The Power of Blessing

This is Rodney from the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we explored manhood within Jesus Christ. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Sit back, enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and choosing the Truth Podcast Network.

The Truth Network Podcast is brought to you by our friends at Masculine Journey. I was skeptical, Pastor Wright. I picked this book up, The Power to Bless, and I thought, okay, what's this going to be about? Is this going to be another little psychological journey of pablum and happiness?

And it went deep and it hit my soul. Pastor Wright, The Power to Bless, the subtitle, How to Speak Life and Empower the People You Love, and you take people to the ultimate blessing found in Jesus Christ. First of all, thank you for this gift, this book, The Power to Bless. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Stu.

Thank you so very much. You know, at one point, when you write a book, you go through all these different possible titles, and at one point, I said, maybe we should just call it Beyond Hashtag Blessed, because that's the other place you see it, right? Hashtag blessed. You know, I mean, people are like, hey, I just had a great meal at such-and-such restaurant.

Hashtag blessed. It's something a lot deeper than that, boys. It goes deep, and you really go deep.

In the scripture, you go way back to the Old Testament. I want to get into this book, and I want people to know this book is in the pre-order phase right now, and of course, we'll play this program back a lot, because we need it. I need it, personally. Selfishly, if I'm the only one listening to you right now, I'm in your study, and I'm interviewing you about this, then praise the Lord, because you have been a blessing to me. And I'm not just saying that because I'm one of the folks that endorsed the book. But you have to, because of that. And I'm hoping it still sells the books.

I'm hoping it will still, but I know it will be a blessing. And I want to ask you about this simple question. This is my favorite question to ask my guest, especially you. I don't know if I've ever asked you this before, because you've been on my show so many times. You've hosted my show before, Pastor Wright.

Who is Alan Wright? Child of God. Co-heir with Christ. And I'm a husband of 35 years to Ann, who, as you know, is a force of nature, a delight, a joy, and a fantastic Bible teacher.

And dad to Bennett, who's married to Amy, who Bennett has just become a lawyer, and to Abby, who is finishing up her schooling at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And then pastoring a church for 24 years, same spot, a multi-site church in this region of the Piedmont, North Carolina, and serving as president of Alan Wright Ministries, and writing books. And so life is good, and God is good.

And I told my wife, she said, what would you want in your epitaph? The other day, I just said, well, just put, he tried. No matter what, we're trying to get the word out because God's good, and he's formed the world to be a place of blessing. And so we have so much to learn. And really, a lot of times when we're sharing the gospel, when we're describing the need for Christ, we start with a curse. But really, there is a curse. There is sin. I mean, just open your eyes.

Let's open your ears. But the creation starts with a blessing. It starts with good news that God made us, and he made us in his image. And so in this whole story of redemption, which you track through your book, The Power to Bless, you're trying to take a whole narrative. It is arguably the theme of scripture. Because think of this, the very first act of God with human beings was to bless them. He blessed them, and then he said, be fruitful and multiply and have dominion in the earth.

And Stu, I'll tell you, if a listener got nothing else except this point right here, the order is everything. For most of my life, I kind of lived the opposite of that. I thought, if I am fruitful and multiply, if I do a good job, if I perform well for God, then I'll be blessed. That's not the gospel. And what God does is he blesses in order to empower our productivity. So blessing is not the reward for productivity.

It's the fuel for it. So if you want to flourish, and if you know somebody in your life that you want to flourish, then let's take a lesson from God who right from the beginning blessed, which is a positive vision spoken in faith, affirming identity and attaching destiny to it. And it's something that anyone can learn to do. And that's a big part of the reason I've written the book. But I think you're right that this is part of what I've tried to show is blessing from the very opening page of the scripture all the way through until Jesus is hanging on the cross and becoming a curse for us so that we might receive the blessing that should have been just reserved for him.

That's woven all through the story. It is powerful. It's mystical.

But it's not magic. But it is God's way of changing the world. And that right there really, really puts a slam dunk or slams the door in the face of the prosperity gospel, which in a very real sense is just another indulgence or just another way to please God.

