He looked at me and he said, you know, Lee, when you get to the end of your life and all is said and done,

you will never regret being courageous for Christ.

Welcome to the Alisa Childers Podcast. My guest today needs no introduction. He's a former investigative journalist from the Chicago Tribune, who as an atheist put the claims of Christianity to the test.

He investigated those claims and then became a Christian at the age of 29. And since then he's written tons of books, including the classic The Case for Christ, which of course was made into a movie.

And actually he wrote a book called The Case for the Real Jesus that was particularly influential when God was reconstructing my faith and I was coming out of a faith crisis. It was so helpful to me.

So I am so excited to introduce you. He's the he's the goat apologist, the greatest of all time. Lee, how are you?

I'm doing great. So great to be with you to finally meet you sort of. We've communicated through the years and I was so honored to write the forward to your fantastic book that looks into progressive Christianity and the pitfalls of that and so forth.

So I'm a big fan of you and what you're doing. And so I'm grateful to be here.

Well, I'm thrilled to finally have you on the podcast. You know, for the longest time, I just thought, well, I wouldn't be able to get least robo to come on the podcast.

And so here you are. So that's great. And I mentioned earlier that you need no introduction, but I certainly did. So I was so thankful that you agreed to write the forward for another gospel. So thank you so much for doing that.

Oh, it was my honor. I think it's one of the most important books that came out all year. Oh, truly, really. It's so timely. And I've encouraged so many people to read it. I'm glad your curriculums coming out.

Yes. So everybody can be looking for that this summer. I was telling Lee before we came on the air that we recorded the video portion for the curriculum this past week.

And it, I mean, I was just blown away with how beautiful it looks. It just aesthetically so beautiful. And I'm thrilled with the content. So I'm excited for churches to be able to go through a six week series to study through the book.

I think it's, I hope it'll be really helpful for people. But enough about my book. I want to talk about your new book. You've just written a book called The Case for Heaven.

And it's a really fascinating book. And I think that what you frame really well in the book is how closely the doctrines of heaven and the doctrine of hell are tied together.

You just kind of can't have one without the other. And today I thought it would be really interesting, not just interesting, but also kind of necessary.

If we just kind of focus in on hell, I mean, that's not something a lot of people want to do a whole podcast on. It's not something that you typically think, yeah, let's talk about hell.

But I think it's really important because it's one of those, those teachings that is falling by the wayside. It's being misunderstood. It's being misarticulated in a lot of cases.

I listened to a lot of the deconstruction stories of people who de-convert from Christianity or end up in a broader spirituality or more of a progressive Christianity.

And that idea of hell is almost always the first domino to fall. If we look at the core essential doctrines of Christianity like a line of dominoes, it's either hell or the Bible that's that first one that starts to knock all the other ones down.

And I understand it. I mean, we think about hell. It's not easy to think about hell. It's not pleasant. And it can be tempting to just kind of say, okay, we'll just get rid of that.

But you make a really robust case for the existence of hell and the nature of hell. Why do you think hell is something that's important for Christians to think about and to talk about?

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