“How do I love an unbelieving friend?”

Steve Brown:
How do I love an unbelieving friend? 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 honest questions, welcome to Key Life. Here’s our host, author, and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeBibleStudy.com.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey man. Happy Friday. How you doing?

Steve Brown:
I’m doing well. How’s your podcast going?

Pete Alwinson:
Hey, it’s going good. We’ve surpassed 3000 downloads, so we’re on the move.

Steve Brown:
All right man. How do they do that?

Pete Alwinson:
How do they,

Steve Brown:
How do you do it? But I don’t listen to podcasts. How do you do it?

Pete Alwinson:
Just go to the podcast app on your iPhone and,

Steve Brown:
Well, what if you don’t have an iPhone? What if you’ve got an Android?

Pete Alwinson:
Well, they have those there too. I don’t know how Android works, but they’ve got them. They’ve got the app for the podcast and then go to ForgeTruth and download that ForgeTruth.

Steve Brown:
Hey listen, it’ll be great. You guys ought to go there. If they go to ForgeTruth.com can they find all that out.

Pete Alwinson:
They can get the podcast there too.

Steve Brown:
All right. You never listen to me, but listen to me now. Go to ForgeTruth.com. You’ll be glad you did. By the way, as you know, Pete comes in on Fridays and we spend Fridays answering questions. You can ask a question anytime you want, 24 7, just turn on your phone, pick it up. Call 1-800-KEY-LIFE and follow instructions. You can record your question and sometimes we put your voice on the air. Or you can send your question to

Key Life Network
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in Canada, it’s

Key Life Canada
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or you can e-mail us at [email protected]. And, all of those places are places where you could make a contribution, if you’re called to do that. By the way, you can do that on your phone. You can text Key Life at 28950 that’s 28950 and just follow instructions. If you can help us, please do. I promise that we’ll be faithful with your gift. We’ll squeeze every dime for the glory of God. And if you can’t, we understand, do say a prayer for this ministry. And speaking of prayer, would you lead us in prayer? We’ll get to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
Absolutely. Let’s pray. Father God, we come into your presence today, so greatly pleased that we can just come before you in humility and worship and all because of what you have done, Lord Jesus, to connect us to the Father through your life, your death, your teaching, your resurrection, by the power of your Spirit to bring the gospel into our hearts. And so, we worship you and as your people, we come to you. And Lord, it’s been a long week and we’re at the end of it. Many of us are still going to work all week-end. And we’ve got things to do, we’ve got people to be with. But Lord, we come to you and we recognize that we are living in a world that that doesn’t by and large recognize you. And so, we pray as we gather for worship that you’d be with our pastors and churches and that we would be lights in this world and speak your truth, but that also Father, you would give us the ability to make a connection with those who don’t know Jesus, that we’d be able to share the simple and yet profound gospel of salvation through faith alone in Jesus Christ. We honor you for being your children and what you’ve done to make us your. And now, we commit this time of Q&A to you. We’re thankful, that we can ask big questions of a big God, and we ask that you would show up, for we pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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

Caller 1:
I just finished listening to the podcast on judgment and it was very well done. I understand that a believer to another believer can rebuke in love, and that made total sense to me. My question is, how are we as believers to approach non-believers that we’re in relationship with, people who do not believe and are making decisions that we don’t approve of? How do we still love them without condoning their actions?

Steve Brown:
That’s a good question.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. It really is.

Steve Brown:
It really is. You know what I think, I think, and I hate the word authenticity, but I think it’s, authenticity is very winsome, very attractive to unbelievers. And I think sitting down with a friend who’s an unbeliever, who may be gay, maybe doing things sexually they shouldn’t be doing, maybe they’re, well they’re sinners. And I think if you say to them, and I did this one time, who the editor of a gay lesbian newspaper who was angry at me about something about another guy that they were trying to bring down. And I said, Look, I’m not gonna talk about my brother cause I don’t do that, but I, but if you, and he was very hostile when he called and I said, if you have the time, I’ll try to explain him to you. And he said, Well, I’ve got the time. And then I said, first thing I need to say to you is that I’m really messed up. I have done so many bad things that I can’t, I can’t throw rocks at anybody and I just don’t. And so, you and I may disagree about your lifestyle, but there’s some things in my lifestyle that you’re not going to be happy with and some things in yours that I won’t be happy with. And so, I’m not going throw rocks at you. And at that moment, the whole situation changed.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Wow.

Steve Brown:
And they ended up junking the piece where they were going to be attacking my friend. And I learned something from that in a lot of ways that if we’ll do that, like this person who asked the question, I don’t think you can compromise the truth.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
But you can say, look, we’re going to have a come to Jesus talk and after that I’ll never bring it up again unless you want me to. And then you say, look, I don’t approve of some of the things that you do and you don’t approve of some of the things that I do. And part of that’s cause I’m a Christian. And it’s not because I’m good, it’s cause I’m his cause I’m not good. So, I’m not going for the rocks at you, but I want you to be clear about it and I think you’ll be surprised, at how the reaction you’ll get to that. It’ll be a lot more positive than you think it will be.

