“Can I sell my medications to my friends?”

Steve Brown:
Can I sell my medications to my friends? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Pete Alwinson:
Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of Jesus in the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and sufferers. Life’s hard for everyone, so grace is for all of us. But there is a lot of confusion about how grace applies to real life, so here’s seminary professor and author Steve Brown and Pete Alwinson to answer your questions.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete. How are you?

Pete Alwinson:
I’m doing great.

Steve Brown:
I can hardly wait to get to that question.

Pete Alwinson:
I know man. That’s going to be fun.

Steve Brown:
And the question is, is it okay to be a drug pusher? Yeah. Probably. Well, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Pete Alwinson comes in, if you haven’t read Like Father Like Son, you ought to get that book. It’s a life changer. It’s mainly written to men, but it’ll help you if you’re of the fairer sex and haven’t identified with the other. You’ll get a lot out of it from the Bible, who God is, how he’s defined as Father. And you’ll learn a lot about your boyfriend or your husband. So, get it, Like Father Like Son by Pete Alwinson. You can get it wherever good books are sold. And if you haven’t yet, check out ForgeTruth.com Pete, as you know, comes in every Friday, and we spend Friday’s broadcast answering the questions that you have asked. And we love your questions. And we love sitting around talking about them. You can ask a question by calling 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 7, follow the instructions, record your question, and we sometimes put those 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 by the way, if you can help us financially, we would appreciate it very much, and we’ll be faithful with your gift. Just so you know, we’re a member of ECFA in the States and CCCC and Canada. Those organizations oversee us to make sure we’re ethical. But we were ethical before they came along. But you can trust that we’ll use your gift and be as faithful with it as you were in giving it. And if you can’t, we get that too, don’t we Pete?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, man. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Hey, why don’t you lead us in prayer and we’ll get to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
You’ve got it. You’ve got it. Our Great God, what a joy to stop just for a minute, and to thank you for how good you are, glorious and wonderful, kind, merciful. And we worship you, Lord, and we give you praise and honor. It’s been a long week and a lot has happened. A lot happens every week. And so, we pray for your peace, we pray for wisdom, we pray for strength, perspective. We pray, that you would enable us to worship you this week-end. Lord, we need that, we need to pull away, we need to get into your presence, we need to give you our anxieties and focus upon how big and glorious you are. And so, Lord, prepare that time. Be with our leaders now, even, as they’re putting the finishing touches on the worship services, our worship directors, our pastors, our priests. All those who lead and serve, Lord, may we show up and be there and we pray that you would meet us at the very point of our need and bring the gospel to clarity in our life. We give you honor and praise, even in this time of Q&A now. We commit it to you in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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

Caller 1:
If it’s a sin to smoke, I use these things with nicotine in them just to quit smoking. Would that keep me from going to heaven? And also, is it a sin to sell your medication and get money?

Steve Brown:
Well, first, no. You’re not going to hell because you smoke. How often do we have to say, by faith in Christ, alone, period, zippo, nothing else. That’s it. Man, you start adding a list of things that you can’t do and go to heaven, you’re going to go crazy. I mean, that means no fat person can go to heaven and I’m overweight. And I don’t like even thinking about that. And so, so no, not, can you sell your medications to your friends? What do you think about that?

Pete Alwinson:
Well, you know, I mean, I’ve got some vitamins I want to sell you at five bucks a pop right now, Steve. You know, I mean, no, if you’re selling illegal drugs and that’s what we’re talking about is those pain meds, oxycontin, oxycodone, that kind of stuff, you know. No, you know, just you keep it from, in fact, I do think we have to watch what we keep in our medicine cabinets when people are coming over. That happened early when I was a pastor, we had a young lady in the church who was, who came in and stole something that we had there and she got, she’s an addict, you know, so you got to be careful.

Steve Brown:
Man, we have an awful situation in this country and you know there are a lot to be said about the borders of our nation, but maybe the most important and the most deadly is the way the drugs are coming from China and from, through Mexico. And through other countries, enough to kill every man, woman, and child in America. And somebody needs to do something about that. And there are reasons for pain medication. We’re not suggesting that if your doctor prescribes that to you, that you shouldn’t use it, but even then you should be careful.

