Faith for Others to Flourish [Part 1]

Pastor, author and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. When you have that faith vision and you speak it out in accord with your faith, there is something that changes in the cosmos. There is a power that is released.

There is an opportunity of transformation that comes about. And you, therefore, are literally blessed to be a blessing. 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 today's message in a series titled The Power of Blessing 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 can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But right now, let's get started with today's teaching in the series Praying with Power.

Here is Alan Wright. I read a story some years ago of a valedictorian in a high school class, and he really wanted to thank God or mention God in his valedictorian address at graduation. But the officials had told him, you can't mention God at all from this platform. It's a public school. So he had a little fun, though. He knew hundreds of students, and they had a little conspiracy.

They colluded ahead of time. And so he got up to the microphone to give his speech, and the first thing he did was he sneezed. And then about 200 students said in unison, God bless you.

Are you ready for some good news? There's a blessing that is at work within you and that you have to give to others that is something far greater than any cordial greeting to someone when you see them or some nice thing to say when they sneeze. You are authorized by God to be like God in this, to have a faith vision over others' lives for them to flourish. And when you have that faith vision and you speak it out in accord with your faith, there is something that changes in the cosmos.

There is a power that is released. There is an opportunity of transformation that comes about. And you, therefore, are literally blessed to be a blessing. Would you turn with me to Hebrews chapter 11 this morning to one of the most famous chapters really in the Bible. It's about all the heroes of faith. And we're going to see this morning just how the blessing is actually just a form of expressed faith. And so we're going to talk to you about faith and talk to you about the power of blessing as we're in the midst of a new series that is designed to thrill our hearts and to equip us in practical ways to train our tongues, to train our mentality, to speak blessing. And so here's a good place to understand the essence of why it's so powerful and it's Hebrews chapter 11.

I'm just going to read a few little pieces of it and then later I'll be coming back through and talking about a number of places. Hebrews 11 verse 1, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the Word of God so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. And then begins this parade of the great heroes in the hall of fame who have believed God for the most miraculous things imaginable.

And just jumping through to show you a few instances. Verse 7, By faith Noah being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen. It talks all about Noah and the ark. And then verse 8, By faith Abraham. And it talks all about Abraham and how he came up out of his homeland and just didn't know where he was going and yet God led him. And then how he and Sarah trusted God to give them a baby in their old age. And then verse 23, here's Moses. By faith Moses tells about several of the miraculous things happening through Moses's life. And it goes on and mentions in verse 30, By faith the walls of Jericho fell down. Talking about Joshua's enormous faith. And then at verse 32, What more shall I say? And it starts listing people like Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah, David and Samuel, the prophets.

Even listing at verse 35 women, some women who receive their dead back by resurrection. Listing these incredible miracles that have taken place. And it's so interesting, don't you love it when all of a sudden you're like, is that really in the Bible? You know how you've maybe read something a hundred times? And I've been, the revelation and the joy of my heart about the idea of the power blessing has been something reverberating in me for over 20 years.

And I've talked a lot about it over the years. And I thought I was well familiar with Hebrews 11. But there is a hero of the faith here that honestly, until just very recently, I didn't know he was listed here.

It's unusual. It's at verse 20, verse 21 rather, By faith Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, bowing in worship over the head of his staff. I didn't even know that was in there. Right there amongst the list of all the heroes of the faith is the act of blessing. Blessing is a theme that runs through the entire Bible. You know, one of the great ways to read the scripture is through the themes of scripture and things that you keep seeing coming back over and over and over again.

I love sometimes just to look at the Bible in this sense of how is this big story being tied together by this one thread? And so here's the instance of blessing. From the very beginning, you see this because God's interaction with humanity was He blessed Adam and Eve and then He said, Be fruitful and multiply. So right there, if God's interaction with us, His prime interaction with us is to bless us.

You start paying attention to this. So then it's no surprise that He blesses Noah, who becomes the one who is used to save the world. And then He calls up Abraham and how does He build faith in Abraham? He builds faith by blessing him repeatedly and speaking a vision over Abraham's life that this fatherless man with his old wife beyond childbearing years are going to be parents. So what is he doing?

