When I came back downstairs later after a short nap and a run there was Jeff ready to go. Instead of eating in the hotel we decided to go out into the community and walk around a little bit and have breakfast in one of the small restaurants there. My goal was basically not only to befriend this person but also to look for an opportunity to explain to Jeff about my faith in Jesus Christ. I was aware that he was on this trip as something of a spiritual search. So I had an agenda about how I wanted to approach Jeff and tell him about my faith in Jesus Christ.

What I'd like to do is relay a little bit of that conversation because I think the details may be helpful for you if you're a Christian seeking to communicate your faith in Jesus Christ to others, especially someone who is, as in this case, of a New Age persuasion. He was on his way to India to study with an international community in an ashram there, to pursue Hinduism and find enlightenment.

Jeff was probably in his mid-thirties, a psychologist and has a family in Santa Fe. He was taking two months off for this trip to India. He had been doing meditation in Santa Fe, which many of you know is kind of a hot bed for New Age thinking and New Age awareness groups. He was open to New Age concepts and sympathetic to their theology. He was a very gracious person. Often psychologist-types are very emotive and very sensitive and kind. He was one of those people.

When I got wind of this I wanted to talk to him about Jesus Christ. This man had just committed a good chunk of his time and money to fly over there and had already made a serious commitment to exploring Hinduism and, to use his words, find truth and peace in his life. So I realized that in a few hours that afternoon I probably wasn't going to transform all of his theology. I had a very particular goal. My goal was not to accomplish the whole process in one fell swoop, I had no confidence that I could do that. Instead I wanted to plant particular seeds. I wanted to give him the kind of tools to help separate truth from error.

My conviction as a Christian is that his pursuit of Hinduism as an answer to reality, ultimate truth, is in error. I think it's possible to know that if we use the right ways of discerning truth from error. My exposure to the New Age movement in the past has shown me that they are very adept at taking those tools away so that you are more susceptible to believe whatever they tell you as long as you have some kind of experience associated with it.

With that in mind I started my conversation with Jeff. I wanted to work with his epistemology, to use a philosophic term. I wanted to talk with him about how he knows what he knows and how he judges whether a thing is true or not and to find out whether those ways of judging truth are good, valid ways. If not, I wanted to steer him in a different direction, steer him toward a more reasonable fashion of determining what is true and false.

I didn't start talking about Christ right away, that would have been artificial. We walked and talked and I got some information about his life. To be honest with you, I didn't know if we were in fact going to talk about the Lord. My attitude was that I was open and was looking for an opening, but I'm not going to use this man and treat him simply as Gospel fodder. He is an individual important to me just because I can witness to him, and if I can't witness to him the heck with him and I'll go and do something else. No, he was an important person in his own right. I wanted to communicate that to him. So we sat and talked for probably an hour about odds and ends and then slowly the conversation came around to spiritual matters.

He started the details of his quest and what was motivating him and what his concerns were. My biggest fear with Jeff's involvement in the New Age and his pursuit of Hinduism is that in answering these very critical questions about what is true and what is false in the spiritual, moral realm he would make the mistake that I talked about yesterday, the mistake of abandoning rationality. I said yesterday that rationality was the mental tool that we used to separate truth from falsehood in our daily lives, and it is the thing that allows us to have knowledge and survive in the world. Often times we see this fundamental concept in the pursuit of knowledge in the material realm, but when it comes to immaterial issues like values and religion, which in my view are even more important because they deal with eternal destiny and not just temporal life, people then want to change the rules and abandon them altogether. I was concerned that he was doing this.

I began by asking him some questions. I started finding out where he was at but also trying to show him that there is a way to discern truth from error that is reasonable, sound and the kind of thing that we practice on a day to day basis. In fact, we have to use that in order to live. If we use it in our day to day life for physical things then it's also very important to use the same methodology to determine spiritual truth from spiritual error.

I was aware also of his New Age epistemology. In other words, how do New Agers know what they know? They don't use rationality, at least that's what they say. It's impossible not to use rationality. You always end up using rationality in some sense. But their big thing is experience. They want to live by experience and they test things by experiencing it. Then if they can experience it and it is real to them, subjectively real to them, then it's true.

