“Do our loved ones in heaven see us?”

Steve Brown:
Do our loved ones in heaven see us? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
This is Key Life, dedicated to the message that the only people who get any better are those who know that if they don’t get any better, God will still love them, anyway. That teaching raises a lot of questions, so here’s author and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeBibleStudy.com with answers from the Bible, that’ll make you free.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey man. How you doing?

Steve Brown:
I’m doing really good. By the way, you guys, I had not encountered that until fairly recently. If you’ll go to ForgeTruth.com there is an amazing and wonderful podcast. You all do that weekly or monthly?

Pete Alwinson:
Weekly, it comes out on Monday.

Steve Brown:
And then they could, if they couldn’t hear on a Monday, they could get it on Wednesday.

Pete Alwinson:
Absolutely, they can get it any day they want.

Steve Brown:
You archive it there.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
It was, I had a great time. I went over and spent some time with these guys. It would have been better if it was a woman’s ministry, but I’ve got to deal with ugly men. And, I went over and we just had a great time.

Pete Alwinson:
It was great.

Steve Brown:
And you have some great tech people and some people involved in it. And, it’s called Forge

Pete Alwinson:
The Forge Truth Podcast.

Steve Brown:
Forge Truth Podcast.

Pete Alwinson:
And Steve, you’ll be on it soon.

Steve Brown:
Hey listen, go to ForgeTruth.com there is so much on that website that is so good and so much more that is to come and you need to be aware of it. Pete, as you know, comes in on Fridays and for the last 25, almost 26 years, you’ve sat in that chair and straightened me out.

Pete Alwinson:
Taking the blame.

Steve Brown:
And taking the blame. That’s why I invited you, man. I was tired of getting those letters. Listen, we love to get your questions and you can ask a question by calling 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 7. You can record your question and we sometimes put you on the air. You can write to

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

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

or you can e-mail your question to [email protected] and I promise we’ll take you seriously. By the way, if you can help us financially, we’ll even take you more seriously. No, we really won’t. But if you can, please do. And I promise that we’ll squeeze every dime for the glory of God. Pete, why don’t you lead us in prayer and then we’ll get to some of these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
All right, let’s go. Our Great Father, thank you for the joy of being able to come into your presence at any time because you are the God who is sovereign, that you are nearby, that you know all of what is going on in all of our lives. You’re kind, you’re good. You’re loving. You are the supreme king of heaven and earth. And Lord Jesus, you are the only savior of the world. We praise you. We really ask that you would continue to work in our lives. Thank you for what’s gone on this week. And, but we pray you’d redeem the things that we think were bad and turn to good. And in a glorious way bring honor and glory through what you do in our lives. We need you big time. Father, be with our pastors, our teachers, our leaders, our priests, all those that will be proclaiming your word this week-end as we get with your people, and we pray that you would be lifted up and glorified then and there as well as right now as we do the Q&A. We committed to you. In Jesus’ strong name we pray. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, this is an e-mail and this is the question. Do our loved ones in heaven see us?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, we don’t know, do we? Exactly, a hundred percent.

Steve Brown:
No. We know that once, there is an example in the Scripture where they did. But that’s very, very rare.

Pete Alwinson:
Which one are you thinking about?

Steve Brown:
Well, I was thinking of Lazarus, but there are others, there may be others, I don’t know. But it’s not a common thing, and I think that’s the way God created us. You know, the problem with death work and mourning time and grief work is the facing of the reality that your loved one is gone. And as you and I both, when we’ve taught seminary students how to do funerals, we’ve made sure that they understand that they have to cause the family and maybe even harshly to face the reality of death. That’s why funerals are good with a coffin open because it’s hard to ignore the fact that that’s a corpse. And you don’t start healing until you psychologically have dealt with the reality that there’s nobody to wind the clocks, that the foot falls you were used to hearing are no longer there, that the laughter’s not there and it won’t be. And if you go too far down this road and the Scripture doesn’t. You put off the healing that is absolutely necessary for a person.

Pete Alwinson:
Well said, well said, on all counts. And so, just agreeing with you on that and seeing that the need is to recognize too that heaven is another dimension. It might not be way up there. It’s another dimension, God certainly is here and interacting with us and he is available to us. So, I love your processing that and knowing that he is omnipresent as well as transcendent and glorified.

Steve Brown:
Do you know that old story of the two women were sitting in church waiting for a funeral when the wife of the husband went up to the casket, leaned over, and started wailing and said, George, speak to me. George, speak to me. And one lady said to her friend, if George speaks to her, I’m out of here. I’m out the door right over there. And she said, there’s no door over there. And she says, well, where do they want one? This is another e-mail question, Pete. What is the purpose of the Holy Spirit and our lives as Christians?

Pete Alwinson:
Wow, that’s a great question. Raises the whole point of the ministry of the Holy Spirit overall and your book, they ought to get and read.