He's calling them parents when not only are they not parents, but in the natural there's no way they could be parents. And then you recognize that He teaches the Hebrew patriarchs how to bless their children every Sabbath day to speak over them. And He tells the priest through Aaron that Aaron and all the priests, when the people of God gather, every time they gather, the priests are to lift their hands and say, The Lord bless you. The Lord keep you. The Lord be kind and gracious to you.

In other words, put a blessing on them. And the Bible says, And thus you'll put my name on them. So He's revealing here that when the blessing happens, something supernatural is taking place. And then we read of the patriarchs blessing their kids and the leaders like David blessing his household. And on this goes until you come to Jesus being born in Bethlehem. And He's the sinless Son of God.

If ever there was somebody that you would say, Well, He doesn't need to be receiving blessing from others, it would be Jesus, right? But Jesus is born and very soon a man who's a prophetic figure seems to come out of nowhere named Simeon. And he comes having been supernaturally really assigned to come.

And what does he do? He takes and places hand on baby Jesus and blesses him. When Jesus is getting ready to begin His ministry, His public ministry, He's getting ready to go into the wilderness, He's going to be tempted for 40 days. What happens is He's baptized and His Father in Heaven publicly, verbally blesses Him saying, This is My Son in whom I'm well pleased.

What is the Father doing there? Jesus has not yet begun His public ministry. He's not yet begun healing the sick or casting out demons. He's not yet begun His great teaching ministry.

He's not fed the poor. He's not died on a cross or been raised from the dead. And the Father is saying, This is My Son, and I'm well pleased in Him. In other words, you see how the blessing goes first.

That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Before God commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful, He blessed them. Before God called Abraham to father a nation, He blessed him. Before God released His Son into ministry, He blessed him.

Why? Because blessing is God's secret strategy to empower you to be all He made you to be. When others affirm you, most of the time it's because you've proven your worth.

Maybe you did well on a test, accomplished a goal, or proved yourself competent. Such affirmation is nice, but it's not the way of God. God's strategy is to declare your worth before you have done anything to prove it. In the kingdom of God, blessing is the fuel for your productivity, not the reward for it. Maybe you need your heart to be healed from old wounds caused by others withholding their blessing, or maybe you're ready to shatter that invisible ceiling that keeps you from soaring. Either way, Pastor Alan writes, the power of blessing will change your life. Change how you interact with others as you discover the ancient skill of the Hebrew patriarchs as they bless their children. Learn how to tune your heart to accept blessing and reject curse.

Most of all, drink in the unquenchable blessing of God in Jesus Christ. Get motivated God's way with Alan Wright's seven message CD album, The Power of Blessing. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Call us at 877-544-4860 or come to our website, PastorAlan.org.

Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. And Jesus then when he ministers, he blesses people. He began his ministry with a series of Beatitudes in which he talked about blessed are the poor in spirit. And he describes how there's an inversion of the way you would normally think of blessedness. When people brought their little children to him, what he did was he laid his hands on them, the Bible says, and he blessed them. And the last thing that Jesus did is he was leaving the earth in Luke 24.

He lifted up his hands as he was ascending to heaven, literally. And he blessed the disciples. Paul and Peter both pick up on this theme and say that if you really want to understand the gospel, then what will happen is you will learn not only to bless those that treat you well, but you'll also learn the gigantic secret of blessing those who persecute you. This is a theme that runs and ties together the whole Bible.

It's absolutely magnificently important. And then we come to Hebrews chapter 11. And it's this famous chapter about faith. It's a chapter about about the great, great heroes. And the people that are listed here are ones that have believed for the impossible and the impossible became possible. These are the ones who we remember for being the giants of faith vision, of seeing something.

And you think about what is mentioned here. It starts with God himself. In other words, the greatest example of faith is God himself, because God created everything that exists out of nothing. Theologians call it kratio ex nihilo. There was nothing and God created everything. How did he do this? Well, we learn from Hebrews that what he did was he made what was visible out of what was invisible, that here's the essence of faith.

