“Is retirement biblical?”

Steve Brown:
Is retirement Biblical? The answer to that question and others, 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 hard questions, then welcome to Key Life. Here’s our host, author, and seminary professor, Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hey Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey.

Steve Brown:
You doing good?

Pete Alwinson:
I am. I’m doing good. How about you?

Steve Brown:
How does it feel to be a grandfather again?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, we have six now.

Steve Brown:
Oh, I have three. I don’t want any more. That’s enough.

Pete Alwinson:
Ha ha ha.

Steve Brown:
I’ve got friends that have as many as 15, I wouldn’t even be able to remember their names.

Pete Alwinson:
Isn’t that amazing? We have a man at Forge, you know him, and he just turned 90 yesterday, 11 grandchildren, 14 great grandchildren.

Steve Brown:
Oh my.

Pete Alwinson:
Can you imagine the exhaustion, 90 years of age he’s got?

Steve Brown:
Or how much it would cost to give birthday presents. I mean, you could go bankrupt with that sort of thing. That’s the downside of being a grandfather. The upside is the love and the joy and sense of belonging. That’s the point of it. Okay, that’s Pete Alwinson. Go to ForgeTruth.com and if you haven’t read Pete’s book, Like Father Like Son, get it and read it. It’s life changing. And as you know, Pete comes in every Friday and we spend Fridays answering questions and we love doing that and we love your questions. You can ask a question by going to 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 7, or you can write to

Key Life Network

P.O. Box 5000

Maitland, FL 32794

or

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

or you can e-mail us at [email protected] and if you can help us financially, please do. We’re a member of ECFA in the States and CCCC in Canada. And both of those organizations oversee our finances to make sure that we’re ethical. Now, we are, and we were, before they came along. But just to be sure, I wanted you to know that we are members of those organizations. And if you can help us financially, I promise we’ll be as faithful with your gift as you were in giving it. And if you can’t, we understand that too, say a prayer. Pete, say a prayer.

Pete Alwinson:
All right. Let’s pray together. Oh Father, we do thank you for your goodness to us. And at the end of this week, we praise you for the fact that you are sovereign and powerful and holy, and yet you love us and that you have declared to us, about your majestic grace to us in Christ. And so, as your people at the end of this week, we give you praise and we honor you. We thank you that you hear our prayers, because of the merit of your Son, Father. And we thank you that you delight when we pray. And so, we come now, we ask that you would continue to help us finish out this week with the joy of the Lord as our strength. We pray that you would be with our pastors and teachers and priests and leaders and all those who are called to bring us into your presence during the week-end. Holy Spirit, would you use them in a powerful way that we could worship you and be set free to live more abundantly rich lives in you. You are so good to us. We thank you for family, for friends. We thank you for the church. Expand your church and make it pure. And now, we commit this time of Q&A to you as we pray these things in the strong name of our risen Savior, Jesus. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, this is an e-mail, and you’re an expert. Some of the best teaching I’ve ever heard on Revelation came from the pulpit of the church where you were the pastor and I was a member. This is the question, why are there so many sevens in the book of Revelation?

Pete Alwinson:
Well, you’re kind, and I’m not an expert. Okay, I’m an expert. No, no, we’re not, but you know, seven’s the perfect number, right? And so, the numbers in Revelation are all metaphorical. And almost everything in Revelation is metaphorical.

Steve Brown:
And so, when you say seven is perfect, John was saying this is perfect. This is from God. That’s why there’s so many number sevens.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. Or this is the perfect number. This is the perfect, what’s included in this number is what needs to be grasped and understood. The seven churches, there were more churches, but the seven churches in those messages contain seven key messages that needed to be heard.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. Good stuff. All right. Let’s go to our phone lines.

Caller 1:
I’m hearing from a couple peers that retirement is not a Biblical principle, and I retired a couple years ago because I ended up messing up my knees and I couldn’t continue to go up and down the steps on my previous job. You know, now they’re saying that I should be going back to work somewhere. So, I’m wondering if I’m sinning against a principle of God.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, you’re probably not saved.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, call Key Life, you’ll get encouraged.

Steve Brown:
And there’s a thing that you at Forge teach that is really good.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. You know, we teach don’t retire, rewire. And really what it does is it taps into our purpose. Our identity is that we’re the deeply beloved redeemed sons and daughters of the most high God.

Steve Brown:
Not what we do.

Pete Alwinson:
Not what we do, but our purpose is that we are leaders, workers, and warriors to advance his gospel. So, work is a big part of our nature and Jesus is all. So, we get to contribute tending to God’s culture and advancing his kingdom. And so, we need a reason to go to bed at night and get up in the morning, you know. And when we don’t have that, and when we trivialize our lives by just doing leisure stuff. The point is, that make a contribution, but some, you know, yeah, if you have a job at your knees are bad, you can’t do that job anymore.