Dr. Frank Beckwith, who I've interviewed before, made this observation. For a long time now Christians have been accused of abandoning rationality, putting their minds on the shelf, doing something ludicrous and ridiculous by becoming Christians. It's an intellectually indefensible way of thinking. You've got to be an idiot to be a Christian. This is the way I used to believe. You've got to be dumb or stupid or ugly, or all three in order to become a Christian. What has happened, though, is that there have been many people who have rigorously defended the faith and demonstrated that Christianity can be defended. And in fact, rationality shows that good reason points to the truth of biblical theism and not to some other kind of religion. The irony is that now we've got center stage with the best arguments, people are saying that the arguments don't matter. Before they said we are too stupid. Now that they see that we're bright and that we have arguments, they say arguments don't matter, only experience matters.

In light of this concern about experience I asked Jeff some very important questions. I said, "Jeff, let me make an observation about the way you made this trip." My goal here was to look at the way Jeff makes decision in normal, daily life. Jeff got onto an airplane and came to Malaysia and he was experiencing Malaysia. He knows the truth of Malaysia because he was experiencing it.

But I had to point out that this wasn't the only thing that was involved in his decision. He actually made some assessments before he was able to have this experience of Malaysia. He had to do some research. He contacted people in India, for example, who have this organization that he was going to. He contacted a travel agent to get a ticket and he trusted Malaysia Airlines to get him to Kuala Lumpur. All of these things he did in order to get him to this place where he could finally experience Malaysia.

He took two steps in making this step. The first step was cognitive assessment. He made a mental cognitive assessment of circumstances which allowed him to make a reasonable choice to get on an airplane and trust his entire life to a bunch of people he'd never met before. That happens every time you climb on an airplane. It was a reasonable assessment because of the research that he'd done. Because of that cognitive assessment that allowed him to make some choices he then could have an experiential investment in this trip to Malaysia.

Note also that his assessment had to do with authority. He didn't take it on blind faith, he didn't jut climb onto any airplane. He contacted an appropriate authority to find the information that was necessary for him to make a reasonable assessment and a reasonable commitment of his life. The truth of Malaysia was secured from an appropriate authority before he even got onto the plane.

I made the point that the kind of thing that he did was something that we do all of the time. Our normal practice gives us some clues about how we assess questions of truth and error, right and wrong, how we gain knowledge. He used a very normal means before he could have an experience of Malaysia. Point being, his experience was not the first thing. The first thing was a cognitive assessment and that allowed him to safely have the experience. Had he not given cognitive assessment to circumstances there is no reason to trust that his experience would be a safe one, in fact it could have threatened his very life. That was the first thing. I wanted to undermine the New Age's emphasis on experience as the sole and most critical criterion for truth.

Keep in mind I'm laying a foundation here. I'm trying to show him how he thinks about things, but in a way I'm not really teaching him anything new. I'm just identifying what we all do on a regular basis with the idea that in a few moments I'm going to encourage him to use the same mechanism to separate truth from error in the spiritual world. Taking a cue from C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity I began to ask him some questions about what we can know about the spiritual realm without any revelation at all. What are some standard givens that we can observe that must be integrated into our spiritual scheme of things? Wherever we land in terms of our spiritual assessment of reality, we must take into consideration and integrate certain givens.

The second point that I wanted to make was that if he's gong to search for religious truth there are some things that strike me as givens that need to be integrated into whatever paradigm one constructs. This reflects my view that truth is that which corresponds to reality. A thing is true if it reflects what really is. It's true that I'm in this room if I am in fact sitting in this studio broadcasting. The point is that if there are certain beliefs that we can identify in our environment and world that have to do with the spiritual nature of things that seem to be givens, that if we have a description of religion, we are going to need to incorporate those givens into our description of religious belief.

What are those religious beliefs? Lewis argues that there seems to be a moral law that every single person in this world has built into him. There may be some discussion about details of that moral law, whether abortion is murder or capital punishment is murder. Some of the details of that moral law are debatable, but the fact that virtually no society condones outright murder seems to be pretty well established. So there is a characteristic moral law that underlies all of humanity. That's his first observation.

