

00:26:04.000 She's just a kid, you know?

00:26:06.000 And yet now you can see the anxiety in her eyes, the apprehension in her eyes, because death had come knocking on her family's door.

00:26:14.000 And so I think it's ever more relevant today to say, wouldn't you want to know with confidence, with a degree of certainty that what happens to you after you close your eyes for the last time in this world?

00:26:27.000 And I think the movie is going to encourage believers.

00:26:30.000 And I think it's going to challenge people who are skeptics.

00:26:34.000 So talk a little bit more about the promises that we know about heaven.

00:26:38.000 I mean, someone might be saying, okay, how do I get there then?

00:26:40.000 Do I have to do a lot of good stuff?

00:26:42.000 I mean, do I have to kind of put a lot of points on the board?

00:26:46.000 Talk about what Christians do about heaven. 1.00

00:26:48.000 You know, Christianity is the only world religion.

00:26:51.000 I've studied every major world religion.

00:26:54.000 Christianity is the only religion based on grace.

00:26:58.000 In other words, every other religious system is spelled D-O-N or is spelled D-O.

00:27:02.000 It's spelled D-O.

00:27:03.000 You have to do something to earn your way to God.

00:27:06.000 You've got to use a Tibetan prayer wheel.

00:27:07.000 You got to go in a series of reincarnations.

00:27:09.000 You got to go on a pilgrimage.

00:27:11.000 You've got to give alms to the poor.

00:27:12.000 You have to do, do, do a bunch of things to try to earn your way to God.

00:27:16.000 And guess what?

00:27:17.000 You probably won't make it.

00:27:19.000 Christianity is not spelled D-O.

00:27:21.000 It's spelled D-O-N-E.

00:27:22.000 It's done.

00:27:23.000 Jesus said it's finished.

00:27:24.000 He said that on the cross.

00:27:26.000 And what he means by that is he went and paid the death penalty that we deserve for the sins that we've committed.

00:27:33.000 And he offers forgiveness and eternal life in heaven as a free gift of his grace.

00:27:38.000 And like any gift, it becomes ours when we receive it in gratitude and repentance and faith.

00:27:44.000 And so that is distinct and different about Christianity compared to every other world religion.

00:27:52.000 That's something that people don't expect to hear, though.

00:27:55.000 They expect that they have to kind of do like that God is some sort of kind of moral scorekeeper and that you're going to kind of see.

00:28:05.000 the score at the end.

00:28:06.000 Talk a little bit about that because this kind of idea of like points on the board is a common belief in America.

00:28:12.000 It's very common.

00:28:13.000 I think it syncs up with the American, you know, hard doctrine of hard work and perseverance and so forth.

00:28:20.000 It's kind of bred into us as Americans.

00:28:22.000 We're hard workers and so forth.

00:28:24.000 But, you know, that's where reincarnation got its attractiveness because reincarnation says not only can't you do enough good deeds in your lifetime to earn your way to God, you've got to go through a multitude of lifetimes, maybe an infinite number of lifetimes to try to earn your way to God.

00:28:43.000 And yet you don't know what you did wrong in the previous life.

00:28:46.000 You don't know what bad karma you're waking up, making up for.

00:28:50.000 And so you have no idea how to improve.

00:28:52.000 It's just an illogical system.

00:28:54.000 But I think it plays to our desire to try to earn something.

00:28:59.000 It's harder, I think, for us as Americans to be offered a gift.

00:29:04.000 We'd rather try to earn something.

00:29:06.000 But Jesus says, you can't earn this.

00:29:08.000 You can't earn this.

00:29:09.000 You need to receive.

00:29:10.000 You know, the last verse I read before I became a Christian is John 1, 12.

00:29:15.000 It says, but as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name.

00:29:23.000 And that forms an equation of what it means to become a child of God.

00:29:27.000 Believe plus receive equals become.

00:29:31.000 Lee, talk about the transformation that putting Jesus in your life did for you.

00:29:36.000 If I remember correctly, it made you a happier person, less angry.

00:29:41.000 Walk us through that.

00:29:43.000 I had been as an atheist. 0.97

00:29:44.000 I had lived a very immoral, drunken, profane, narcissistic, self-absorbed life. 0.93

00:29:51.000 And that was my life.

00:29:54.000 I mean, I remember once getting into an argument with my wife about her going to church, and I just blew up.

00:30:01.000 I had so much rage inside of me.

00:30:02.000 And I reared back and I kicked a hole right through our living room wall out of rage.

00:30:07.000 My daughter was crying.

00:30:08.000 My wife was crying.

00:30:09.000 In fact, my daughter, when she was a toddler, if she was playing with some toys by herself in the living room and she heard me come home from work through the front door, would just gather her toys and go in her room and shut the door.

00:30:22.000 She's going to be drunk again? 1.00

00:30:23.000 Are you going to be yelling and screaming and kicking holes in walls?

00:30:25.000 You know, at least it's nice and quiet in here.

00:30:28.000 And yet, four or five months after I received Jesus as my forgiver and leader, and he began to change my attitudes, my character, my morality, my life, that same daughter, watching the transformation in her own dad, went up to my wife and said, mommy, I want God to do for me what he's done for daddy.

00:30:49.000 And she received this free gift of grace at age five and is a devout follower of Jesus today.

