“Does religion enslave us?”

Steve Brown:
Does religion enslave us? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Welcome to Key Life. Our host and teacher is Steve Brown. He’s nobody’s guru, but he does have honest answers to hard questions about the Bible. God’s grace changes everything. How we love, work, live, lead, marry, parent, evangelize, and worship. Now, here’s Steve and Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth with street-smart Bible teaching for real life.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey! There you are. Here we go. Another Friday, man. Are we going to make this?

Steve Brown:
Of course.

Pete Alwinson:
Okay. All right.

Steve Brown:
But of course, because we don’t have to preach on Sunday. You know, when you were a pastor, you were a lot more uptight when we sat down and did these programs.

Pete Alwinson:
Probably. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Cause you were going for the Sunday and that’s not a fun thing. That’s hard work.

Pete Alwinson:
Every seven days, baby. There it is.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. And you never get rid of it.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
But I’ll tell you, there’s an upside. When it’s over, it’s better than drugs. That’s Pete Alwinson, as I’ve told you, go to ForgeTruth.com there is really a movement that is changing lives there and it’ll blow you away. Growing like weeds in Central Florida and beginning to take root in other places. Go check it out, listen to the podcast, look at some of the videos, read some of the material. ForgeTruth.com and as you know, Pete comes in and we answer questions together and we’ve done this for years and years and years, and we love your questions and we love talking about them. You can send your questions to

Key Life Network
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or you can e-mail your questions to [email protected] or if you’re in a hurry, pick up the phone and dial 1-800-KEY-LIFE and follow instructions. We’ll record your question and sometimes use that on the air, and the only dumb question is the one you don’t ask. 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, and you’ll touch so many other lives. If you can’t help us financially, we understand that. Do say a prayer for this ministry. And Pete, why don’t you pray for us, and we’ll get to some of these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
All right. All right. Our Father, we do come to you today on this Friday, and what a joy it is to stop for just a minute and to recognize that you are the only God, the one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You’ve revealed yourself to us, through what you have made, your wisdom and power, you’ve revealed yourself to us preeminently through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. And by the power of His Spirit in our hearts that has confirmed in us the reality of who you are. And so, we honor you, we praise you and Lord, we know we need you in so many ways. You know that we need your power for the problems that we face, the relationships that need to be restored. Lord, the direction that we need, the bills even that would have to be paid. And Lord, we pray for your direction, your guidance. We pray for our leaders, our country. Oh God, we pray that you’d pour out your Spirit on your church. And in this country, Lord, we pray that you would bring more and more people to faith in Christ. Do that even this week-end, we ask as we go to church, may there be some men and women that come, that for the first time find that they need to bow the knee before the risen Savior Jesus Christ. Honor Yourself through your church this week-end, we pray and this time of Q&A in Jesus’ Name. Amen.

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

Caller 1:
Was religion specifically designed to enslave us?

Steve Brown:
Well, yes and no. We need to explain that.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
No, it’s designed to free you, real religion. False religion will enslave you every time. But also, you’ve got to go through a door that makes you enslaved, a bond servant. Talk to us about that.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that’s good. So, God created us and he created all things good. And then we fell away and we fell into bondage. So, the gospel is all about freedom from that bondage to sin, right?

Steve Brown:
Right.

Pete Alwinson:
But he takes us out of one kingdom that is enslaving us, and he makes us slaves of Christ, Romans 6. So, you could read that. So, when you think about true religion, when you think about the gospel of Jesus Christ. True religion, no, it sets us free, but it does make us bondservants of the Most High God. That’s a seeming contradiction, but it’s not.

Steve Brown:
You know, there’s the, and I’ve told that story, and you’ve heard me tell it a lot of times about the time, I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but when Lincoln went down to the slave market And bid on a young slave girl, and won it. And Lincoln and his new property walked away and he turned to her and said, Young lady, you’re free. And she said, Oh yeah, what does that mean? And he said, It means you’re free. And she said, Does that mean that I can say whatever I want to say? He said, Yeah, you can say whatever you want to say. Can I do whatever I want to do? He said, Yeah, you can do whatever you want to do. Can I go wherever I want to go? And Lincoln laughed and said, Yes, you can go wherever you want to go. And then she said to him, I think I’ll go with you. And that’s the bond servant thing that frees you up. There are religious systems that enslave you.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. But so called Christian systems that seek to tie, link your good works with salvation.

