Holy Attraction [Part 2]

Where did all this come from in the first place in this sin-bent world in which we look and we see so much selfishness? The question is not, why are people so sinful?

The question is, where has all this good come from in such a sin-broken world? That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series God Moments, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina.

If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It's Pastor Alan's book by the same title, God Moments, and it can be yours for your donation this month to Allen Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you a copy of Pastor Alan's book, God Moments, our special offer today. Contact us at pastorallen.org, that's pastorallen.org, or call 877-544-4860, that's 877-544-4860. More on this later in the program, but right now, let's get started with today's teaching on God Moments.

Here is Allen Wright. I'd like to say that I did something especially faithful to make this God Moment happen, but I didn't. And though I prayed fervently that evening, I was no giant of prayer. And though I was seeking God, I can't say I was panting after Him like the deer after the water broke. Beloved, I just knelt and I prayed, and God chose to come near to me that night. I had thought about holiness, I'd even studied the subject, but that night I experienced the mystery like Rudolph Otto's classic description of holy encounters. I experienced a tremendous awe that might make a man cover his face and run. But at the same time, I felt a mysterious fascination with the holy presence of God. For a few life-changing moments, here's what happened. God let me see the weight of my sin. For a few life-changing moments, I could feel the weight of His glory. I was just, beloved, I was overcome by this compelling holy love that had come in my dorm room like an encompassing cloud. And here's what happened, was instantly I saw the selfishness of my soul. I had charted my course without any real consultation at all with God.

I had not asked Him a single time, God, what do you want me to do with my life? And I was, at this moment, completely aware of just how selfish my pursuit was, and how I'd wanted to shut God out and ignore His call on my life. And at the same moment, I was utterly undone over my sin.

And yet, here's what happened. While I was weeping over my sin, I was intensely drawn towards this beautiful, pure presence that began filling my heart, and I wept openly, profusely, and passionately. I cried tears that I didn't even know I had. It was as though some deep well of repentance suddenly became this artesian spring, and I just wept and I wept. But in the midst of this, beloved, of the emotional flood, there came the most intense peace that I have ever known. I suddenly wanted what that holy presence wanted for me. And I felt my soul being washed. And in the midst of that moment, God spoke distinctly to my heart.

It was so simple, so beautiful, so quiet, I heard in my heart, not my ears, but I heard it so plainly in my heart, Allen, you know I've called you to the ministry, don't you? And I just wept and said, yes, Lord, yes. And that was it.

That was it. It was just a moment. It changed my entire destiny.

I told my roommates that evening, I called my mom that night and wept and told her. And never, not once, never once since that time, all those years ago, decades ago, have I questioned, doubted, or forgotten that moment. It's a moment that would shape every detail of my life and would move me towards a very narrow path that God had ordained for me, and it's been a path of unspeakable blessing. I love being a pastor. There have been incredibly hard times, and there are days that are incredibly hard, I go, oh, I wish I was doing something.

But I love this. And the most fascinating whole facet of that holy encounter for me was not just hearing God call me in the ministry, though I remain awed that He would want me to serve Him. But what most overwhelms me in my recollection is that though the well of tears might surface at times, when I recall that experience, I'm astonished by this simple fact.

And here's the point of me telling you the story. I was suddenly attracted toward that which had previously repelled me. I was drawn toward the very thing that previously I was running from. How can you explain something like that? How can it be that you have moments in your life where everything within your flesh is wanting to go in one direction, but then something happens and you're drawn in another direction?

I'll tell you how there's only one way that can happen. It's God. It's a God moment of holy attraction.

And I know my story is big and it's dramatic, and maybe you say, well, I've never had a big moment like that, and I've never been called into the ministry. What I'm just trying to illustrate for you is that God is at work when you are headed in wrong directions. There is a way of God who is wooing you and drawing you intensely, passionately, wonderfully, feather dusting the crumbs of our sin onto the wooden spoon, eager to take it into the fire and burn it away so that we would have a life of purity and live the life that He's called us to. You see, we don't repent of our sin because all of a sudden we've become good rather than bad. We repent, we change course because we are drawn by God Himself into the very holy life that He has planned and destined for us.