It is seeing something that you can't see with the natural eyes. But this was not a surprise to God. When he said, Let there be light. It wasn't something new to God, because God is light.

And he had already a vision of what could be. And when he said, Let there be light in the midst of speaking of that word, then light burst forth at 186,000 miles per second and established itself as the fastest possible movement in the universe. And at the same time, bursting forth with stars in galaxy upon galaxy, it was extraordinary. And this is a little solar system that we've got here revolving around a medium-sized star called the sun. We've learned that the earth is very small compared to the sun.

The earth, a million of them could fit inside the sun, which is to compare to the earth where a golf ball, it'd be like filling up a school bus with golf balls. That's how big our sun is. But our sun's not that big.

I mean, it's bright and you can get sunburned and you can't get very close to it, and you're ready for fall to arrive just because you're tired of being hot. And yet it's not even that big, because they have discovered the Canis Majoris star, the big dog star, that if earth were to fit inside of it, instead of being a million earths, it'd have to be seven quadrillion earths, which means if it earth with a golf ball, you'd have to have enough to fill up Mount Everest. That's how big the big dog star is, burning with light. That's the kind of thing we're talking about here in Hebrews 11. That's the level of stuff we're talking about, is the kind of there is no light, and just speak out, let there be light, and that's the kind of magnitude of miracle we're talking about. And then it goes, talks about Noah. Noah, it's a big level miracle, because Noah's got to believe that though there's not a cloud in the sky, that it's going to rain, and it's going to rain so much that it's going to flood everywhere so much that you've got to have this big boat. And he's got to believe that God's specifications for this boat are going to work, and that he's going to be able to build it, and that there's going to be one boat that's going to build it, and that there's going to be one boat with one door, and this is the one way that anybody will be saved, and that he'll get all these animals, and that he's got to believe it'll happen, and then he he gets on this boat, and for six months he's out there floating on water, and then he's got to believe that one day it's going to be dry land again. And he's got to believe that God is going to use him to repopulate this earth, and that God's goodness is going to continue on. I mean it's big time level, miracle. And then he comes to Abraham and Sarah, and this is big because, well Abraham's 100 years old when they finally have have Isaac.

He's 100. And see they've been childless, and Sarah not being able to have children, and so even if you'd come to her when she was a younger woman and said you're going to have a baby, it'd have been hard to believe, but then she's just so old it's just beyond, in other words it's beyond the time that it's possible, and then natural for them to have children, and not only had to believe that they were going to have a child, but the bigger thing they were believing that made it so miraculous, their faith so great, is that they had to believe that God was going to use their son to be the birthplace of a nation. And they had something else to believe on top of that, and is it not only the birthplace of a people, a nation, but that through their family the whole world would be blessed.

Come on, this is big, right? And then he talks about Moses is in this list, and several things about Moses, but not least of which Moses had to believe when God said, if you and the people will put blood over the doorposts in the Hebrew homes, then when this destroyer comes through you will be saved, and you will be considered spotless and unharmed, simply because the blood of an innocent lamb. This is hard to believe, but not only that, they get up to a point where the Egyptian army is pressing in behind them, and the big red sea in front of them, and they are going to be absolutely massacred. And he has to have a word from God that says, lift up your staff and part the water of the red sea.

You got to have some kind of faith to envision a red sea opening up so that you can walk through on dry land. This is the heroes of the faith we're talking about here. And then he talks about Jericho. This is Joshua.

Joshua loved Joshua. He's got to envision walls coming down. I was researching again what those walls were like according to the excavations. They probably were double walls, some of the thickest in the ancient world, and he was told that you're going to walk around the city for six days in a row, and walk around it, and then on the seventh day, walk around it seven times.

On the seventh time around, I want you to blow those trumpets, and let everybody let a loud shout, and the wall is going to fall flat. That was the plan, and Joshua believed it. We're talking about the heroes of faith here. We're talking about the most miraculous, unbelievably, unimaginably great miracles that you have to have some kind of eyes of faith to see. He talks about Daniel and the lion's den.

