You may have been infected with a virus and not even realize it. The virus is made up of dangerous ideas—ideas that don’t reflect Jesus and biblical living and it’s spreading across America.

Summit Ministries President Dr. Jeff Myers warns us about the battle for ideas in culture and offers strategies to strengthen our faith. He reflects on a time in his life when he first discovered that a virus was infecting his mind and heart.

“I was personally influenced most by a secular worldview I would say; the idea that God is not relevant to what’s happening in the world. For much of my life, that’s the one that plagued me.”

Although we don’t have much control over the virus itself, Jeff says that we can certainly immunize ourselves. He shares from his personal experience and thought process behind writing his book .

The way you immunize against viruses is looking at them in the right context. For example, I looked at a big question like, why do I hurt? I wrote this book in a time of great personal pain and as a result of the difficult things that happened, I had really sunk into a depression. I wanted to know, why do I hurt? Why is there this pain in my life?”

Jeff looked at a variety of worldviews to see if any of them could properly address the topic of pain and suffering.

“The new spiritualists worldview says that pain is not real; pain is an illusion because the whole physical world is an illusion. Well that didn’t help me.”

“The secular worldview says that pain is just the way it is. Richard Dawkins famously said in his book The Blind Watchmaker, ‘In a world of blind physical forces and genetic replications, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and there is no rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. D.N.A. neither knows nor cares. D.N.A. just is and we dance to its music.’ Well that didn’t help me either.”

After studying all of the influences of those ideas, Jeff still hadn’t found any answers to his questions – until he looked into the Christian worldview.

“Jesus says, ‘In this world you will have trouble, but take heart I have overcome the world’ (John 16:33). That idea of overcoming is that Jesus, through His death and resurrection, has removed from evil its ability to destroy what is most important about us. Just like the dawning of a new day, His hope is coming alive in our hearts more and more as we have the mind of Christ.”

“Jesus says, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (Matthew 6:11) and in a time of great personal pain, every day I had to grasp onto that. I remember every single morning meditating on Lamentations 3:22-23 that says, ‘Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His mercies are new every morning and His faithfulness is great.’”

“I found myself thinking, I can’t make it another year; I can’t imagine going through the rest of my life like this. It was as if Jesus, through that passage would say, ‘Let’s not do the rest of your life, let’s do today.’”

He finally found the answer that he was looking for through a relationship with Jesus Christ.

God is not interested in ending our pain, as much as He is interested in growing our dependence on Him. That turned out to be the answer to the question, why do I hurt? When other worldviews simply didn’t. If you get a little bit of those bad ideas in the context of the truth, then you can realize how shallow, insubstantial, anemic, and shriveled they really are, and the truth of Jesus shines even brighter.”

As Christians, it’s important to build up our immunity with God’s truth, so that we will be able to identify the signs and symptoms of dangerous ideas that are trying to infect our lives. 


Over the last twenty years, Dr. Jeff Myers has become one of America’s most respected authorities on Christian worldview, apologetics, and youth leadership development. He is the author of several books and is the president of Summit Ministries.

Overcoming the outbreak