Well, if I perform enough, if I believe enough, if I speak enough things, well, God's going to like me. And what you're doing is taking blessing to a whole deeper level. The very source, the very solution to the curse is how Christ became a curse for us. The cross.

Yes. Which is so, our whole Christian gospel message. Sadly, there is no cross and there is no, there is no, you know, there is no work of Jesus that, you know, we're not emphasizing that. But you're leaning into that in your book, which really blessed me as a lens for understanding blessing in general. I became fascinated for at least 10 years now with what is definitely the most important family blessing in the Old Testament. And arguably the most family, most important family blessing in the Bible, and certainly the most prevalent in the history of the Jewish faith. It's in Genesis Chapter 48, where Jacob is called upon by Joseph to bless Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. And this blessing is so important to God that he, through Jacob, mandated that this blessing would be spoken. So for 3700 years, every Sabbath, Jewish dads have been blessing their boys saying, may God make you as Ephraim and Manasseh. And here's the interesting thing.

Nobody seems to know why. I studied what all the rabbis said. A lot of rabbis say, well, maybe it's because these boys got along and other siblings in the Bible don't seem to get along.

But if you're going to bless your children to be like some great people, wouldn't you say be like Elijah and Elisha or Moses and Joshua or Abraham and Isaac, but Ephraim and Manasseh. And so I unveil this because I think this is where God has shown me some things about how in the end, and maybe we'll have time today to talk about it. It's a picture of the gospel, a picture of the cross, a picture of the great exchange. It's beautiful and marvelous.

Well, that right there is why I kept reading this book because I wanted to know the answers, what those names mean, the etymology. There's a lot of depth in there. The book is The Power to Bless. The author who's our guest today on Truth Talk is Pastor Alan Wright, who many of you have heard on the radio for years. He's been preaching the Word of God with his program through Alan Wright Ministries, and he has written this book, The Power to Bless. Pastor Wright, we're coming up on a break here, but somehow this book is woven into your spiritual DNA. And I want to talk, I asked you at the beginning of this program, who is Alan Wright? You shared a little bit about your testimony, how you met Christ. I want to get into that in the next segment. We're not going to have time, but the next segment to get into that, I want to get into how this book is connected to really your identity and our identity as believers. And the great spiritual blessings, that treasure trove, Ephesians 1, really enunciates.

Quick question going into the break. Folks that want to get the book, they want to get it, maybe get a bunch of copies even in pre-order, because I think you're offering a free audio book. Yes, Baker Books is offering, if you will pre-order the book from Amazon, you will then receive at release a free audio book as well, which is a great value. And so please pre-order the book now. Help launch this message of blessing. Tell everybody you know about it.

Get copies for others. I would appreciate it so much, because this is God's power to change lives. And I promise you that once you learn about how to bless someone's life, you'll be a believer and practice it for the rest of your life. It'll change somebody's life.

That is so cool. The book is The Power to Bless, and I guess they can just find it in all the places books are sold. Anywhere books are sold. Is there a ministry website that you send people to for your ministry? For all of our other resources and everything going on with us, pastorallen.org. And you can hear him preach, you can hear his messages, and look up all his other books. We're going to come back with Pastor Allen, and we're going to talk to him more about what it really means to be a blessing on a deeper level.

How this has changed his church and really catapulted his ministry to a whole other level, and why he wants to share this with all these other people, and why he's written a book about it. So stay tuned. More on Truth Talk with our special guest, Allen Wright, when we come right back.

Hang on. Have you ever been cursed? Have you ever heard any bad news?

Have you ever been criticized, made fun of? Well, with me, to counter this and to bring us all up. I mean, listen, we need some good news.

We need some blessing. I love this guy. Every time he opens up the mic to preach, he asks this question, are you ready for some good news?

And he's got my attention by then. He is pastor, author, Allen Wright, with Allen Wright Ministries. And I'm actually with him in the study at his church, on the property of Rinaldo Church, right here across the street from historic Rinaldo Gardens, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. But many of you all over the world have heard him online. His ministry, pastorallen.org.

