We met with a student over the weekend who has officially decided against the faith. Super bright, open, pleasant and polite — just doesn’t believe.

Why not?

1. Questions. Sovereignty and free will, reliability of Scripture, boilerplate skepticism.

2. Evidence. Doesn’t see evidence at church or among Christians that there’s any difference between Christians and anyone else. And no evidence of anything supernatural. All the miraculous stories in the Bible — where are they?

We talked through the difference between believing in Christ and believing in Christians, and we discussed the evidence for Scripture being trustworthy — the bibliographical test, internal evidence, manuscripts, variants, and all the rest. Confirming the Bible’s authenticity isn’t too difficult since there’s overwhelming textual evidence for it.

So what does it come down to? Wanting. Wanting to know, wanting to believe, wanting to surrender. After all, when one has the authentic testimony of Jesus Christ, believing is really about responding.

We agreed to pray for conviction.