Steve Brown:
It’s called Follow the Wind. And it was a hard book to write. Cause there isn’t a lot of resource. There isn’t, you know, that’s an area that is avoided in many places, not among our charismatic friends, but in mainline denominational, you don’t find a lot about that.

Pete Alwinson:
There’s a lot of people that want to just kind of ignore him.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
But you know, the Holy Spirit does take a pro Jesus approach almost all the time.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. He’s a pointer.

Pete Alwinson:
He’s the pointer. And so, when we overemphasize the work of the Holy Spirit, we can get into trouble, but we can also underestimate

Steve Brown:
That’s true

Pete Alwinson:
how he energizes our faith and encourages us to really experience grace on a daily basis, which is what we need.

Steve Brown:
So, the Holy Spirit does a lot of things in the life of, he convicts us of sin.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. He comforts us.

Steve Brown:
He comforts us when we’re scared to death.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
He lifts up Scripture and applies it in our minds. He teaches us. In fact, this morning, Jeremy, who’s our producer and I were recording the last six chapters of the Gospel of John. And we’re going to post that and some other Scripture on our website. But it’s just the reading of Scripture and we were, and those are the chapters, there toward the end of John when Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit. And he says, it’s to your advantage that I go away cause I’m going to send you something that’s going to blow your mind and it’s going to make a big difference. Well, he didn’t put it that way, but that’s what he meant. And that’s the Holy Spirit.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Yeah. So, we can’t wait to hear that. And you reading Scripture is just awesome, you know, and the reality is that we are commanded by the apostle Paul to be filled with the Spirit. And not drunk, but be filled with the Spirit.

Steve Brown:
That’s right.

Pete Alwinson:
And so, that’s something we can do every day. Lord, fill me and keep filling me all day long. Give me your power, ability to think your thoughts after you, be comforted and encouraged.

Steve Brown:
Do you remember that booklet that Bill Bright wrote called How to Be Filled With the Holy Spirit?

Pete Alwinson:
Yes, but I can’t give you the content on that.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, I remember the content, Dr. Bright was an acquaintance friend of mine. And his lectures on that made a major difference in Anna, my wife’s life. And he says, you breathe. He calls it spiritual breathing. You breathe out and you breathe. Breathe out as the sin, breathe in the Spirit. And at that moment you are filled with the Spirit and you trust that that’s true in faith. Listen, you know, we can’t deal with this subject unless we talk about what’s the difference between being filled and being baptized with the Holy Spirit?

Pete Alwinson:
Right. And it illustrates one of the major points, I Corinthians 12:13 says.

That it is by the Holy Spirit that we are baptized into Christ or engrafted into Christ.

In other words, the Holy Spirit is really the one who takes the work of Christ and applies it into our hearts, converts us.

Steve Brown:
What about it being a second work of grace?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that’s where we would say that there’s many works of grace of the Holy Spirit ongoing, but it’s not a unique or different baptism of the Spirit.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. There’s only one baptism.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Ephesians are pretty clear about that.

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

Steve Brown:
And so, but there can be 5 or 10 or 15 fillings of the Holy Spirit. And they’re significant. You know, you get such characters as Dwight L. Moody, who spent some time in his room and he came out and said he had seen God, and it was the Holy Spirit that brought him to that particular point. And I bet that every Christian who’s listening to us right now has had an experience of the Holy Spirit, even if they didn’t recognize it. Say God, let me know when that happens. And he generally says yes to that kind of prayer.

Pete Alwinson:
And I think we ought to say, Lord, do amazing things through my life and let me know it’s you.

Steve Brown:
That’s right. And if you don’t, that’s okay. You know, I don’t get to vote, but that’d be really cool if you’d let me see it occasionally.

Pete Alwinson:
Amen. Amen. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Was Jesus crucified on Friday night and raised on Sunday morning? If he was, how does that fit in with the three days and three nights?

Pete Alwinson:
Well, the answer is yes, and that’s an easy one to answer because in the Hebrew mind, right, they considered part of a day, a day. And so, we don’t have a chronology issue. If it was part of a day, it’s considered a day, and that’s how the gospels treats it.

Steve Brown:
So, it was an Hebraic, colloquial expression.

Pete Alwinson:
Mm-hmm. That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
You know, I was just getting ready to answer by saying, but the Bible made a mistake.

Pete Alwinson:
It never makes a mistake. Right? You were just going to set it up and light a fire here.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. You know, at one time, that’s what I would’ve said. I, in fact, underlined places in Scripture that I said there were inconsistencies, but I’m older and a little bit wiser, and they have all disappeared.

Pete Alwinson:
Yes. Amazing.

Steve Brown:
God’s word is true. It’s true truth. It’s a revealed propositional truth And the stories are true too. Hey, Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.