Wow! And there is no illustration in the Scriptures better than this than Jesus' famous story of the two sons. So finally we come to this incredible text in Luke 15 where the opening sentence of Jesus' famous parable is just staggering that there was a younger son that said to his father, Father, give me the sheer property that's coming to me and he divided his property amongst them. Kenneth Bailey describes the stabbing pain the father must have felt upon hearing the son's request. For over 15 years, Bailey says, I've been asking people of all walks of life from Morocco to India and from Turkey to Sudan about the implications of a son's request for his inheritance while the father is still living.

The answer has always been emphatically the same. The conversation runs as follows, Bailey writes, Has anyone ever made such a request in your village? Never. Could anyone ever make such a request? Impossible. If anyone ever did, what would happen? The response is always, his father would beat him, of course.

Why? The answer comes, the request means that the son wants his father dead. Bailey explains it normally after signing over his possessions to his son, the father is still entitled to live off the proceeds, but because the younger son in Jesus' parable demands and gets the full use of the inheritance before the father's death, the implication is agonizing. It's as though the boy said, Father, I would rather you were dead. If you want to just pause and understand the heart of God, you can see it here. If you could imagine the piercing sting of pain that that earthly father felt when his son said, I just assumed you were dead. I'd like all my inheritance now.

I'd like to do it on my own. Once you've begun to understand and consider that, you could see something into the pain of God's heart. For every single person who's ever walked away from God and turned away from him is essentially saying, Father, I'd rather you were dead.

The story, the parable is so remarkable. I would have expected the father to simply decline. I wouldn't be surprised if the father had beaten the boy into submission, or shamed him into staying, or physically restrained him from leaving, but what the text tells us, so matter of fact, just begs belief.

The father divided his property between them. The father could have kept his son home by fear or by force. He could have made a dozen plans by which to sabotage the boy's folly. Once the boy was gone, the wealthy patriarch could have sent servants to recapture the carousing kid, but from the beginning, the father decided to rely on a different strategy. He would let the boy become repulsed with his own folly and be drawn back to the father who had always loved him. It was risky, but it was simple. The father, by loving his boy anyway, would allow the beauty and blessing of home to travel in the son's wayward heart until eventually it would draw him home.

That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. God's always been there. In every moment, you narrowly escape from danger. In every moment, you were surprised by a blessing.

In every moment, you just knew the direction to take. God was there. Your life is defined by countless moments of God's grace. Perhaps they've been covered by the sands of time or have just gone unnoticed in the rush of life, but your life is full of God moments. When you make a gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's heart-stirring book, God Moments, that will lead you on a spiritual treasure hunt to uncover your God moments. It's Alan Wright's timeless book, God Moments.

Discover your God moments in the past and be filled with fresh faith today. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.

When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org.

Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. When the younger son tried to live it up, he wound up barely living at all. One day, destitute, hungry, working in pig pens, associating with the very animals that were unclean to the Hebrew people, he actually considered eating the pig slop. He'd reached the depths of his waywardness, not because he thought of eating food fit for pigs, but because the pigs are so unclean to the Hebrew people.

He was not only associated with defiled creatures, he'd become like them. The marvel of the God moment of holy attraction is not that God has always prevented you from taking an ugly path, but in the depths of your ugliness, God has still called you homeward. If you want to discover moments of holy attraction, you will have to take a painful look at the moments in which you resisted God's way the most. So it's not an invitation to wallow in yesterday's sins, but to take an honest look at your life, identify the painful moments in which you, in one way or another, had said, Father, I'd rather you were dead. And there you're going to start finding your God moments of holy attraction.

Well, the younger son, he reached total emptiness of belly and heart before the text says he came to his senses. And look what he said. He said, How many of my father's hired men have food to spare? Here I am, starving to death. This is what I want you to see. Please don't miss this.