And he's written this book now. This book is really a crowning message of your heart, your ministry. Now, I'm going to say something that you're not expecting, pastor. My sister, Karen, my brother-in-law, Todd, my awesome nieces, they'll come to lunch early January every year. They'll show up to our lunch after church, and it's January, it's New Year's, and they will just be on another level.

They will just be so anointed, they'll be so excited. We're like, why are you guys so excited? You know, we're just trying to have family lunch here and kind of get down to business. And, of course, we talk about what God taught us at our different churches.

Well, they said, you're not going to leave it. But this week was the blessing service. And so you're actually implementing, encouraging people to be a blessing and to verbally bless. Bless. So your church takes literally life and death are in the power of the tongue. And you've written a book called The Power to Bless.

Exactly. It's a life message for me, Stu, and indeed our church for over 20 years. Instead of exhorting people at the New Year to try harder, make more New Year's resolutions, which studies show everybody fails by the second week of February, except for about 8% succeed.

They don't work. It's noble as they are, and it's valiant to set goals. But what we say is, really, how does God empower us for change? He blessed Adam and Eve and then released them to be fruitful and multiply. And you see the thread begin with the Hebrew patriarchs, where this idea of blessing, like when Isaac, maybe some of the listeners know the story of Isaac, blesses inadvertently the wrong son. Jacob connives and deceives and steals Esau's blessing, the blessing that should have been reserved for that firstborn son. And I remember the first time I really studied that story, I thought, well, Isaac will just say, oops, you know, bless the wrong child.

That's not what the text says. Instead, he said, I have blessed him and indeed he'll be blessed. And it says he trembled violently when he realized he'd blessed the wrong son. You see what that saying is in the Hebrew mindset. They understood, as you were saying, Stu, words are not words can't fall empty to the ground.

Words can't be stuffed back down the mouth. And when it's blessing, it has an irrevocable power. So this is something we should pay attention to. And how is it that we could learn to craft blessing uniquely for people we love and learn to receive blessing? All of this through the lens of a fantastic blessing in the Bible, the blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh.

So that's what the book's all about. OK. And let's talk about how Pastor Alan Wright's life was changed by the gospel of Jesus Christ, which really is the anchor point to all blessing. That's out of which all these blessings. So take us to maybe a little bit about your testimony and then how this power of blessing has kind of been woven in to your DNA to go out. It's why I have a burning passion for everyone to know this blessing because it's what I miss.

And most of the people I know missed it to some degree and some have missed it severely and have only had curse. So my dad left home when I was in the fourth grade. And not too terribly long after that, my mom got on her knees one night. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister, but she really wasn't walking with the Lord. And she got on her knees one night and she said, God, she said, if you really exist, then I need your help because I'm sinking down.

And if I go down, I'll probably take these three boys with me. And that's all she did. She just cried out to God, you know? Well, I think it was within a couple of weeks, not really a neighbor, but a couple of miles away, an acquaintance came and knocked on her door and said, Marianne, I was awakened in the middle of the night and you were on my heart and I haven't been able to get you off my heart. I just wanted to come.

Is there something that you need? And my mother said, yes, there is, and told her about my dad leaving and about how much was on her. And that woman led my mom to the Lord.

And they then later talked about it. And the night that the lady was awakened in the middle of the night was the night my mom was praying. From there, my mom, I thought I'd watch it.

I'll start crying. You know something about your testimony? You just, it's so real. And then not long after that, my mom told me and my two brothers about Jesus and how real he was. And we got invited to a fantastic evangelical church. And that began my life with God. I loved my father, and he struggled with alcohol for most of his life. He was a well-known newsman on TV, exceptionally gifted, and a very, very sweet man, and I loved him. He coached my peewee football team.

He was a fantastic communicator and author and artist, and I wanted so much from him. But, you know, I look back on my life and, you know, my dad was in that generation. I'm sure a lot of listeners can identify where fathers didn't tell their kids very much how proud they were of them. I remember a couple of moments in my life. One was when I was in college, my first year.

