“A family member is transitioning. What am I going to do?”

Steve Brown:
A family member is transitioning. What am I going to do? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
This is Key Life, dedicated to the message that the only people who get any better are those who know that if they don’t get any better, God will still love them anyway. That teaching raises a lot of questions, so here’s author and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth with answers from the Bible that will make you free.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey, good to see you.

Steve Brown:
Good to see you, too. You doing well?

Pete Alwinson:
Doing well. Better than I deserve, for sure.

Steve Brown:
Oh, you know who first said that?

Pete Alwinson:
I think it was DeMoss.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it was. It was Art DeMoss. I heard him say it. I never heard anybody say that. Now, everybody says that.

Pete Alwinson:
I know.

Steve Brown:
Because it’s so true. Well, that is Pete Alwinson. The ministry, the men’s ministry that is growing like weeds in Central Florida and in other places in the country is called FORGE. And if you want to know about it, go to ForgeTruth.com and if you haven’t read Pete’s book, Like Father Like Son, get it. It would be a tremendous gift to the men in your life. And it would be good for you if you’re not a man. If you’re a lady, you’ll learn a lot from it too. Pete, as you know, comes in and we answer questions on Fridays. Love to get your questions. You can send them 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 it to [email protected] or pick up the phone, 24 7, and dial 1-800-KEY-LIFE and follow instructions. Record your question, and sometimes we’ll put it on the air. And by the way, we take you and your questions seriously, and I really mean that. If you can help us financially, those are the places you could do it. If you do, we’ll rise up and call you blessed. If you don’t, and you pray for us, we’ll rise up and call you blessed. If you can help, if you can’t, pray for us. And Pete, you pray for us and we’ll answer questions.

Pete Alwinson:
Alright. Our Holy God, what a privilege to pause just for a minute and to come into your presence. And as we think about this week, Lord, we stop and we recognize that so much more is going on around us than we even know. We know there’s a spiritual realm, an emotional realm, financial, physical. Lord, we need you in every aspect of our life. So, as we think about you and your goodness and your grace and your mercy and your power, that you are a God who plans, you’re a God who controls, a God who loves. We’ve come to you, and we thank you, Jesus, for being the one who did everything that we need to be in a relationship with our Father in heaven and with you. And so, we ask that you would be glorified. But Lord, open our hearts, give us a bigger, incredible picture of who you are. And that we would trust you more, even with the problems and the challenges that we face. And even as we deal with Q&A and questions today, Lord, we have so many questions because we control so little and we know so little. We ask for your power and your wisdom, even as we do these things now. But be with our leaders this week-end as they gear up for worship. Give them your power and your presence to draw them to you that we too would be drawn to you through this week’s worship. Commit this time of Q and a now, in Jesus’ Holy Name. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Okay. Let’s go to our phone lines.

Caller 1:
My daughter has married a man, and now he’s changing to be a woman. We have someone in our church whose son is doing the same thing, but he has gone into the women’s bathroom. We’ve told them it’s not Biblical. They need to talk to us about what they see. I know Jesus loves them. How are we in the church supposed to handle when somebody is seeking, is lost? My daughter and her husband have totally denied Christ. So, this movement is taking those away. Yet, these people were trying. And now, they’ll probably leave our church.

Steve Brown:
Oh man. Hard place to be. You know, the answer to your question is simple. You never compromise truth and you love. You know, we’re living in a culture, and you’re experiencing in your family and in your church, the transitioning in terms of sexual identity. And, it’s unconscionable, it’s wrong, it’s clearly not Biblical and I think we’ve got to say that. And the hard thing is to say that without sounding like, and you’re going to hell and I’m glad, kind of stuff. We simply should be saddened. We ought to shed tears because the stories of people who have transitioned, and there are thousands of those, who have transitioned, is not pretty. The suicide rate goes through the roof. The depression and the need for medication. And we are, in fact, in our culture, mutilating children. Can you believe that? I mean, I wouldn’t have even thought this five years ago. So, what do Christians do? Christians do what they’ve always done. We speak truth. And we love. And it’s hard to put that together, because when I, talking about it right now makes me want to spit, I’m so angry. And I’ve got to stop that, and Jesus has got to fix it, because the people who are there are just like you. They’re sinners. They’re sinners who have sinned, and that’s why Jesus died. And it’s just, it’s a different sin we haven’t encountered in a long time, if ever in our culture. But it is nevertheless still sin, and you don’t go as somebody who’s not a sinner to somebody who is. There aren’t no people around like that, because we all are. Ask God to give you love, but don’t you dare compromise the truth or you’ll get the hives.