If you don't get anything else, get this right here. The boy came home because he was attracted to his father. The boy came home because he was eternally drawn to his father's blessing. Stop and ponder the unspeakable power of a father's lifelong blessing hidden in the wayward son's heart. The attraction of home was so compelling that it overcame the boy's shame and folly and stubbornness. Yeah, it was the son's choice to return, yet it was like an irresistible attraction because amid the snorting of the hogs, the boy somehow heard the sound of childhood laughter in his own backyard. With a plain view of pig waste, he somehow saw his father's smile, and while still breathing the crude odor of swine swill in a faraway land, the foolish son somehow smelled in his mind's eye, in his mind's heart, he began to smell lamb chops sizzling on his father's grill.

The only way the foolish son ever found his way home was by the stunning attraction of a better, holier, healthier way. That is a moment of holy attraction, and it's the only way that anyone finds the Heavenly Father's feast. I love that story because what it proves to us is the way of this feather-dusting father is not to shame or beat you into submission to His will, but is instead in the mystery of His grace to let you become attracted to what is holy. And somehow, by His grace, every single moment that you have turned away from sin and turned towards God, every one of those moments, you can be sure of this, it was God who was there to work and to will inside of your heart. And what I'm saying, beloved, is therefore, go on a spiritual treasure hunt for every one of these moments in your life.

See, there are people who you've met, and maybe you're one of them, just live with a consciousness of their God moments of holy attraction. And you'll hear these people, they're saying things like, if it hadn't been for God, there's no telling where I would be today. If it weren't for God, I can tell you right now, I would have gone into ruin. If it hadn't been for what God had done, there's no telling what I would have become.

These are the people that love to sing Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, and now I'm found, was blind, and now I see. See, sometimes in describing, looking back on those kind of God moments, you might say, I don't know what happened to me, I was going in the wrong direction, but I just couldn't rest. Or sometimes you might say, I recognize the error of my ways.

Or you might just say, I came to my senses. Or I might say, it just didn't seem right. If you're skeptical, you might say, well, I learned right and wrong from my parents. It wasn't God. Well, let me ask you, where'd your parents learn right from wrong? Where'd all this come from in the first place, in this sin-bent world in which we look and we see so much selfishness?

The question is not, why are people so sinful? The question is, where has all this good come from in such a sin-broken world? And see, eventually, if you trace it back, everything holy and good comes from God. Every good gift comes from God.

And so I encourage you, go, beloved, on a spiritual treasure hunt for the God moments of holy attraction. Start with considering the low moments. I'm not saying wallow in it, I'm not saying brood over it, but you need to consider the low moments in your moral life. Don't go back and wallow, don't be tantalized by them. But remember how bad it was and how everything unholy would have ruined your life.

What would have destroyed you, but it didn't. Because here you are now. Then, think about every positive change in your life. I would encourage you to journal about this. I would encourage you to sit down and write it out.

Think about it. When did you kick a bad habit? When did you change some part of your personality that just was flawed?

When was it that you matured in some way over some old childish manner you had? Or when you were headed down a wrong path and some good person came in your life and helped draw you in the right way. You were thinking of destruction, but a heavenly prompting intervened. You go back and look at these moments because what you do when you go back and think about those things is you're going to see that God was there.

God was the one drawing you. And then the third step is just thank and praise God for every moment that you can remember like that and regularly remind yourself. So it's like when I tell my testimony about God calling me into the ministry, it does more than just encourage others who hear it. What it does is it reactivates for me that this is my moment of holy attraction and I realize I in my own flesh was going to go in the wrong direction but God. And it builds my faith and it builds my sense of just wanting to obey Him.

That's what happens. When our son Bennett was a toddler, we lived in a house, had a retaining wall. It was about three or four feet up away from the driveway and Bennett liked to get up there and walk along that little wall. And I didn't want a little three-year-old walking on that wall. It was too dangerous and I told him not to walk on it and yet he still did. And one day he fell halfway down before catching himself, scraped himself terribly, bleeding his little legs and he's just screaming and crying. And I got him and began to minister to him, cleaned up his legs.