And, boy, it was a lot harder in high school, and I studied really hard my first semester. And I made all A's, and I let my dad know. And he sent me a card, and he said, I'm really proud of you. And he said, above that is my love. It was the only card I ever got like that from him. I cherished it. I held onto it. Years later, when dad was doing better, and I had an opportunity with my brothers to say, Why don't we have some counseling?

Make up for some lost time. And in the counseling session, I said, Dad, there's something I'd like. I'd like for you to bless me.

He didn't know what it was, and even the counselor didn't know what it was. I said, I'm talking about the kind of blessing that Hebrew patriarchs spoke over their children. I'm talking about the way in which Jesus, when he was on earth, people were bringing their children to him because they wanted him to bless him.

I'm talking about something that has a positive vision, about something you really could affirm in my life, and what you see in me that's of real value. I think I'd really be blessed by that if you could do that, dad. And he said, okay. He came back to the next counseling session, and he had a couple of cards, one written for each of my brothers and for me. He said on his little card, it wasn't momentous, it wasn't awesome, it wasn't poetic, and it wasn't really biblical, but he just said, when I came home from the hospital, I was the baby of the family, my brother Mark said, Why do we have to get him? And he just said in his little card to me, he said, I now know why. It's because we would need you.

It's just a morsel, but I gobbled it up like a starving person. And I think that there are people all over, I think there are men listening to me right now that know exactly what I'm talking about. I think there are girls that know exactly what I'm talking about. You'd give anything to have your daddy's blessing. You do anything just because you realize there's something you're missing. And without that blessing, we're like Jacob, who I talk about in the book. Your life can fall into drift, shame, pretense. If you're not affirmed, then you're always looking for it.

If you're insecure, that's a form of basically anxiety that leads to most of our problems. And we can wind up with drift, no real direction in our life. There's so much purposelessness in the generation now. Maybe it's because we haven't spoken blessing into them that has said you have a future and a hope.

A way in which we could see our lives moving towards something. And I would have given a head up from my dad to have him be able to affirm that. You know, it was interesting. My dad started out his career in radio. And then he became a newsman for his whole life. He was a pioneer in TV news. And then I became a radio man.

And I thought about that. My dad was a newsman. I'm a good newsman. And now I'm on radio. We're in the radio ministry together.

We were sitting in a room here together, two radio guys. And I remember the day, by this time, that I went on radio with my dad. The years of living had brought a lot of pain. And then he had some serious strokes and neurological problems. And he was in a skilled care facility. The day that we started the radio ministry, over ten years ago, I went to visit him. I took him out in his wheelchair to get some sunshine. And most days he wasn't very communicative by that point in his life. But this day, I looked at him and said, Dad, we started a radio ministry yesterday.

We're on five different stations with Truth Network in three different states. And for an unusual moment, he picked up his head and he just smiled real big. And he said, well, that's great. The moment like that meant something to me.

But what I really wanted was I wanted him to be able to rise up out of his wheelchair, walk behind me, lay his hands on my shoulder and say, I'm proud of you, son. What I would have given for him to say, I started my life in radio. And now you've got an even bigger call in the radio. Bless that radio ministry that you'll reach hundreds of thousands of people. I wish that he could have just blessed and affirmed that to me, but he couldn't. By that time, it was too late.

But it's not too late for us. We can bless one another. And if you haven't received that blessing, you still can. You can receive it from someone else in your life. And if you haven't been giving that blessing to someone, I just want to say to anybody listening, you can still learn to do this. It's not too late.

It's never too late. And, Stu, the book has step-by-step instructions to show biblically how you can learn to do this and craft a meaningful blessing for someone you love. The book is The Power to Bless. I'm spellbound just to hear this man share his testimony.

Thanks for going deeper with us. We're going to come back and find out where the power comes from to bless and how people listening can reverse the curse, like the grace of God did in your life, with Pastor Alan Wright, the author of the book, The Power to Bless, available right now at all bookstores on pre-order. And get it, and you will be blessed, but we'll talk more about that when we come back. So what is a blessing, and where does the power to bless come from? This word blessing is what's thrown around so much from someone who sneezes, as trivial as that, to just a God bless you. You see cards with that on it.

