“Can my friend on Meth still go to heaven?”

Steve Brown:
Can my friend on Meth still go to heaven? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
If you think laughter isn’t spiritual, or that faithfulness to God means conformity to Christian stereotypes, then this program probably isn’t for you. But if you’re looking for honest, Biblical answers to hard questions, then welcome to Key Life. Here’s our host, author, and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey, how you doing?

Steve Brown:
I’m doing really good, as a matter of fact. And now better, since you’re here. So, I’m doing great.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, we’re not doing Meth. We’re not, you know, we’re not doing that.

Steve Brown:
No, we’re not. I think maybe we’re going to say it’s possible to go to heaven, but you can’t bring your pipe with you. But we’ll see. Pete, as you know, comes in every week on Friday, we’ve been doing this for years and years, long before some of you have ever been born. And we spend time answering questions and we love to do that. By the way, go to ForgeTruth.com great podcast there and great teaching and solid as a rock. And it’s life changing. You ought to check it out. If you’re a guy, you might want to be a part of one of the many Forge groups that meet in the morning and you can find out how to do that by going to ForgeTruth.com We love your questions and we enjoy this time. You can ask a question anytime you want to by going to 1-800-KEY-LIFE and follow instructions. Sometimes we’ll put your voice on the air. Or you can send your question to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
Maitland, Florida 32794

in Canada, it’s

Key Life Canada
P.O. Box 28060
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6J8

or you can e-mail your question to [email protected] and if you can help us financially, please do. I promise we’ll be as faithful with your gift as you were in giving it. We’ll squeeze every dime for the glory of God. If you can’t, we understand, say a prayer for this ministry. Pete, why don’t you pray for us and then we’ll get to some of these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
You got it. Let’s pray together. Oh, Our Great God, what a joy it is to be your children, to come into your presence now just for a couple of minutes and to lift you up high and holy and lifted up as our great God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we praise you for the fact that you are infinite and immortal, that you are Spirit. And yet you understand us. You’re our Creator, our Redeemer, our Protector, Provider. Oh, Lord God, we honor you. And we thank you for such a great salvation that we have in Christ. And Lord, you know us and you know at the end of this week, we still need you big time. We know you’ve been in charge all week and yet this week-end, we need to rest in you, relax in you, and worship in you as well. So, we pray for church this week-end and Lord help us to get there in person and help our pastors and teachers and priests and leaders, worship directors, all those that will sacrifice to make it possible for us to hear your word, to bring praise and honor and glory to you. And be lifted up in a powerful way in our lives, Lord Jesus. And now, we ask during this time of Q&A that you would use it, answer the questions we have, develop our minds and our hearts. In your holy name we pray. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Well, let’s go to our phone lines.

Caller 1:
I have a friend, and she loves the Lord like I do, and she reads her Bible, she feels close to God. The only issue I have with her is, she’s trying to get off Meth, and I’m trying to help her. And she thinks that she’s still going to go to heaven, even though she’s been saved. Doesn’t she really need to be walking in the Lord’s steps, God, in order to do that?

Steve Brown:
I appreciate your concern for your friend. Do we, can we go to heaven and be a sinner? Well, of course. One of the guys early in my ministry, and I wish I could remember his name, he had a radio show for a long time. He was the manager of a Beatles band at that time and was well known. And he said that he was on drugs when Jesus found him. And he gave a testimony about that time, and he said, The thing I’m so thankful about is they didn’t tell me to get off the drugs. They told me to run to Jesus. And he said, I finally got off drugs, but it took almost two years. And yeah, your friend can go to heaven, and as I said, you can’t bring your pipe, but you can go to heaven. If you’re going smoke Meth, you probably can’t do that in heaven. And your friend knows that, and has assurance. There are, every one of us have besetting sins that we struggle with. I mean, every one of us, Erik Guzman, who’s still our friend, but used to work here on the staff, used to say you hear a lot of fat preachers yelling at gay guys, but very few gay guys yelling at fat preachers. Well we forget that gluttony is a sin too. So, if you’re overweight, can you go to heaven? What if you struggle with anger? What if you, what if you have a lust problem? What if you, well, it goes on and on. We’re getting better, but that’s a process, isn’t it, Pete?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, I like the way you put that. And you know, if it sounds like her friend is really trying to get off. You know, so it sounds like she’s going in the right direction. And that’s the goal, right? Jesus progressively changes us in a moment, in a twinkling in an eye, we’re his. But the process of sanctification takes a long time and some issues are longer than others.