He must have cried for 20 minutes. And the whole time I'm sitting there with compassion for this little boy because he's bleeding and he's hurt. And nothing in me is going to say to him, look, I told you not to get on that wall. Instead, I just wanted to minister to him in that moment. Why did I not need to say I told you not to get on the wall? Because the boy is there suffering from his own disobedience and after he cries for about 20 minutes, this three little boy, and I'll never forget, he just looks up and he says, now I understand why you don't want me walking on that wall, Daddy. I didn't have to ever say don't walk on that wall again because he saw a better way.

He wanted to do what his father had said because he'd seen the light on this matter. I'm telling you, this is the way it is with God. Oh, God is so wonderful.

He's so good. And the call to obedience is a wondrous call to be able to obey God as a gift and God is wooing you even right now. There is a deep, deep thirst that God identifies within you. And it's that thirst that God is using to call you unto himself. I think sometimes about thirst because I drink, let's just be honest, I drink too much Diet Coke.

Okay, there, I said it. I drink too much Diet Coke and it's my substitute for not drinking too much sweet tea. But I ought to just be drinking water. Everybody says drink the water.

All the medical community, drink the water. It's so good if you just drink the water. And yet I sit down and eat a meal and I want something else to drink. But just not long ago I was hiking on a mountain and it was a hot summer day. I was hiking and I was exhausted. I was sweating profusely and I'd run out of water.

We got back down off the mountain. We finally go to get some water and I just started drinking the water. I felt like I could just drink a gallon of water. And while I was drinking it, it must have been the Lord showing this to me, the thought of drinking a Diet Coke was repulsive to me in that moment because water would have been the only thing that would satisfy. What did it prove to me? That there's a deeper thirst for me that really is for the water that my body needs.

Not a diet drink with a lot of sodium in it and everything else, blah, blah, blah. I'm saying there's a deeper thirst in you and God has a way of getting you in touch with it so you, like the younger son, can fall into the Father's arms. The plan of God always has been to lure you into something that's better. He doesn't beat you into submission.

He doesn't make you a slave because you're a son or a daughter and He loves you and He woos you and He attracts you and He intercedes for you and He waits for you in every single good moment in your life where you chose the right path. That is a God moment of holy attraction and that's the gospel. Alan Wright, that's good news for today, right? It's today's teaching on holy attraction in the series of God moments.

Hey, stay with us. Alan is back here in a moment with a final word for today. Unlock the power of blessing your life. Discover God's grace-filled vision for your life by signing up for Alan Wright's free daily blessing. If you want to fill your heart with grace and encouragement, get Alan Wright's daily blessing.

It's free and just a click away at pastorallen.org. God's always been there. In every moment, you narrowly escaped from danger. In every moment, you were surprised by a blessing.

In every moment, you just knew the direction to take. God was there. Your life is defined by countless moments of God's grace. Perhaps they've been covered by the sands of time or have just gone unnoticed in the rush of life, but your life is full of God moments. When you make a gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's heart-stirring book, God Moments, that will lead you on a spiritual treasure hunt to uncover your God moments. It's Alan Wright's timeless book, God Moments.

Discover your God moments in the past and be filled with fresh faith today. The Gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.

When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, pastorallen.org. So, Alan, some of my favorite stories of God moments are when people tell me there's no reason, there's no explanation that I would be serving God the way I'm serving or involved in a lifestyle that may have any hint of looking holy because of the bad sinner that I am. And I think that's a God moment right there. Well, I believe enough that we were born in sin to say that because of that, it's like we've got these sin-tainted spectacles on.

We can't see everything. And so we need God to give us some new glasses. We need God to be the one who actually makes us want the thing that would be best for us. He is drawing us and attracting us towards His own holiness. And it's a worthy pursuit to go on a spiritual treasure hunt and look backwards in your life and realize He didn't beat you into submission. He didn't make you a slave. He wooed you. He attracted you to Himself. Something inside you has changed. Your want to has changed. And it's going to continue to change because He's a God of holy attraction. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.