You see common signatures or epitaphs, things like that. But you wrote a whole book about it. How could you write a whole book about blessing, Pastor Alan Wright? You shared about your testimony, just craving your father just to love you. I love you because.

I bless you because. And so many kids, dads never said, I love you. So many daughters. I'm a father of daughters. I'm selfishly interviewing you so I can be a real blessing to my sweet daughters, to my wife.

Will you please help us get there? But where's this power? It is, I would say, I like to say it's mystical, but it's not magical. Because a blessing is spoken in accord with God's word. So the best way to bless someone is to think about what God has to say about their life. But it also is, and this is what the book teaches, we can learn to see uniquely into one another's life. I look at it this way, Stu. It's like almost everybody you know, there's some virtue or quality or positive attribute about that person that you see more clearly than they do.

Even in our own family. You know, like when I saw it with my kids growing up, I would see a value in them that they didn't see yet. And so I'd call it forth.

Let me tell you how simple this is. I tell this story in the book. One day when Bennett and I were playing golf, he was maybe 10 years old.

This was many years ago. He started out and had a bad haul. He was a good golfer. Even at age 10, he was a good golfer. And he gets a double or triple bogey on the first hole.

And anybody that plays golf, you know, you feel so bad because you feel like you're just blowing your round. And he was a very controlled kid, but I could see his little face grew a little red and he wanted to get mad. And he can just blow your whole round and have a bad haul.

But he didn't. Instead, he pulled it together and he ended up having a good round and we had a good time. And we were riding home. And on the way home, I said, Bennett, I said, you know, I noticed today that you had that bad hole and it's frustrating. I know what it's like to be frustrated. I said, but I noticed something. You pulled it together there. And instead of letting me get you down and getting you too angry, you played really well.

And you didn't have a really good round of golf. I said, you know what? The Bible has a phrase for that. It's called self-control.

And I said, you're only 10 years old. I said, but I already see self-control within you. And that's a fruit of the Spirit. And I believe you're going to grow into a young man with lots of self-control.

And in my experience, men who have a lot of self-control go far in this world. Wow. Well, that's a blessing. What did I do there? What I did was I recognized something in his life that was in accord with the Scripture, something that needs to be affirmed, and something that was unique to him that I saw at work in him that he wasn't recognizing. If I hadn't pointed it out to him, he'd have never even thought of it. But I pointed it out to him, and then I did more. I attached it to a characteristic of his own identity, because blessing is instilling identity.

If we want people to live better lives, let's don't tell them what they ought to do. Let's give them their identity, and they'll live out of that. And not only did I instill an identity in that little 30 seconds, one minute, but I attached future productivity, benefit, fruitfulness, and success to that. So that's what blessing does, and that's what it does biblically. And I always like to tell a little story like that because it's simple.

And you don't have to be super spiritual. And yet, can you imagine the power of that? And honestly, Bennett, who just graduated from Duke Law School last year and is clerking this year and going to be a lawyer, he has loved school his whole life, and part of it is he's got a lot of self-control.

When the other kids are out goofing off, he said, I'm going to focus in on my studies. And it actually has led to a lot of success. Was it all because of that one statement? No, but that's part of it. Because once someone gets a positive vision over their life, they tend to live up to it. But if someone paints a negative forecast and we believe it, we'll live up to the negative forecast.

And that's curse. So it's really believing in someone for who they are, who they can be. It's seeing the God-given genius that he's put in all of us and connecting that to the gospel. Yes. Connecting that to... Yes. I hear a lot in your ministry about who you are in Jesus. Yes.

You're a king's kid. Yes. And using language to build people up, to edify... Exactly. It doesn't mean you dismiss sin. It doesn't mean you don't correct.

It doesn't mean there weren't discipline opportunities. Oh, absolutely. Those are all recognizing who Jesus is and what he's done in you and what he can do through you. Exactly. And I believe that when we instill identity through the power of blessing, that then transformation is just taking place, right? I mean, you think of any transformation in the scripture, and in some way or another, it's linked to identity. When the prodigal son decides to go back home, what does he say?