He talks about women receiving their dead back to them through resurrection. I mean, how in the world do you make a list like Hebrews chapter 11? I mean, you've got to believe for something incredible. You've got to have had a faith that's remarkable. You've got to have had seen something in the spirit that you were able to see beyond what any natural eye could possibly see if you're going to make it in this list.

There's some people that aren't in this list. I mean, it's kind of like at the end, the writer of Hebrews goes, I don't got enough time to tell you about all the heroes. So, you know, it could be others included, but seems like Elijah and Elisha should be mentioned here.

Come on, Elijah, that day he defeated a 450 prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, called down fire on wet wood. That was pretty good. That should have maybe made it, didn't make the list. What about Elisha who could just pray for people and they came back from the dead?

That's pretty good. That might should have made it. And I know it mentions the prophets, but come on, it shouldn't at least be mentioned by name, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea, at least Hosea. I mean, if you are a preacher and you can believe God that you're supposed to marry a prostitute and still have a preaching career, you ought to make it into this list. What do you got to do to make it into a list like this if Elijah and Elisha can't make it in there? And then you come down there at verse 21 and you're reading all these stories, you know, red seas, mouths of lions shutting up, and you get Jacob who leaned on his staff and blessed his grandsons. That makes the list?

An old man meeting his grandsons and saying, God bless you, and I hope you have a nice life. That makes the list? See, in order, if you're in this list, it must mean that whatever you did is so exemplary of the supernatural power of a faith vision that it has world-shaking power.

That's how you make this list. And right here in the middle of it is a tired old man who spent most of his life deceiving, conniving, and striving, but near his deathbed he spoke out a blessing over his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh. Is the blessing that powerful that it should be cluded in the list of the hall of fame of faith?

Yes, that's the whole point. It is an expression of faith when you have a vision over someone else's life for them to flourish. Blessing is the expression with your own lips and your own actions of a vision of faith for someone else to flourish even though there is not evidence of that flourishing yet.

Alan Wright. That's encouragement for today. It's part of our teaching on the subject in the series, the power of blessing faith for others to flourish.

And we've got more with Alan in just a moment with additional insight on this for your life and the final word. Before God commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful, he blessed them. Before God called Abraham to father a nation, he blessed him. Before God released his son into ministry, he blessed him.

Why? Because blessing is God's secret strategy to empower you to be all he made you to be. When others affirm you, most of the time it's because you've proven your worth.

Maybe you did well on a test, accomplished a goal, or proved yourself competent. Such affirmation is nice, but it's not the way of God. God's strategy is to declare your worth before you have done anything to prove it. In the kingdom of God, blessing is the fuel for your productivity, not the reward for it. Maybe you need your heart to be healed from old wounds caused by others withholding their blessing.

Or maybe you're ready to shatter that invisible ceiling that keeps you from soaring. Either way, Pastor Alan writes, the power of blessing will change your life. Change how you interact with others as you discover the ancient skill of the Hebrew patriarchs as they bless their children. Learn how to tune your heart to accept blessing and reject curse. Most of all, drink in the unquenchable blessing of God in Jesus Christ. Get motivated God's way with Alan Wright's seven message CD album, The Power of Blessing. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Call us at 877-544-4860 or come to our website, pastoralan.org. Alan, as we kicked off this teaching today, and we'll pick back up with it on the next program, Faith for Others to Flourish.

Now, what exactly can we expect to hear in part two? Well, you know, you could understand faith if you're praying for somebody. It's where I have confidence and I can trust God. Maybe you're praying for somebody and that person has very little confidence right now in God.

Their trust has been rattled. Well, blessing is like that, but instead of being a prayer that is spoken to God, a blessing is a vision of faith that's spoken to an individual or to a group of people. So in other words, you have people in your life that you can see things that maybe they can't see about themselves that are of great virtue and you have faith for their future.

You have faith for how they can prosper and grow and how God can use them. And when you speak that out and it's joined with your faith, it has an amazing power to release someone into a destiny. That's the power of blessing. Yeah, so much different than being controlling, manipulative. It's a releasing into God's plan for someone's life by you calling it forth. And that's the ancient biblical art of blessing. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.