[As a result of a survey of some 3,000 teens]… These teens believe in a combination of works-righteousness, religion as psychological well-being, and a distant, non interfering god.  Ironically, many of these young deists are active in their churches… It is important for every Christian parent to discern MTD from Christianity.  A child can be compliant and well-behaved, attend Sunday worship, and socialize with the church youth group, but merely possess MTD. (Page 27).

Sociologist Mark Regnerus in his book Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers exposes the the failure of evangelical homes to discern and mold their children’s spiritual values.  The author points out that evangelical teenagers are just as sexually active as their non-Christian friends.  In fact, there is evidence that evangelical teenagers on the whole may be more sexually active.  Those who identify themselves as evangelical teens tend to have their first sexual encounter at a younger age, 16.3 years, than liberal Protestants, who tend to lose their virginity at 16.7 years.  And young evangelicals are far more likely to have had three or more sexual partners (13.7 percent) than non-evangelicals (8.9 percent).  What about abstinence pledges?  Those work – for a while – delaying sex on an average by about eighteen months, with 88 percent of pledgers eventually giving up their vow. (Pages 27-28).

Most Christian parents assume that church attendance or youth-group involvement equates to new birth. Parents are naive about new birth and its symptoms. (Page 28).

I know what it means to wrestle with questions of faith. I know what it’s likefor faith to be so mixed up with family tradition that it’s hard to distinguishbetween a genuine knowledge of God and comfort in a familiar way of life.

I grew up in an evangelical Christian family.  One that was on the more conservative end of the spectrum. I’m the oldest of seven children.  Our parentshomeschooled us, raised us without television, and believed that old fashioned courtship was better than modern dating.  Friends in our neighborhood probably thought our family was Amish, but that’s only because they didn’t know some of the really conservative Christian home school families.  The truth was that our family was more culturally liberalthan many homeschoolers.  We watched movies, could listen to rock music (as long as it was Christian or the Beatles), and were allowed to have StarWars and Transformers toys.

But even so, during high school I bucked my parents’ restrictions.  That’s not to say my spiritual waywardness was very shocking.  I doubt Amish kids would be impressed by my teenage dabbling in worldly pleasure.  I never did drugs.  Never got drunk.  The worst things I ever did were to steal porn magazines, sneak out of the house at night with a kid from church, and date various girls behind my parents’ backs.  Although my rebellion was tame in comparison, it was never virtue that held me back from sin.  It was lackof opportunity.  I shudder to think what I would have done with a parent sanctioned season of rumspringa.

The bottom line is that my parents’ faith wasn’t really my faith.  I knew how to work the system, I knew the Christian lingo, but my heart wasn’t in it.  My heart was set on enjoying the moment.

Recently a friend of mine met someone who knew me in early highschool.  “What did she remember about me?” I asked.

“She said you were girl crazy, full of yourself, and immature,” my friend told me.

Yeah, she knew me, I thought.  It wasn’t nice to hear, but I couldn’t argue.  I didn’t know or fear God.  I didn’t have any driving desire to know him.

For me, the Christian faith was more about a set of moral standards thanbelief and trust in Jesus Christ.

During my early twenties I went through a phase of blaming the church I had attended in high school for all my spiritual deficiencies.  Evangelical mega churches make good punching bags.

My reasoning went something like this: I was spiritually shallow because the pastors’ teaching had been shallow.  I wasn’t fully engaged because they hadn’t done enough to grab my attention.  I was a hypocrite because everyone else had been a hypocrite.  I didn’t know God because they hadn’t provided enough programs.  Or they hadn’t provided the right programs.  Or maybe they’d had too many programs.

All I knew was that it was someone else’s fault.

Blaming the church for our problems is second only to the popular and easy course of blaming our parents for everything that’s wrong with us.  But the older I get, the less I do of both.  I hope that’s partly due to the wisdom that comes with age.  But I’m sure it’s also because I am now both a parentand a pastor.  Suddenly I have a lot more sympathy for my dad and mom and the pastors at my old church.  Funny how that works, isn’t it?

At the church where I now pastor (which I love), some young adults remind me of myself when I was in high school.  They are church kids who know so much about Christian religion and yet so little about God.  Some are passive, completely ambivalent toward spiritual things. Others are actively straying from their faith—ticked off about their parents’ authority, bitter over a rule or guideline, and counting the minutes until they turn eighteen and can disappear.  Others aren’t going anywhere, but they stay just to go through the motions.  For them, church is a social group.

It’s strange being on the other side now.  When I pray for specific young men and women who are wandering from God, when I stand to preach and feel powerless to change a single heart, when I sit and counsel people and it seems nothing I can say will draw them away from sin, I remember the pastors from my teenage years.  I realize they must have felt like this too.  They must have prayed and cried over me.  They must have labored over sermons with students like me in mind.