In my father's house, they have it better than I do. Right. He remembered, I have a father and I'm a son. That little bit of identity drew him back home. I find that when people think that they're worthless, they do worthless things. When they think their life is of infinite value, they orient themselves in that direction. I need to tell everyone, if you just joined us, this is Stu Epperson Truth Talk with my special guest, Pastor Alan Wright, who's written this new book, The Power to Bless.

It's in pre-order now, and you can order it where all books are sold. Take us to the power behind the power of blessing. Take us to that bloody hill on Calvary. When Joseph had these two sons, and then eventually is reunited with his brothers and his father, in this glorious story that's recorded from Genesis 37 through Genesis 50, when he learns that his dad, Jacob, is dying, Jacob, who lived his whole life as a deceiver up until nearly the very end, Jacob, who always thought you had to struggle in order to be blessed, didn't understand it until the end of his life, Joseph rushes over with his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. Manasseh is the firstborn, Ephraim the secondborn. He says, Dad, I want you to bless our sons. Jacob does something absolutely mystifying.

What happens? It's hard to picture this, but get it in your mind's eye. Joseph brings his firstborn, who is the one entitled in that culture to get the stronger blessing, who would get a double portion of the inheritance, and that's symbolized by the right hand. And he brings Manasseh, and he puts the older, Manasseh, under the right hand of Jacob, his grandfather. And he brings the younger, Ephraim, and puts him under Jacob's left hand.

So this is the proper order. And in a strange moment, Jacob crosses his arms, and he takes the right hand and he puts it on Ephraim's head, the younger. And he puts his left hand on Manasseh's head. And Joseph's trying to be respectful to his father because it's a very respectful culture. He says, Father, no, no. Joseph's upset by this because he's violating the custom of primogeniture.

He's violating all the cultural customs. He takes his father's right hand and says, No, Dad, this one, the right hand goes on Manasseh's head, the firstborn. And the text says, Jacob said, he crossed his arms again.

He said, I know, my son, I know what I'm doing. And the Bible says, and thus, he put Ephraim, the younger, ahead of Manasseh. And thus, it is that every week for 3700 years, Jewish fathers have been saying, May God make you as Ephraim and Manasseh?

And nobody seems to know why. It only makes sense in light of the gospel because, Stu, here's the gospel. Here's the gospel. The father had his son, the firstborn of all creation. His name was Jesus. He lived a sinless life, a perfect life that warranted nothing but the father's blessing. You know what Jesus warranted? He merited only the right hand of God's blessing. But on the cross, the unthinkable happened. The father, figuratively, crossed his arms. He took his right hand of blessing off of his firstborn.

And he took that right hand and crossed it over in an unimaginable exchange. And he offered the right hand blessing to the secondborn, to all the Jacobs, to all the deceivers, to all the sinners, to me, to you, to anyone who would receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. We're the secondborns. We're the ones that are the ones that didn't deserve the right hand of blessing. And instead, we're given it.

This is what it means. It means that he who knew no sin became our sin, took our curse, so that we who didn't deserve any blessing instead got a share of the blessing that should have been reserved just for Jesus. And until you see that, you can't understand what Paul means when he says, We've been blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ. And you can't understand what it means to be a co-heir until you see God's arms crossed in the heavenlies and the blood of Jesus paying for your sin and the unreserved, unmerited favor of God now put upon the believer's life simply because God, in a sense, crossed his hands. I wonder if the angels and archangels didn't say, Father. And God said, I know what I'm doing. Why are you doing that to him when there's all these guilty sinners? He could have called 10,000 angels.

He could have. And instead, this time, not by any accident or trick or deception or any fluke, but by God's set purpose. That's what he did for us. And that, and nothing less than that, is the depth of the power of blessing at work in the world. And we, as believers, are called evangelicals. We evangelize. We are to take this message aggressively, ambitiously, to the ends of the earth.

It is from the blessing of God in Christ that we're, this is the compelling message of the Great Commission. And people ask me all the time, well how can I, Pastor, how could I, I need, I know somebody I love. They need to change. What can I do for them? You can't control them. You can't manipulate them. You could shame them, but that's what the devil does.