Pete Alwinson:
You know, that really is a good balance. And we see who Jesus is and was, full of grace and truth. And that’s what we have to be to people. We have to be Jesus to people. But when Jesus confronted error, he was uncompromising. And was seen to be wrong, and that’s one reason why they wanted him out of the way. So, they will always try to sideline us as being unloving and unkind. When we really do care that people are doing things that are sinful, but they’re harmful for themselves and to others.

Steve Brown:
Oh, so true. So true. Crying when you speak truth is not a bad thing to do.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. Show them your heart.

Steve Brown:
Well, that’s what happened with Jesus. When he looked over Jerusalem, that was a bad place. They were doing some, in fact, he went down and kicked posteriors in the temple. I mean, he overturned the money changers. So, he was not a wuss. But when he looked out over Jerusalem, he wept. And he said, how often I would have come to you as a mother chicken would come to her chicks. And the tears were shed so pray, God, enable me to weep where you do.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, I think this is so important instead of getting angry, we ought to let that anger lead us to sadness and weep for them and then confront where we can. I mean, there are some systemic issues that some people have power to deal with in government and in the medical community that are aiding and abetting horrible practices.

Steve Brown:
For money.

Pete Alwinson:
For money.

Steve Brown:
They know.

Pete Alwinson:
Clearly.

Steve Brown:
They know what they’re doing. They’re doing it out of greed.

Pete Alwinson:
I want to say this from a pastoral standpoint is that a church and I listened to messages by one church that faced this of a man that showed up in a dress and they were very kind, very loving. He came week after week, but they finally, after a few weeks, took him aside and said, now we want you to know we’re glad you’re here and we want you to continue to come. We’d like to be your friends and get to know you better, but when it comes to the bathrooms, you must go into a men’s bathroom.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. That’s good.

Pete Alwinson:
And then, and then they actually escorted him. And when he tried to go into a women’s bathroom, they stopped him. And so, you have to, you have to do these things.

Steve Brown:
And those situations where we’re involved, where we touch it, we dare not compromise.

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

Steve Brown:
We just can’t, you know, it’s not that we don’t want to, and people won’t like us because we do it.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
But listen, deal with it.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Do it anyway. But do it kindly and ask to get that from Jesus.

Pete Alwinson:
Absolutely.

Steve Brown:
Oh man. That’s a hard place to be. What does the Bible say about purgatory?

Pete Alwinson:
It doesn’t.

Steve Brown:
Well, yeah, it does. In that Corinthian passage, C. S. Lewis says it’s a Protestant purgatory. Where all the woods, hay, and straw, and stubbles burned up, and the only thing left is Jesus. And where it’s burned up is purgatory, a Protestant purgatory. No, that’s a doctrine that’s held, mainly by Roman Catholic, an intermediate state between heaven and where you are. And as Protestants, we don’t buy into that, but we understand there is a fire and you’re going to smell like smoke. So, maybe there is a purging, but it’s maybe different than is taught there.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it and in one of the books of Maccabees, there’s a reference to purgation and that’s where they get it. But you know, the great thing is that Jesus endured the hellfire of separation from God for us that we would not need to. And so, there is a lot of times the apostle Paul and others say, test me, test yourself and that Lord, do burn out the sin in our lives. And I think it’s that kind of purgation is needed every day. And what if the church, what if all of us were more repentant, more allowing the Holy Spirit to clean out the dross. Perhaps He could use us in a more powerful way and we’d hear His voice more clearly.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. Well said. And you know, I’m an old guy cramming for finals. I don’t know if I want to go home smelling like this. I used to say to seminary students, you haven’t sinned big enough and lived long enough to even have an opinion about that. And there’s some truth to that. You know, over the years, I look back and wince at some of the plans. I hope that gets fixed. And maybe it will. Maybe there’s a purging fire that will make it better when I go into the throne room, who knows? But I tell you one thing I do know, it’s time for us to get out of here. We could sing a chorus, but we don’t even have time to do that. So, I must say Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.