Steve Brown:
And C.S. Lewis used to talk about conversion being turning around on a road and depending on where you were on the road when you turned around, what seems pleasing to man and to God, it’ll be different for different people. He said that if, well I said, taking what Lewis said, that you may, when you become a Christian, be a really angry person, and you smiled at one person that day. Well, God is more pleased with you than with me if I’m a people person, and I smiled at a lot of people. So, you know, we’re all at different places, and we’ve got to be careful about judging where somebody else is, cause some people are straight, you don’t, you never know when a Christian has sinned. Two things, you don’t know how hard they tried not to sin. And you don’t know the forces that were arrayed against them that caused them to sin.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s true. That’s true. And with this kind of a physical addiction, it’s even harder to get away from even, you know, nicotine is very difficult to get away from, alcohol very difficult. I had a friend, that I met with recently who all external stuff aside, looks like, this guy’s got it together. And yet he struggles with his identity in Christ. And so, it’s not a physical substance. He feels bad about himself and he knows the gospel and that’s going to take even more time to turn around. So, there are spiritual issues as well as some of these chemical or physical issues that we face. Keep fighting and keep walking in the same direction of the Lord.

Steve Brown:
And those who he chooses will be in heaven.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
No matter.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
All right, this is an e-mail, Pete. What do you think about public confession? I assume this is a confession of sins and not a confession of your faith.

Pete Alwinson:
Right, probably. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Probably.

Pete Alwinson:
I love public confession, as long as it’s yours.

Steve Brown:
You know, sometimes it’s inappropriate, isn’t it?

Pete Alwinson:
It can be. It can be, depending on where, because it can draw attention to yourself. On the other hand, we just had Nate Larkin, who you know, Samson.

Steve Brown:
Where was I with him?

Pete Alwinson:
I don’t know. Recently, you were.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, recently I was with him.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, cause he was down here in Orlando. We had him speak at Forge and it was one of our best, you know, best sessions, because his authenticity is grace based.

Steve Brown:
Blows you away.

Pete Alwinson:
And it really helps the guy say, alright, I’ve got to deal with it too. And, I’ve got to face it. So, I think it can be very good, and in the right time, right place.

Steve Brown:
And his, and he does it in a way that’s not, I remember one time I used to be on the board of a ministry that deals with sexual brokenness. And Eric MeTaxas was the speaker that evening, my friend, and I like him a lot. And Eric, and during the testimony time, a man got up. And confessed his sin with his family sitting there and Eric went, but he didn’t, to me later, he was really said that was inappropriate and he was probably right. We got to be careful. We really do. We do, the Scripture says, confess your sins to one another. And that’s true. It doesn’t say confess your sins to the world or be detailed about your sins or to bask in your sins. Or to, so you don’t feel so guilty to tell everybody, because there’s some things that are appropriate and sometimes they’re not. And you need to be very careful about it.

Pete Alwinson:
I think that’s true. Our denomination says, public sins need to be repented of publicly.

Steve Brown:
There you go.

Pete Alwinson:
Private sins need to be repented of privately.

Steve Brown:
That’s a good admonishment about dealing with that. Is there demon possession? This is an e-mail too, let’s see how much time we have.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, I think there still is today and was it C. S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton who said.

Of course, there’s demon possession and Satan is alive and well, I know because I’ve done business with him.

Steve Brown:
That was probably Chesterton. C.S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters said.

Our danger is we don’t believe at all in Satan and the other is we believe in demons under every bed.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. And I’ve been in situations, you probably have too, where we felt just this heavy presence of evil and it’s a hard, hard to nail down, with an individual except, like in the gospels. You don’t see those kinds of situations like the gathering demoniac as much, but they’re out there.

Steve Brown:
It exists. I encountered that in the Philippines. I spoke at an old church up in the mountains, and there was, and the place was absolutely packed. People were standing outside looking. And I said, man, this is cool. You must be having revival. Pastor said, no, we had some occult people deal with somebody that had demon, that was demon possessed. And they couldn’t fix it. But our elders prayed for him, and he was free.

Pete Alwinson:
Wow.

Steve Brown:
And that caused the whole village to come to our church.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s so cool.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it really is. Yeah, it still exists.

But greater is he who is in you.

And I didn’t say this, John said it.

Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.

Talking about Satan. Got to go. Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.