Steve Brown:
And that’s enslaving.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s enslaving. And that’s not freedom because we can’t fix ourselves and we cannot meet God’s standard by ourselves.

Steve Brown:
We live in a culture that doesn’t like Christians. And one of the things they constantly say, and listen to me guys, it’s a lie. It’s from the pit of hell and it smells like smoke. That Christians are people who want to enslave people and take away the freedom. No, we aren’t.

Pete Alwinson:
No.

Steve Brown:
We’re just the opposite. You want to be free, that’s what we’re about. You want to be enslaved, stay where you are.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right. You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Steve Brown:
It’s amazing to me how, what unbelievers that are on some kind of a fight or war against Christians. How what they accuse us of is exactly what they do.

Pete Alwinson:
That is right. And that’s what Satan, our enemy, that’s what darkness does. So, I’ll tell you what’s here to enslave us, Marxism will enslave you. Any number of philosophies, pick up a philosophy book, almost every one of those philosophies that are, that leave God out of the picture and Christ out of the picture, they will enslave you.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
They’ll destroy you.

Steve Brown:
Don’t let anybody tell you different.

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

Steve Brown:
Where did Adam and Eve’s children get their wives? You want to go there?

Pete Alwinson:
Back in hallowed history, right? In the early days when God set this thing up, he must have set it up to where siblings had to become spouses.

Steve Brown:
You know, that causes us to wince because of the prohibition against incest. But you’ve got to understand what’s going on. God doesn’t say something’s a sin because it’s nasty, he says it’s a sin because it’ll kill you. And as we have fallen as a culture, that has to do with our genes, has to do with a lot of things, so that intermarriage within families, something that you just don’t do, cause it has horrible repercussions. But in the beginning, none of that had happened, so it was a whole different deal.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right. And so, it was God’s way, and God’s ways are good ways. So, there it is.

Steve Brown:
Okay. What about salvation of a baby who dies, or of someone who is mentally ill or disabled?

Pete Alwinson:
You know the big issues and and that happens and we really don’t have all of the Biblical data that we’d like to have on something like this.

Steve Brown:
Doesn’t speak to it much.

Pete Alwinson:
But we do know that God is gracious and good and he knows way more than we do. This is a way above our pay grade.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it really is.

Pete Alwinson:
So, we trust in him.

Steve Brown:
But Pete, the early church and the fathers of the church have always taken a stand that the disabled and the infants are loved by God. And there’s some Biblical warrant for that.

Let the little children come unto me and forbid them not. You must become a child in order to see the kingdom.

The importance that is placed on children throughout Scripture. There is some warrant for it. And the church has always, by and large, in the early days, taught that you can trust God with that, as you said, because he’s good and he’s kind and he’s merciful.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. And so, we can rest in him and in the work of Christ.

Steve Brown:
Is it important, well, we’ve answered something like this, important to become a member of the church? Of course it’s important. Or as opposed to just being a regular attender.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. You know, when I was pastor of a local church, I would, I treated everybody that was a regular attender as a member in the sense that, you know, I mean, if they need, if they were causing trouble, I wanted to talk to them, you know, if they wanted to get together with me, I met with them, you know what I mean? So, in that sense, membership is kind of a cultural construct, or a construct of a local church, but it’s a good idea for elders to get to know their people and to be able to baptize their kids and all that.

Steve Brown:
And you can do that with a regular attender, but the way to deal, if you’re a pastor, let us give you some advice. When you have an attender that won’t join, take them to lunch and say, I’m concerned that you have no convictions.

Pete Alwinson:
You know, in America, we really do struggle with commitment and we like to be the radical gods of our own life. And so, I think it’s good for us to put down roots. I was thinking about this the other day, that it’s natural for us to want to be connected to one church. I get asked, as you do, to speak in different churches, and I go to one regular church, but it’s more natural for us spiritually to be connected to one church. Okay to go periodically to other churches, but be committed somewhere.

Steve Brown:
And as we have discussed here, the most important thing you can do in our culture and what we’re going through is to join a church, tell everybody you’re a member and support that church. That is a good thing that you ought to do. Well, we’re out of time. But before we go, I must say Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.