“How do you know if it’s from God?”

Steve Brown:
“How do you know if it’s from God?” 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 no guru, but he does have honest answers to honest questions about the Bible. God’s grace changes everything, how we love, work, live, lead, marry, parent, evangelize, purchase and worship. So, here’s Steve and Pete Alwinson from ForgeBibleStudy.com with street-smart Bible teaching for real life.

Steve Brown:
Hey Pete, how you doing?

Pete Alwinson:
Hey, happy Friday.

Steve Brown:
You were recently in Atlanta, weren’t you?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, I was up there seeing our son and grandkids, son, daughter-in-law, grandkids. Yeah, it was great.

Steve Brown:
And listen, the cool thing is over kids, is that grandkids you give back.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. That’s right. That’s exactly right. Or you leave them. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
You don’t. And then tail lights are wonderful for both sides of that family.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, we both cleaned up in the area of grandkids.

Steve Brown:
That’s Pete Alwinson, and Pete’s Men’s Ministry is incredible. And it’s growing and it’s making a difference in a lot of lives. You can find out about it by going to ForgeTruth.com, you can read Pete’s book and he’s working on one right now and we’ll let you know when it comes out. But the first book was Like Father Like Son. And if you’re in Central Florida, you might want to, in the flesh, be present at a Forge thing. You will be amazed at how free and gracious it is and how life changing. By the way, as you know, Pete comes in and each Friday we answer questions and we love your questions. You can pick up the phone, call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, and often we put your voice on the air. Or you can write to

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

if you live in Canada, it’s

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

or you can send your question by e-mail to [email protected] and all of those places are places where you could help us financially. And if you do, you get three free sins and if you don’t you’ll get the hives. That’s kind of manipulative, isn’t it?

Pete Alwinson:
Nobody does it better, Steve.

Steve Brown:
Actually, we understand and the people that are supposed to give to Key Life do, and maybe you’re one of those, you can touch a lot of lives with your gift and we’ll be careful and faithful with it. We’re a member of ECFA in the States and CCCC in Canada. Both of those organizations make sure that our practices are ethical, but they were ethical anyway. But at any rate, help us if you can, if you can’t say a prayer. And Pete, you lead us in prayer and we’ll get to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
All right. Let’s pray together. Our Great God, what a joy to stop right now just for a couple of minutes, and thank you for your goodness, to thank you that you are sovereign, that you are powerful, that nothing limits the omnipotent God of the universe. And yet you’re with all of that power, you’re kind and merciful, you understand us, you forebear, you’re patient with us, you teach us, you develop us. We thank you for how you have walked with us and held us in the palm of your hand. And Lord, you know every one of us, your people who are listening today and who need a sense of your touch, who need forgiveness, who need just a confidence that you are in charge. But there there are some Lord that need answered prayer about jobs, about money, about pregnancy, about having children. Lord, there’s some that are lonely and lost and discouraged. And Lord, you know each one of us right now, and you know what we need. So, we come to you and we look forward to worshiping with your people. May our churches be healthy, Lord. May they be Bible centered, Christ centered, God centered, would you be with our pastors, teachers and leaders priests this week-end, that we could worship together, before the great God of the universe and be encouraged to go back out and influence our world in a positive way. Thanks for the time of Q&A, thanks for Steve and thank you for so much for the great Key Life staff that does so much behind the scenes for other people. We commit this time to you. In your Holy Name, Lord Jesus we pray. Amen.

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

Caller 1:
How can I be sure whether visitation is from God or from the devil?

Steve Brown:
That’s, do you ever wonder that?

Pete Alwinson:
I have, in the past.

Steve Brown:
Lord, if this is from you, I’ll do it. And if it’s not, I won’t, but you’ve got to let me know which is which. But there’s some better ways that are stable to do that, aren’t there?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. How do you, here’s one thing I do know, is that when things, when there’s a lot of confusion and it’s very varied and difficult to figure something out. That it may well be the presence of evil, because confusion and disorder.

Steve Brown:
That’s true, I agree with you. Also you can know by, if anything comes to you by way of what you feel that God is calling you to do, if it’s not affirmed in Scripture, it’s not from God.

Pete Alwinson:
Clearly, the Holy Spirit will never contradict the written word.

Steve Brown:
And God has put us together for a reason, hasn’t he?

Pete Alwinson:
Mm-hmm.

Steve Brown:
So that when I feel that I’m called to something, I’m going to check with you.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And you’ll either say, go for it. Or, are you crazy?

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
One or the other.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s why we have boards, that’s why we have elder boards, deacon boards.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, that’s true. You’re right to kind of make those kinds of things.

Pete Alwinson:
And friends.

Steve Brown:
Another thing is common sense. You know, I can’t tell you how often I have, I have had to deal with people, who found Jesus and immediately thereafter wanted to go on the mission field.

Pete Alwinson:
Hmm.