I see now that they were doing the best they knew how.  But a lot of thetime, I wasn’t listening.

During high school I spent most Sunday sermons doodling, passing notes, checking out girls, and wishing I were two years older and five inches taller so a redhead named Jenny would stop thinking of me as her “little brother.”  That never happened.

I mostly floated through grown-up church. Like a lot of teenagers in evangelical churches, I found my sense of identity and community in the parallel universe of the youth ministry.  Our youth group was geared to being loud, fast paced, and fun.  It was modeled on the massive and influential, seeker-sensitive Willow Creek Community Church located outside Chicago.  The goal was simple: put on a show, get kids in the building, and let them see that Christians are cool, thus Jesus is cool.  We had to prove that being a Christian is, contrary to popular opinion and even a few annoying passages of the Bible, loads of fun.  Admittedly it’s not as much fun as partying and having sex but pretty fun nonetheless.

Every Wednesday night our group of four-hundred-plus students divided into teams.  We competed against each other in games and won points by bringing guests.  As a homeschooler, of course I was completely worthless in the “bring friends from school” category.  So I tried to make up for that byworking on the drama and video team.  My buddy Matt and I wrote, performed, and directed skits to complement our youth pastor’s messages.  Unfortunately, our idea of complementing was to deliver skits that were not even remotely connected to the message.  The fact that Matt was a Brad Pitt look-alike assured that our skits were well received (at least by the girls).

The high point of my youth-group performing career came when the pastor found out I could dance and asked me to do a Michael Jackson impersonation.  The album Bad had just come out.  I bought it, learned all the dance moves, and then when I performed—how do I say this humbly?—I blew everyone away.  I was bad (and I mean that in the good sense of theword bad ).  The crowd went absolutely nuts.  The music pulsed, and girlswere screaming and grabbing at me in mock adulation as I moon walked and lip-synced my way through one of the most inane pop songs ever written.  I loved every minute of it.

Looking back, I’m not real proud of that performance.  I would feel better about my bad moment if the sermon that night had been about the depravity of man or something else that was even slightly related.  But there was no connection.  It had nothing to do with anything.

For me, dancing like Michael Jackson that night has come to embody my experience in a big, evangelical, seeker-oriented youth group.  It was fun, itwas entertaining, it was culturally savvy (at the time), and it had very little to do with God.  Sad to say, I spent more time studying Michael’s dance moves for that drama assignment than I was ever asked to invest in studying about God.

Of course, this was primarily my own fault.  I was doing what I wanted to do.  There were other kids in the youth group who were more mature and who grew more spiritually during their youth-group stint.  And I don’t doubt the good intentions of my youth pastor.  He was trying to strike the balance between getting kids to attend and teaching them.

Maybe I wouldn’t have been interested in youth group if it hadn’t beenpackaged in fun and games and a good band.  But I still wish someone had expected more of me—of all of us.

Would I have listened?  I can’t know.  But I do know that a clear vision of God and the power of his Word and the purpose of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection were lost on me in the midst of all the flash and fun.

When we talk about knowledge of God, we’re talking about theology.  Simply put, theology is the study of the nature of God—who he is and how he thinks and acts.  But theology isn’t high on many people’s list of daily concerns.

My friend Curtis says that most people today think only of themselves.He calls this “me-ology.”  I guess that’s true.  I know it was true of me and stillcan be.  It’s a lot easier to be an expert on what I think and feel and want than to give myself to knowing an invisible, universe-creating God.

Others view theology as something only scholars or pastors should worry about.  I used to think that way.  I viewed theology as an excuse for all the intellectual types in the world to add homework to Christianity.

But I’ve learned that this isn’t the case.  Theology isn’t for a certain group of people.  In fact, it’s impossible for anyone to escape theology. It’s everywhere.  All of us are constantly “doing” theology.  In other words, all of us have some idea or opinion about what God is like.  Oprah does theology.  The person who says, “I can’t believe in a God who sends people to hell” is doing theology.

We all have some level of knowledge.  This knowledge can be much or little, informed or uninformed, true or false, but we all have some concept of God (even if it’s that he doesn’t exist).  And we all base our lives on what we think God is like.

So when I was spinning around like Michael Jackson at youth group, Iwas a theologian.  Even though I wasn’t paying attention in church.  Even though I wasn’t very concerned with Jesus or pleasing him. Even though I was more preoccupied with my girlfriend and with being popular.  Granted I was a really bad theologian—my thoughts about God were unclear and often ignorant.  But I had a concept of God that directed how I lived.