Pete Alwinson:
I love that. And I think, you know, by you saying what you said ahead of time, that you’re messed up. And then by saying, let’s have that conversation about the issues one time.

Steve Brown:
And that’s it.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. And I think that that’s, let’s talk about it and let’s do it as friends and I’m not going to be thrown back in your face. You’ll know where I stand. I know where you stand. And that authentic warmth.

Steve Brown:
It really works, you know, and I’ve checked it over and over again since I talked, that’s been years ago when I talked to the editor of that newspaper. But I’ve done it that way a lot.

Pete Alwinson:
Now, in honesty,

Steve Brown:
it’s amazing

Pete Alwinson:
It is amazing. And honestly at that point, they may be able to get through that conversation and then they may never come back. They may not,

Steve Brown:
might be

Pete Alwinson:
You know, it’s true that, there are people that we know, that when, when we are really that different morally, we can’t go deeper.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. I agree with you.

Pete Alwinson:
We can work in the same office with each other,

Steve Brown:
be civil

Pete Alwinson:
and we can be civil and we can pray for each other. And if somebody’s sick, say, Hey, I’m praying for you. But we can’t fake that we’re even closer.

Steve Brown:
But sometimes, the friendship supersedes that.

Pete Alwinson:
It can

Steve Brown:
I mean, it’s like a childhood friend or someone you’ve been friends for years. Or you’ve become a Christian and they didn’t. And you just don’t want to lose that friendship because you love them deeply. And they love you deeply. You can weather that storm that way, but you’re right, sometimes I have a friend, Michael Joyce, who’s a lawyer in Miami, and he said after he became a Christian, what am I going to do about my friends? And I said, Don’t worry about it and it will take care of itself.

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

Steve Brown:
His friends didn’t want to be friends anymore, most of them didn’t.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
I get that.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, and you know, and I have a friend too who’s the chief of police, and he’s not, I’ve shared the gospel and we’re just, we’re friends, but he doesn’t accept Jesus. And, we don’t get together that much, but when we get together, it’s civil and I care about him and he cares about me.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. That’s good. This is an interesting question. Does salvation comes through the covenant line? If the answer is no, then it’s a decision, right? How do you define salvation?

Pete Alwinson:
Wow. How, how do you, how do you look at that?

Steve Brown:
I’d say both are true. I think the covenant isn’t irrelevant. I think when God calls a family member, he generally calls a bunch in the family, that’s called a family covenant. I think there are covenant communities in different places where God works, where he’s extant in a different way than he is at the corner bar. And those things are the way God works and it’s a good thing. But you know, you can be a part of the family covenant and say, I ain’t going there and run as fast as you can in the other direction. So, it has to do with a responsibility on your part to respond to that covenant. So, it’s both. It’s both, I kind of get the feeling it’s both.

Pete Alwinson:
I agree with you. I think that God does work covenantly, covenant is an organizing principle for understanding the Bible, old covenant, new covenant. Yeah, Absolutely.

Steve Brown:
What is salvation?

Pete Alwinson:
Salvation is being redeemed from the effects of our sins. It’s being saved from sin and death and hell.

Steve Brown:
And it has all kinds of implications to it.

Pete Alwinson:
Oh, for this life and the life to come. The new heaven and new earth.

Steve Brown:
That’s right. You know, I don’t, and we were talking off the air. We often do that. We like each other, so we don’t just come in here and sit on the microphone. We sit and talk for a while, but we were talking about how complicated people coming to Christ is. It really is. You know, we have, you know, I’m an evangelical and I know about the Roman Road and the Four Spiritual Laws, etcetera, and Evangelism Explosion. And those are important and they’re good tools. But God’s bigger than that too. I mean, he’s drawing people to himself in funny ways. And we need to recognize when that happens, that those people are our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. Yeah. There is not one way, that people come, they come to one, a relationship with God through one person, Jesus. No one can come to the Father, but by me, Jesus said.

Steve Brown:
That’s right.

Pete Alwinson:
So, there’s only one person we can get to the Father through. But there are many different ways and I think one of the most fascinating things is seeing how varied are the stories? No two,

Steve Brown:
They really are.

Pete Alwinson:
just like the birth of a person, the being born again is different for everybody.

Steve Brown:
It really is. And you know, if you’ve been around long, you just think, you know, there are people that say, you didn’t do it my way, that means you’re not saved. That’s not true.

Pete Alwinson:
No.

Steve Brown:
Now we’re not saying it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you believe something. We’re just saying Jesus loves you enough to come in a way that you can understand.

Pete Alwinson:
Absolutely.

Steve Brown:
Hey, we’re out of here, but first Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.