Pete Alwinson:
You really should. You know, when we started our church years ago, Steve, we had two pharmacists in them. And I noticed that both of the pharmacists, wouldn’t even take anything, even when they had a headache and I go, come on, why? Because they knew there was always side effects and chemical reactions in some ways to everything you take. And it’s even more complex these days. That made me first aware of being careful what you put into your body. And, you know, hey, listen, we have to be stewards of our body.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, we really do.

Pete Alwinson:
And we even need to be discerning with our docs.

Steve Brown:
I was going to say, in answer to that particular question, no, you can’t be a drug pusher, but if you have a friend in need, you could give them. No, you can’t do that either because of what Pete just said.

Pete Alwinson:
You’ve got to be careful.

Steve Brown:
All right. This is an e-mail, Pete. How do I love God? I have accepted Jesus as my Savior, and I’ve been a Christian for many years, but I really don’t appreciate the love that I hear other believers talk about.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, I really thank them for that authentic, I bet that’s more prevalent than people know in the church.

Steve Brown:
Oh, you know it is. And that kind of question, it pleases Jesus, that kind of authenticity. Do you know how you love God more?

Pete Alwinson:
Well, you know.

Steve Brown:
There’s not a thing you can do. You can’t.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s not a work, it’s not by doing more.

Steve Brown:
No, you let him love you.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. How do you, what do you mean by that?

Steve Brown:
I mean, name the ways that he loves you when he shouldn’t. I mean, sit down and do it as a practice. Get out a legal pad, if you’re an old person like me, or get out a file on your computer and just say, what have I got that I didn’t deserve that shows me that God loves me? And you can start with salvation and forgiveness and the mercies that he’s shown and the blessings that he’s shown, name them and thank him for it. And just say, I don’t deserve that. Thank you. And you’ll be surprised what begins to happen when that happens. And it means that every time you do something that shouldn’t be Christian, that a Christian shouldn’t do, before you go ballistic, repent and then say, Jesus, do you love me? And if you can’t find the Scriptures, ask your pastor to tell you. Yes, He loves you as exactly the same as He did before you did that. And beginning to think like that, it’s a redoing of your mind. Instead of always thinking of condemnation and guilt and shame, think of grace and mercy and forgiveness and apply it in every aspect of your life. And you’ll see a change beginning to take place.

Pete Alwinson:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Ask him, ask him to help you see his love for you because still in so many of our churches we need to emphasize the holiness of God that leads us to repentance and yet God uses his power to bring us to salvation. A lot of Christians don’t really believe that God likes them or loves them.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
They really don’t believe it because they think their sins are greater than what Jesus did for us.

Steve Brown:
You know what Jerry Parries, I love this, and I’ve quoted it everywhere, he’s one of our voices. And I love Jerry a lot, and he says.

That you will run out of sin before God runs out of grace.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s good.

Steve Brown:
It is, and it’s a good thing to remember. Okay, this is an e-mail. Did Cain have a wife?

Pete Alwinson:
He had to have, because his line got spread out there. It had to have been a sister, they had to have been wildly procreating in the early days to fulfill God’s commission to populate the world. And so, and the genetics were under God’s sovereignty at that point.

Steve Brown:
It was different. Yeah, It really was. And it was before the law too. And there’s a lot more to be said about that. But one of the things that we’re getting ready to reveal to you, which isn’t in Scripture, And this has never been revealed in the history of the world. The name.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, her name.

Steve Brown:
Gertrude.

Pete Alwinson:
Gertrude. You know, I was wondering what it would be and that’s really a Hebrew name, which means.

Steve Brown:
It means Gertrude.

Pete Alwinson:
It means Gertrude.

Steve Brown:
It means peace. And don’t send us letters. Please try to know the difference when we’re kidding around. We probably ought to say, I’m serious now. We kid so much.

Pete Alwinson:
Sanctified imagination. All right.

Steve Brown:
And this is an e-mail. Do you believe there was death animal before the fall?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. What do you think?

Steve Brown:
You know, I don’t know that has all kinds of overlays to it. I mean, could you, it was, were they vegetarians or not, and we don’t know. There wasn’t anything bad. There wasn’t any cruelty to animals before the fall. Maybe there wasn’t any death.

Pete Alwinson:
Just don’t know.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, when you get home, ask him. And he’ll tell you. Our answer, we don’t know. We’ve got to go. Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.