Steve Brown:
Of course not.

Pete Alwinson:
We get that.

Steve Brown:
And there is a time in life when you slow down.

Pete Alwinson:
Absolutely.

Steve Brown:
By the way, this person sounds like somebody has been laying a guilt trip. Don’t let them do that to you. When you say you shouldn’t retire, it’s just saying you shouldn’t sit back and eat bonbons and work and watch soap operas.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
There’s more to life and I can’t, you know, I was on vacation this year and it went an extra week. At the end of that, man, I was climbing a wall. I thought, I can’t do this anymore.

Pete Alwinson:
I know. And so, we’re wired, we’re created to produce not to be accepted, but because we are God’s people. And I love that about you. You know, there’s nobody I know that works harder than you. But when you get older, we do need a little bit more margin.

Steve Brown:
We really do.

Pete Alwinson:
We do.

Steve Brown:
And that’s good. Just don’t sit around and eat bonbons. There’s more to life than that.

Pete Alwinson:
By the way. What is

Steve Brown:
Serve Jesus.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. In some way, if nothing else, by praying through a long prayer. But Steve, what is a bonbon? I’ve never, what are they?

Steve Brown:
I don’t know? I heard somebody say that, you know, that were going to sit around and eat bonbons. I think they’re chocolates.

Pete Alwinson:
Okay. All right.

Steve Brown:
But I’m not sure.

Pete Alwinson:
I’ve never seen one.

Steve Brown:
Maybe they’ve got booze in them and it makes retirement possible. This is an e-mail, Pete. Let’s see how much time we’ve got. No, we’re fine. How does one know that they are suffering for previous family sins? How can one break such a pattern or stronghold?

Pete Alwinson:
How do you, how do you deal? I don’t know if we’ve had that question in a long time.

Steve Brown:
No, I don’t think so either. I, you know, one of the themes in the Born Free Seminar that we taught for so many years was the importance of recognizing generational dysfunction.

Pete Alwinson:
Mm hmm.

Steve Brown:
You know, you’ve heard it said a thousand times that an abuser who abuses his children will create abusers who abuse their children. But it goes further than that. It has all kinds of implications to it. I have in my family, every male I knew was an alcoholic. Fathers, grandfathers, uncles, all of them, and in my generation, I, God fixed it so I couldn’t drink. I just can’t get it down, and broke that generational dysfunction that was going. And we could talk about a thousand different ways where that is true. And the Scripture really speaks in helpful ways about that. And Ezekiel, God says.

That you’re not responsible for your father’s sin. Everybody is responsible for their own stuff.

And throughout Scripture, the Second Adam breaks that in us because we’re free, we’re forgiven, we don’t have to walk that road anymore. And the importance, and I’m going to shut up, but the importance of Christian counselors is to identify those areas, to kiss the demons on the lips and they lose their power. So, know your past. When you can, know the dysfunctions in your family past because they play in your present. And then go to Jesus with it and let him break the chains of a dysfunctional family. And he does that. He doesn’t do it quickly. It takes a good while, but he does it and he’ll do it for you, if you ask him.

Pete Alwinson:
Oh, that is so well said. And it’s something that we don’t hear much talk about because people say that’s Old Testament, you know, that’s generational, but what you suggest is right. If you have a, if you look at your family and you see this pattern, and you see it in yourself, you be the one to break the cycle like you did. You simply say, Lord, today, I claim that in Jesus, this cycle is broken in my life. Stop it. Free me from it. But from here on out, may that cycle go away.

Steve Brown:
That’s so good. People are always quoting what Paul said.

Forgetting what lies behind, I press on.

Don’t do that. I mean, don’t make that text say something that it doesn’t say. All he’s saying, they’re weights that drag you down, drop them. Get moving. I mean, he’s not talking about the dysfunctions,

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
that this questioner is thinking about.

Pete Alwinson:
Thank you for bringing that up. That’s powerful because a lot of people tend to go there, don’t they?

Steve Brown:
Yeah, they really do. Well, I don’t know.

Pete Alwinson:
So, generational stuff, you know, it’s interesting. Some of us struggle a little bit with that because we don’t know, like I never knew my grandfather on one side and my other grandfather died when I was real young. So, I don’t know some of the tendencies, but I can see them in some of my aunts and uncles, I can surmise some of that.

Steve Brown:
This is a family deal.

Pete Alwinson:
Family thing.

Steve Brown:
And my father was the son of a single mom in days when that was horrible. And so, I don’t know a lot of that either. But with you, I see those dysfunctions in me and in others. And God has been, you know, if I can live another 10 years, I’ll be perfect, Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Amen. Amen.

Steve Brown:
I just want you to know that.

Pete Alwinson:
Could happen today.

Steve Brown:
And it could happen today. You never know, entire sanctification. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. We’ve got to go, but first, I must say. Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.