00:30:56.000 Same thing with my son, who got his PhD in theology as a professor now at Bioli University.

00:31:02.000 So God changed our family.

00:31:03.000 He rescued our family, changed our future, our eternities.

00:31:09.000 And I hate to think of what my life would have ended up like had I continued to go down that dark road.

00:31:16.000 Well, what's so fascinating about your story is that you wanted to find the truth.

00:31:22.000 And that's kind of what got you on this journey, which is what I tell people all the time.

00:31:27.000 Say that just if you have an openness to the truth, that's a phenomenal start because I find, and I've asked this question throughout, some people don't want this to be true, quite honestly.

00:31:38.000 They don't.

00:31:39.000 They want their own kind of belief of themselves being the most important person on the planet, their own God, if you will, to be true.

00:31:47.000 Because this can be, if you believe there's a heaven and you believe there's only one way to get to heaven, which is not earn your way to heaven, that's really humbling, actually.

00:31:55.000 Really humbling in more ways than one.

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00:33:05.000 So, Lee, it says here the case for heaven and hell.

00:33:08.000 Tell us about it.

00:33:10.000 Yeah, I'll tell you, let me say one thing before I say that, and that is one of the other breakthroughs I think in this area of near-death experience was my interview with John Burke, who you'll see in the movie and also in the book, a Christian pastor who studied a thousand near-death experiences.

00:33:26.000 And his conclusion that he backs up verse by verse is that if you look at what actually happens in near-death experiences, it is consistent with Christian theology.

00:33:35.000 Now, having said that, the question about hell is very interesting.

00:33:35.000 Wow.

00:33:39.000 We actually have in the movie, you'll see this and in my book, accounts of people who have had hellish experiences in their near-death experience.

00:33:48.000 About 24% have that.

00:33:51.000 And in the movie, you'll see Howard Storm.

00:33:54.000 Howard was an atheist.

00:33:56.000 He was a tenured art professor and chairman of the art department at a secular university.

00:34:02.000 He died, and he had a horrific experience after his death.

00:34:08.000 I mean, he, I mean, you can tell he had post-traumatic stress as a result of it.

00:34:12.000 I mean, he was, and he describes how he was reduced to roadkill by demons.

00:34:17.000 I mean, he was literally torn apart.

00:34:19.000 He said no horror film could begin to depict how horrific this experience was.

00:34:26.000 And in the middle of it, he called out to Jesus to be saved.

00:34:29.000 Jesus rescued him from that.

00:34:31.000 And this experience, he was later revived.

00:34:34.000 And this experience was so real to him that he not only renounces atheism, he not only resigned his tenured professorship at the university, he not only became a Christian, he became an ordained pastor and is now pastor of a small rural church to this day.

00:34:50.000 So, yeah, we have well-documented stuff that these people who have no nothing to gain by talking about this.

00:34:58.000 I mean, who wants to say, oh, yeah, I died, I went to hell, frankly.

00:35:01.000 I mean, it's the last thing somebody wants to admit.

00:35:04.000 And yet, some of these people are willing to talk about it.

00:35:08.000 And, you know, I think the best thing about heaven is that it's real.

00:35:13.000 The worst thing about hell is that it's real.

00:35:16.000 But the very best thing of all is that through this free gift of grace offered through Jesus Christ, we can, our pathway to heaven is open.

00:35:26.000 The doors have been flung open to anybody, anywhere at any time in any culture who receives this free gift of grace.

00:35:34.000 Amen.

00:35:35.000 So, Lee, just in closing here, what was the thing you learned most about this film?

00:35:39.000 Like, just from a... your own personal perspective, looking back, you say, wow, this either changed my mind on something or I have a better understanding of something.

00:35:47.000 Well, for you personally.

00:35:48.000 The thing I take away the most, I interviewed Luis Palau, the famous evangelist, who shared his faith with a billion people before he died.

00:35:55.000 I had the last interview with him before he died.

00:35:58.000 And he looked at me before he died and said something I'll take to my grave and beyond.

00:36:04.000 He looked at me and said, Lee, when you get to the end of your life and all is said and done, you will never regret being courageous for Christ.

00:36:14.000 That was powerful.

00:36:16.000 And he was my friend and my hero.

00:36:18.000 And hearing that from him is something I'll always carry with me.

00:36:22.000 I hope in my own small way, I can be courageous, just as your viewers and your listeners can take small steps to be courageous, especially this Easter season, to reach out to someone, invite them to church this Easter season.

00:36:34.000 I know that's a risky thing.

00:36:35.000 It's a courageous thing to do.

00:36:38.000 But who knows what God might do as a result?

00:36:41.000 Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs that that's considered to be a courageous thing in America today.

00:36:45.000 Heaven's at stake, everybody, and it's real.

00:36:48.000 If you don't believe us, just watch the movie, The Case for Heaven.

00:36:50.000 Lee, thank you so much for joining us.

00:36:52.000 This was great.

00:36:52.000 Thank you.

00:36:53.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:36:53.000 It's been great to be with you.

00:36:54.000 I appreciate it.

00:36:55.000 Thank you.

00:36:55.000 God bless you.

00:36:58.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:37:00.000 Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:37:02.000 Thanks so much for listening.

00:37:03.000 God bless.

00:37:07.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - March 25, 2022

Making the Case for Heaven with Lee Strobel

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