Steve Brown:
And they weren’t called or prepared or ready. They were just sure that if you were a real Christian, you would next week go to a third world country and serve Christ there.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Doesn’t matter if you’re family starves, doesn’t matter if you have a job and responsibility, doesn’t matter if you’ve got your fingers, just do what Jesus told you to do. Now, that’s insane. And when something’s insane, it didn’t come from God.

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

Steve Brown:
So, you’ve got to be careful. So, if you are involved with other Christians, ask, make sure that there’s agreement in the Spirit about those things. Secondly, make sure that the Scripture is very clear on those things.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Because the Scripture speaks on a lot of subjects.

Pete Alwinson:
It really does, in principle form and in precept form. We have so much that would put down certain ideas that are just silly or unbiblical or demonic.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
And I think we need to use the phrase, I’d love to get your opinion about this. You know, I’m sensing this, what’s your opinion about this? We don’t do that anymore. We’re so social media oriented, we’re like, I want to post this, I want everybody to know what I think. And we rarely ask what other people think. What’s your thoughts about this?

Steve Brown:
That’s so important. And it’s so important.

Pete Alwinson:
And it’s because that’s one of my problems, I’m a teacher, right. So, you know, three points in a poem, I’ve got it all figured out.

Steve Brown:
C.S. Lewis said, by the way.

That the greatest evil in the world is done by people who think they’re doing good. And that they’re doing it for God.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
I mean, we’ve got people in this world who think that cutting off heads is obedience to the God of the universe. And the Scripture’s pretty clear about that sort of thing.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s good. That’s good.

Steve Brown:
Is the Bible really the word of God? And how do you know?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, it is, it is.

Steve Brown:
And are you quite, my mother told me it was, are you calling my mother a liar? There’s some very good reasons for that.

Pete Alwinson:
Where do you start on that whole process?

Steve Brown:
Oh, so many, I think you can start by saying we’ve got 66 books in this book. They were written over a period of hundreds and thousands of years, they were written by different cultural people with different thought forms and it all agrees. That’s a miracle.

Pete Alwinson:
It is.

Steve Brown:
You can’t pull that off.

Pete Alwinson:
No.

Steve Brown:
There’s always prophecy, the prophecies of Christ and how they were fulfilled. Hundreds of years before they took place.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
The way it, truth doesn’t work, doesn’t become truth because it works. It’s the other way around. It works because it’s truth.

Pete Alwinson:
Exactly.

Steve Brown:
But as you begin to exercise the principles of Scripture, even the law, You begin to see this is practical and this works. And that is the way, archeological evidence is incredible.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And it’s, and there’s so much of it. We could go on and on and on.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. The transmission of the text of the Bible is one of the big problems, that people bring up. But it has been faithfully transmitted.

Steve Brown:
It really has.

Pete Alwinson:
And it is. And the Dead Sea Scrolls and the documents that we have in the New Testament. Powerfully prove that the Bible was carefully transmitted down to us.

Steve Brown:
The Dead Sea Scrolls, by the way, the manuscripts there predated anything we had by over a thousand years.

Pete Alwinson:
Yep, yep.

Steve Brown:
And they essentially were exactly the same Bible that you hold in your hand.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
You know, I was taught in graduate school that Isaiah never existed, or if he did, he was a family and a lot of people wrote Isaiah. And yet we go back a thousand years, find a manuscript and it’s one.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And that goes over and over. Every archeological find affirms the reality and the truth of Scripture.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
It’s a book you can count on.

Pete Alwinson:
You really, really can. I’m going through, Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for Christ with a young skeptic. And he’s a really sharp thinker. And it’s,

Steve Brown:
He really is.

Pete Alwinson:
And it’s really a fun thinking process, that would be a good place to start if you need something. And he is really talking about the gospels and how they can be absolutely trusted.

Steve Brown:
And, you know, Augustine said.

The world says, seeing is believing. God says, believing is seeing.

So, you take the first step. In other words, get a Bible if you don’t believe it, but you’re searching for God. Get a Bible and begin to read and see what happens.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Because the confirmation is in the food you eat, whether it’s good or bad or healthy or unhealthy.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
But you’ve got to eat it in order to get there.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, like J.B. Phillips said, it has a ring of truth.

Steve Brown:
It does.

Pete Alwinson:
A ring of truth.

Steve Brown:
And have you always believed that?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, I have, but I got severely tested in philosophy in college.

Steve Brown:
I did too.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. I think we both had a similar thing where they tried to disprove it and so we had to look, we had to take the deep dive and look at it very carefully.

Steve Brown:
We really did. I recognized I didn’t have any authority.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Right.

Steve Brown:
And I was just giving my own views and that wasn’t working. But the Bible did and it changed lives.

Pete Alwinson:
Amen.

Steve Brown:
You know, in those early days, I didn’t know what the Bible said, so I stayed one verse ahead of the congregation. We’ve got to go. Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life’s Network.