“Is it wrong to pray to Jesus?”

Steve Brown:
Is it wrong to pray to Jesus? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
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’s a lot of confusion about how grace applies to real life. So, here’s seminary professor and author Steve Brown and Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth to answer your questions.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey, man.

Steve Brown:
How are you?

Pete Alwinson:
I’m doing well. You doing all right?

Steve Brown:
You keep rubbing your shoulder. You’re going to have to get some surgery.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, you’re going to the doctor after we record today. I am. I’m going to have to have a little rotator cuff repair, I think.

Steve Brown:
You can’t fix it any other way, huh?

Pete Alwinson:
I’ve tried.

Steve Brown:
Well, I know, Isn’t it awful? I’ll tell you, I don’t want to get old. That’s my excuse. You don’t have one. You’re not nearly as old as I am.

Pete Alwinson:
You know, but it’s it’s because I’m older. I did something I shouldn’t have done.

Steve Brown:
Climb mountains and play sports. That’s Pete Alwinson and his ministry Forge is an incredible ministry. God is using it in the lives of so many men. If you want to check on it, go to ForgeTruth.com if you want to know the basis of what he teaches, read Like Father Like Son, a book that Pete wrote. You can get that at Key Life. You can get it by going to ForgeTruth.com and you can get it at your bookstore and if they can’t order it and don’t have it, don’t go there, anymore. As you know, Pete comes in every Friday and we spend Friday’s broadcast answering questions. And we do love to get your questions and we take them seriously. You can send your question to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
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if you live in Canada, it’s

Key Life Canada

P.O. Box 28060

Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6J8

or you can e-mail us at [email protected] and if you want to deal with it quickly, just pick up the phone, dial 1-800-KEY-LIFE and follow directions and record your question, and sometimes we put your voice on the air. And if you can help us financially, we would appreciate that, because we squeeze every dime for the glory of God. We’re a member of ECFA in the States and CCCC in Canada. Both organizations oversee our monetary practices to make sure that we are ethical. We were ethical before they came along, and we still are. If you can help us do, and we’ll be faithful with your gift. If you can’t, we understand, say a prayer for this ministry. Pete, why don’t you lead us in prayer, and we’ll get to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
You got it. You got it. Father, thank you for your goodness, at the end of this week, we just stop for a minute and praise you, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the one true God, the only God. We worship you. We praise you. We thank you that you are in control, even though our world often seems like it’s out of control, we thank you that you are good and kind and merciful. We thank you, though, that you treat us as your beloved children, and sometimes that means disciplining us, but always it means using life’s challenging situations to develop us. Thank you that you have a big vision for our life. Thank you that you want to build us into great people as you define that greatness. And so, Lord, we just ask that you would help us to enjoy your grace, may we understand it more, may it sink from our head and to the very center of our being and flow out in all of our lives, Lord, in enjoying and serving you. Thank you for Steve, for Key Life, for this incredible ministry. We do ask that Lord you would use a time of Q&A to bring honor to your name as you transform our lives. In Jesus’ Name we pray, Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, this first is an e-mail question. Since Jesus taught his disciples to pray to the Heavenly Father, do you think it’s wrong to address our prayers directly to Jesus?

Pete Alwinson:
What do you think?

Steve Brown:
I don’t think there’s any jealousy at all in the Trinity. I feel more comfortable praying to the Father just because I always have but I don’t think there’s any problem at all with praying to Jesus or to the Holy Spirit for that matter. Charles Williams in his history book of the Descent of the Dove about the history of the Holy Spirit calls the Holy Spirit our Lord, the Holy Spirit. But what do you think?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. No, I agree with you. You know, Jesus says, Jesus does say, if you ask anything in my name, and so there is that sense in which we are, I think how the Lord’s Prayer does teach us and guide us because the disciples went to Jesus and said, teach us to pray, right? So, he said, pray in this way, our Father, and then it flows down and doesn’t say in Jesus name, but Jesus does say later, if you ask in my name. So, we are, I think we, I think that formula is important to understand where the merit comes from for us to ask. We ask because of what Jesus has accomplished in his death, burial, and resurrection.

Steve Brown:
That’s right. You know, I think, and you and I both have encountered this being pastors for a lot of years, is some father issues. In fact, you wrote a whole book about it and you’ve got a lot of people who, for whom, for you and I, when we say father, that is a wonderful, wonderful name and we are drawn to it and we love it. Both of us had some problems with our fathers, but that’s not an altogether negative image for us, and for most people, but for some people

Pete Alwinson:
oh boy

Steve Brown:
Oh Father, brings up all kinds of negative things.

