Your son's hardest question about God is a good sign

Quick answer: Thank him for asking. Tell him what happened to you. Lay out the evidence for the resurrection, because everything hangs there. Admit what you don't know. Then keep living it where he can watch.

He's fifteen. You're driving home from practice, and he says it to the windshield instead of to you. "Why do I have to believe what you believe?"

Most parents hear an attack. Your stomach drops, your voice gets level, and you say something about how this family goes to church. It ends the conversation. It also teaches him that the question was dangerous.

Don't do that. A boy who asks you is still talking to you. The ones to worry about are the boys who stop asking and work out their answers somewhere else.

Answer the question, not the tone

Sometimes it's a jab. Sometimes he's tired and sore and picking at the nearest thing. Even so, the question underneath is a fair one, and the apostle Peter assumed you'd get it. "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15).

Notice the order. Be prepared. Then gentleness. Preparation without gentleness wins arguments and loses sons. Gentleness without preparation gives him a warm feeling and nothing to stand on.

So start with something short. "Good question. I'd rather you ask me than wonder alone." Then stop talking and let him have a turn. You may find out the real issue isn't God at all. It might be a friend's mockery, a teacher's offhand remark, or something he's been carrying about his own failures.

Start with what happened to you

He doesn't need a seminary lecture first. He needs to hear that you didn't inherit this like a family recipe.

Tell him when you were wrong about something, and what Christ did about it. Tell him the year you almost walked away and why you didn't. Keep it to five minutes and keep it specific. A mom who says "I prayed for your grandfather for eleven years and watched him change" is more convincing than any syllogism.

Your story isn't proof. It's testimony, and Scripture treats testimony as legitimate. The blind man in John 9 had no argument ready for the Pharisees, only this: "One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see."

Don't oversell it, though. Your experience tells him you believe. It doesn't tell him it's true. For that he needs more.

Then give him the evidence

Christianity isn't a mood. It makes a claim about something that happened in history, and Paul put the whole weight on it: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile" (1 Corinthians 15:17).

That's a gift to a skeptical teenager. You don't have to defend every difficult passage tonight. You have to defend one event.

Walk him through it plainly:

• Paul lists the appearances of the risen Christ in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, including more than five hundred people at once, and says most of them were still alive when he wrote. Anyone could have gone and asked.
• Luke opens his Gospel by saying he investigated everything carefully from the beginning and wrote an orderly account (Luke 1:1-4). He's presenting a report, not a fable.
• The men who said Jesus was alive had every reason to go home quietly after the crucifixion. Instead they kept saying it in public, and it cost them dearly.

Then give him a book to chew on, and read it with him. Don't hand it off. If you want a plain tool for explaining the gospel itself, Way of the Master is built for that.

Jesus didn't hide the stakes either. "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Your son lives in a culture that says belief is private taste, like a favorite team. Tell him Jesus made a claim about reality, and claims about reality are either true or false. That's a more respectful way to treat him than telling him it's all a matter of opinion.

Say "I don't know" out loud

You'll get a question you can't answer. Why does God allow this? What about people who never heard? Count on it.

Say it. "I don't know. Let's find out." Then do it, and come back within the week. A father who admits a gap and closes it is worth more to a boy than one who bluffs and gets caught.

Doubt isn't the same as unbelief. The father in Mark 9 said it better than anybody: "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" Jesus didn't send him away. When Thomas wouldn't believe without seeing, Jesus didn't scold him. He showed him the wounds (John 20:24-29). And the Bereans were called noble because they checked what Paul said against Scripture every day (Acts 17:11).

Test it, then. That's allowed in this house.

He's watching the hypocrites, and so is the news

Sooner or later he'll point at a church scandal or a pastor who fell. When a story like eight arrested in a Florida church donation fraud case crosses his feed, he'll bring it to you.

Don't excuse it. Wrong is wrong, and Jesus had harsher words for religious frauds than for anyone. Then draw the line he needs: people failing the message doesn't change the message. The cross was built for failures, and that includes the ones in the pews. It includes his father, too.

Which raises the harder one. He's measuring you. If you want him to take Christ seriously, apologize when you lose your temper. Say "I was wrong, and I'm sorry" to him and to your wife. Nothing makes a faith believable to a teenager faster than watching a grown man or woman repent without being forced.

He also needs to see what it costs when you mean it. Read what Jim Caviezel said about standing firm even when it costs you, and talk about it at supper. Boys don't want a faith that's free. They want one worth giving something for.

What to skip

• Don't hand him to the youth pastor. A good youth pastor helps, but this question was asked to you.
• Don't schedule a lecture. The best talks happen in the truck, at the fence line, doing dishes.
• Don't raise your voice. You can't shout somebody into trusting God.
• Don't promise that asking leads to a tidy answer by Friday. Sometimes it takes years.

And don't mistake your authority for a gift you can pass on. Proverbs tells us to train up a child in the way he should go, and the principle holds. But God has no grandchildren. Each son has to bow his own knee, and you can't do it for him.

You can do plenty. Pray for him by name. Keep the table open. Keep showing up at church on the Sundays you're tired. Keep reading the Book where he can see it.

He asked you because you're the one he's watching. Give him an honest answer tonight, and then spend the next ten years making it believable.