So I'm talking about this and asking Jeff questions about this, that there seems to be a moral machine in all of us. This is why we're so quick to make moral judgments. Even people who don't think we should make moral judgments consistently make moral judgments because there is something about us that is preoccupied with morality in a way that the rest of creation is not. Some religious understanding of man will have to take into consideration this notion of man's morality, this moral machine inside of man that is always ticking, doing it's moral assessment of things. We don't always obey the moral machine inside of us but it's there. How do we understand that?

The second observation that Lewis makes is not only do we all have this moral notion, this awareness of a higher law, but we have another awareness. That is that we consistently violate that higher law. Lewis says we don't need a Bible, we don't need a system of rules written down for us to know that we violate a law. That is built into us and one of the things that he points to is the fact that we consistently give excuses for things we do. The fact that we give excuses means that we believe very strongly in this higher law, but we happen to be excused from this higher law. We don't argue that there is no higher law, therefore you can't hold me accountable for my behavior. We know there's a higher law that we have violated, but we think our violation is justified so we give an excuse.

So there are two things. First the higher law that we are all aware of, and second the awareness that we have broken that higher law. This is where the notion of guilt comes in.

I asked Jeff, "What is it that guilt?" Guilt is a feeling that we owe. That seemed to make sense to him, that we owe, we have a debt. That's what guilt is. Sometimes when we try to do things while we're feeling guilty, it's an attempt to make up for what we did that we feel guilty about. We're trying to pay this debt off. I asked him, "If we do have this awareness, who is it that we owe?" He thought for a moment. I said, "There's only a couple of different possibilities. We could owe other people, but the fact is we feel guilty about things that don't relate to other people. When we do some things wrong where we haven't hurt another person, we still have guilt."

I suggested that it could be that we owe ourselves. Jeff said something very interesting when I made that suggestion. He said, "No, not big enough." That was very perceptive. I had to applaud him for that because somebody wanting to get out of this bind about moral debt, about guilt might say, "I just have a guilty sense towards myself." That would get him out of the implication that there might be a God that we owe. He was very honest, though. He wasn't taking the easy way out. He jut said simply, "It's not big enough." Guilt really means more than what we owe ourselves. Debt is a personal kind of thing. Who is it that we owe? That bring us to the question of God.

If we have this moral law it implies that there is someone out there that put that moral law in us that defines the moral law because laws are something very specific. They're organized. They aren't the kinds of things that happen by chance. It implies a law giver behind that and also our sense of breaking the law that means that we owe. But we don't just owe in some kind of generalized sense, we owe somebody. We don't owe the law, we owe the person behind the law. That is an important part of the whole process.

Our conservation went on much longer than this. It was one of those times that I wish that everyone could have been sitting there at the table because it was such an encouraging, interesting conversation and it was very amicable, gracious back and forth as I basically asked questions and moved toward these conclusion. Jeff would bring up other things. How is it possible to know God? How can we know something true about God, He's so vast, so beyond us? Is it possible for Einstein to communicate his love to his four year old granddaughter? Of course it is. The granddaughter doesn't understand everything that is in Grandpa Einstein's head, but she can certainly comprehend certain demonstrations of love. By the same token, we can know some things to be true about God if God stoops down to communicate to us about Himself.

I wanted Jeff to have some specific things in mind when he went to the ashram in India and started to get fed a bunch of New Age garbage about all religions being equal and Jesus being a Hindu guru. I wanted him to understand that it makes reasonable sense when we do our assessment of the world that there is a moral law that applies to every single person which implies a personal law giver, not an impersonal force. We have broken that law which implies true moral guilt and we have a debt of sin that we owe, not to ourselves or the cosmos in general, but we owe a person.

My confidence and hope as I prayed for him over the next few weeks was that as this sunk in--and he was very receptive to this--he would find root in his heart and mind so that when he went to the ashram and somebody tried to teach him that the world was Maya and it's just an illusion and we must transcend the illusion and go back to the godhead he would be able to say. I was trusting that God and the Holy Spirit would use that conversation that the Holy Spirit allowed me to bring up.