Pete Alwinson:
Oh boy, I was reading a little, re reading some of Frederick Buechner’s book Telling Secrets, and he starts off telling about his father and his suicide and what you’re right, so I think, thank you for bringing that up because that’s a profound point for many people whose father, earthly fathers mess up their view of their heavenly father.

Steve Brown:
So, pray to Jesus, but read Pete’s book, Like Father Like Son, because he deals with that very issue. And when the Father becomes a positive image for you, instead of a negative, abusive one, then you might want to try praying the Lord’s Prayer with Our Father.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s good. That’s a gracious way, Steve, of approaching prayer.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it is. Is there any truth to be found in other religions?

Pete Alwinson:
Well.

Steve Brown:
That’s an e-mail.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, all truth is God’s truth. Now, Steve, we’ve said that before, right? All truth is God’s truth. You still adhere to that. And I do too.

Steve Brown:
Oh, absolutely. And that doesn’t mean, you know, if a Buddhist says 2 plus 2 equals 4, 2 plus 2 equals 4. And there might be some good moral teaching. C. S. Lewis taught that. In Mere Christianity, he said there is a wide area of agreement about values in the world. And I think that is shared by a lot of different religions, and it’s truth. And Jesus said, I am the truth. That means that wherever truth is spoken, there’s a sense in which he’s present. And yeah, there’s truth, but not saving truth.

Pete Alwinson:
Not saving truth. And that’s really the key, isn’t it?

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it really is.

Pete Alwinson:
And so, that’s why I think the church has gotten into trouble historically when they tried to blend, Greek philosophical thought with Christian theology. The history of the development of theology is wrought with a lot of problems there because of that.

Steve Brown:
It really is. And we don’t think about that. We don’t know where that came from, but it may have come from a place that is not a good place.

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

Steve Brown:
So, you’ve got to be careful about saying it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe something,

Pete Alwinson:
that’s right

Steve Brown:
and you’re sincere about it. That’s from the pit of hell, it smells like smoke. And you don’t want to fly with a pilot who believes that about aeronauticals. And you don’t want to go to a doctor who believes that about medical truth.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And you don’t want to worship a God with that kind of truth behind it. So yeah, there’s truth in other religions.

Pete Alwinson:
And we say that graciously, but some people want us to be gracious to accept everything else and not be exclusive. Christianity is quite exclusive. Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, the life. And we’ve come to accept that.

Steve Brown:
In fact there’s a, that goes back to something that’s even more basic. Truth is always exclusive, always.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. Always.

Steve Brown:
That’s called under Aristotle, the principle of non-contradiction. Two plus two can’t be five and three and four at the same time. It’s exclusively four.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And when that truth is spoken, it rejects the other truths that are not true.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And that’s true everywhere.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s just logic. That’s just rational thinking.

Steve Brown:
And we live in a culture where it doesn’t matter, but it does matter.

Pete Alwinson:
It does matter.

Steve Brown:
And so, yeah, there is truth in other religions, but you’ve got to be careful. How did we get the Bible without the Apocrypha?

Pete Alwinson:
Oh, yeah! Well, the Apocrypha was written, it means hidden, and it was written between the close of the Old Testament, Malachi, and the beginning of the New, during that intertestamental time. But, boy, how did we get the Bible, Old Testament, first?

Steve Brown:
It’s an interesting study and it’s a lot more complicated that we can do here. And you ought to get a book on the power of Scripture and how it developed. It’s an amazing, miraculous story. But bottom line, we didn’t do it. God did it. You know, there came to be a time when everybody said, but of course. And then they proclaimed it in the councils of the church. And it was kind of like they, it was kind of like, nobody dreamed it up. You get pagans who love to tell us, you guys just, you rejected good books. They don’t know what they’re talking about, that didn’t happen that way.

Pete Alwinson:
It did not. And so, the lost books of the Bible, the ones that got power and they see everything in terms of human power structures, the early church had power structure and they got these other books out of there. No, there was a body of apostolic teaching, and the books that are in the New Testament were seen to be in compliance, were that apostolic teaching, and others were not.

Steve Brown:
And the church agreed on it, not just the councils, but everybody, people said, but of course. It’s kind of like we woke up one morning and we thought, whoa, all those letters, all those books, the history, and the poetry, and the wisdom, that is from God.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And we agreed on that.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
That’ll work.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
But listen, get a book on inspiration of Scripture because it is a wonderful story to tell.

Pete Alwinson:
It is.

Steve Brown:
That’s it. We’ve got to go.

Pete Alwinson:
All right, man.

Steve Brown:
Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.