So how are you going to help them change? And this is it. It is the power of blessing. God has authorized us, speaking in accordance with the scripture, in accordance with faith. Basically, it's faith at work. Faith for others to flourish. And the power of God's word, speaking God's word, and the power of the cross. And what he did for me, as opposed to what I'm doing for him, and he accomplished it. It is finished.

It's finished. And we are sowing seeds when we bless. We're sowing and you reap. You'll never reap in a way that you didn't sow.

You'll never sow an orange seed and get an apple. And you'll never sow curse and get blessing to come back. Sow blessing in order to reap it.

That is something. Well, The Power to Bless is the book. The author is with me. What a blessing you've been to me in this interview, Pastor Alan Wright. I'm Stu Everson. This is Truth Talk.

We'll take a little picture here so people can kind of see into this this cool study studio. And the subtitle is How to Speak Life and Empower the People You Love. How to really be a blessing. And the only one who was a true 100 percent blessing, 100 percent of time. Yes. Conceived by the Holy Spirit and the womb of Mary is the Lord Jesus Christ.

Yes. So we are in Him. We're grafted in. We are in Christ. We're new creatures. Creation in Christ.

2 Corinthians 5, 17. So that. We're in Him. Yes.

So there's a now blessing flowing out of us. And you're simply saying, hey, let's let that just let's just throw that up all over everybody. Everywhere. Everywhere.

All the nations. Until everyone hears. And then Christ comes back. Exactly. And if anybody's wondering, well, if I bless people, it'll just go to their head and they'll get lazy. No, no, no. That's not the way.

That's not the way it works at all. Grace actually empowers us for change. And identity fuels a new way of living. And anyone, Stu, anyone, anyone can bless. You don't have to be the spiritual elite. You don't have to be flowery in your talk.

Anyone can learn to do this. And that's why I wrote the book. It'll bless you and you will be able to discover the power to bless those you love. And there's a whole lot more in the book.

And we don't even have time to go through all the chapters. But the book is The Power to Bless. Author Pastor Alan Wright takes us to a whole deeper level.

To the level which is level at the foot of the cross. And thank you for taking us there and for taking us to the gospel on your radio show and all your books. Lover of My Soul. Some wonderful books that have been a real blessing.

Pastor Alan Wright, learn more at pastorallen.org is your website. They can meet you, hear you there. But also get this book. Order a bunch of them. If you go to Amazon to pre-order, then Baker Books is going to give you a free audio book. It's going to be an audio book and it's a great value. So that's a great way. If you'll pre-order, you'll be the first to get the book and you'll also get a free audio book. And you'll help this message get launched.

Awesome. So this will be on radio. Those of you thinking of awesome radio, all of our awesome radio affiliates that carry this program, Truth Talk, that carry your program too.

But you can also make it a podcast. So if you haven't subscribed to the Truth Talk podcast, subscribe, share it with everyone you go and just be a blessing. When you're sharing Jesus Christ, you are sharing the greatest blessing.

The world's full of curse. And Stu, I just want to say to all your listeners how much I love you, how much I appreciate you. What a privilege. It just so happens that we live in the same area and we get to see each other.

But if we didn't and we lived on other sides of the world, we'd still be dear friends. And I just can't say how thankful and proud I am of the Truth Network and all of your work because you are a blessing and you're changing the world through it. And what an honor and privilege it is to be part of the Truth family and to be with you today.

Well, God bless you. Pastor Alan Wright, your very gracious words there, the book, The Power to Bless. So multiply that blessing and let's not keep it. Let's not hide our candle under a bushel. No, I'm going to let it shine. And so that's why you did this, to light us all up. So we're pumped and there couldn't be a better time we need in history because Jesus Christ is coming back.

So how many people are we going to take to heaven with us? So let's get active and be about the Lord's business and take the Word of God to the world. God bless you. Thank you, Pastor Alan Wright. When I say God bless you now... It's deeper. It's deeper. And God bless you.