I’ve come to learn that theology matters.  And it matters not because we want a good grade on a test but because what we know about God shapes the way we think and live.  What you believe about God’s nature—what he is like, what he wants from you, and whether or not you will answer tohim—affects every part of your life.

Theology matters, because if we get it wrong, then our whole life will be wrong.

For many people, words like theology, doctrine, and orthodoxy are almost completely meaningless.  Maybe they’re unappealing, even repellent.

Theology sounds stuffy.

Doctrine is something unkind people fight over.

And orthodoxy?  Many Christians would have trouble saying what it is other than it calls to mind images of musty churches guarded by old men with comb-overs who hush and scold.

I can relate to that perspective.  I’ve been there.  But I’ve also discovered that my prejudice, my “theology allergy,” was unfounded.

This book is the story of how I first glimpsed the beauty of Christian theology.  These pages hold the journal entries of my own spiritual journey—a journey that led to the realization that sound doctrine is at the center of loving Jesus with passion and authenticity.  I want to share how I learned that orthodoxy isn’t just for old men but is for anyone who longs to behold a God who is bigger and more real and glorious than the human mind can imagine.

The irony of my story—and I suppose it often works this way—is that the very things I needed, even longed for in my relationship with God, were wrapped up in the very things I was so sure could do me no good.  I didn’t understand that such seemingly worn-out words as theology, doctrine, and orthodoxy were the pathway to the mysterious, awe-filled experience of truly knowing the living Jesus Christ.

They told the story of the Person I longed to know.

“More than forty years of quadriplegia has underscored to me the matchless value of knowing—really knowing—the doctrines of the Christian faith.  Dug Down Deep reveals how biblical doctrine provides a pathway to understanding the heart and mind of God.  If you’re looking for ‘that one book’ that will push you farther down the road to faith than you’ve ever journeyed before, Dug Down Deep is it. I highly recommend it!”— JONI EARECKSON TADA, author; founder and CEO, International Disability Center, Agoura Hills, CA

“In Dug Down Deep my longtime friend Joshua Harris explains the basics of Christian theology in a way all of us can understand.  He is a humble manand teaches humbly.  If you are tired of hyped promises and want essential truth, this book is for you.  As religious fads come and go, the truths in this book will last.”— DONALD MILLER, author of Blue Like Jazz

“When the apostle Peter says, “Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God…casting all your anxiety on Him,” he implies that humble people are fearless.  They have the courage to stand up for truth humbly.  I love the term “humble orthodoxy.”  And I love Josh Harris.  When they come together (Joshand humble orthodoxy), as they do in this book, you get a humble, helpful, courageous testimony to biblical truth.  Thank you, Josh, for following through so well on the conversation in Al Mohler’s study.”— JOHN PIPER, author of Desiring God; Pastor for Preaching and Vision, Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis

“Via vivid autobiography, Pastor Harris takes readers on a personal journey into the biblical theology that, belatedly, he found he could not manage without.  A humbling, compelling, invigorating read.”— J. I. PACKER, author of Knowing God

“Josh says that this book is his ‘reveling in theology in my own simple way.’  Having read it, I can say that it is also a popular defense of the importance of theology and, at the same time, an introduction to it.  I enjoyed reading it.  And my mind immediately began to go to how I could use this book.  Josh has given me a new tool!  It is interesting, well written, and excellently illustrated.  Josh has succeeded again in giving us a book that is clear, engaging, direct, solid, easy to read, sound, God centered, balanced, humorous—and it even has pictures!”— MARK DEVER, author; Senior Pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington DC

“Dug Down Deep is an incredible book!  It’s a tangible and incarnate look at theology.  I would give it to any young Christian who wants to understand their faith.”— LECRAE, hip-hop artist

“As two young guys who have been deeply blessed and influenced by Josh’s books and example, we couldn’t be more excited about Dug Down Deep and how God is going to use it to transform a generation.  It’s a gripping and honest read. In it we learned things about our older brother that we had never, in twenty-one years, been told before!  But more importantly, we learned things about our Savior that caused us to fall more deeply in love with him and his Word.  Get this book.  Read it.  And join us on a journey to rediscover what has always been true.”— ALEX AND BRETT HARRIS, authors of Do Hard Things

“At Boundless, we’ve enjoyed watching young adults cultivate a fresh desire to go ‘further up and further in’ as followers of Christ.  Few writers fuel that desire quite like Joshua Harris.  With humility, humor, and honesty, Dug Down Deep shows the difference that a foundation can make—how vulnerable you can be when it’s weak and how transformed you can be when you’rewilling to go deep.”— TED SLATER, editor, Boundless.org; Focus on the Family