Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.
She gave birth to Benjamin, but she died in childbirth, and they buried her outside of Bethlehem, where many passers-by and tourists and Jews remember Rachel. 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 Brint, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, Remade, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program today, I sure 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. So as you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer.
Don't miss it. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org.
Or call 877-544-4860. We're going to be more on all this later in the program. But right now, let's dig in and get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. Are you ready for some good news?
Yes. In this world, there is sorrow and there's joy. And for those that are citizens in the kingdom of God, joy wins.
Joy lasts forever. Sorrows come and go. We are in this journey with Jeremiah who prophesied and preached many important oracles of judgment about the discipline of God for the people who have been so disobedient. But we've been reveling in these texts of restoration promise. And we come again today in this centerpiece of Jeremiah's prophecy and theology to a word that goes to the exiles, those that are deported from their homeland in Jerusalem to Babylon under the wicked tyranny of Nebuchadnezzar and who nonetheless were taken there by God's providential disciplinary plan. And as you see the promise of restoration again today, I want to draw your attention to this beautiful exhortation to weep no more.
Keep your voice from weeping. We're in Jeremiah 31 verse 13. I will turn their mourning into joy, the Lord says. I will comfort them and give them gladness for sorrow. And my people will be satisfied with my goodness declares the Lord. So we begin with that prophetic promise.
Mourning is going to be turned into dancing and sorrows are going to be turned into gladness. And it's something you especially need to hear when you're going through sorrows. And then we come at verse 15 to as if in the first scene of what is a sort of powerful dialogue, a powerful conversation prophetically. And here it's the Lord drawing our attention to a voice, a strange voice that's heard. And it goes like this, thus says the Lord, a voice is heard in Rama, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children.
She refuses to be comforted for her children because they are no more. And so then at verse 16, it shifts and now it's as if the Lord is speaking to Rachel, which as we'll see is a figurative persona here, reminding us of Rachel in the Old Testament. But speaking here, figuratively back to Rachel, the Lord says, keep your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears for there is a reward for your work declares the Lord. And they shall come back from the land of the enemy.
I love that. They shall come back from the land of the enemy. That'd be a great text, wouldn't it? For you that are praying for a wayward child, it'd be a great text for the one you're praying for who seems to have been swallowed up by the enemy. They shall come back. And verse 17, the Lord says, there is hope for your future declares the Lord and your children shall come back to their own country. He's speaking here of the literal restoration of children of the next generation coming back to Jerusalem, but there's so much more there. And then at verse 18, it shifts again to where now it is as though the Lord is hearing the response of those that have been promised the restoration.
I have heard Ephraim grieving. So now it's the voice of, of those that have heard the word of restoration. You've disciplined me. And I was disciplined like an untrained calf. Bring me back that I may be restored for you are the Lord my God. For after I turned away, I relented. And after I was instructed, I struck my thigh.
I was ashamed and I was confounded because I bore the disgrace of my youth. Now again at verse 20, it shifts back to the Lord speaking. Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he my darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I do remember him still. Therefore my heart yearns for him. I will surely have mercy on him declares the Lord. What a text. The sound figuratively of Rachel weeping and then the exhortation of the Lord to dry your tears and the reflections of the people of God in a sense, figuratively saying, but we're, we have repented, but we're so ashamed. And then the voice of the Lord who says, I will most certainly have mercy. It is, it is the dynamic relationship of, of tears and joy and longing and, and, and worry and hope and all of that together.
It's powerful. I had a crazy basketball game last weekend. See, my son went to Baylor and my daughter went to Carolina. And I might've mentioned before that I went to Carolina and I tend to pull for Carolina and the basketball game. And, and then they were going to play my Baylor bears in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
It was a most unfortunate turn of events that that's what happened. And so I was just sitting at home alone to watch the game because nobody wants to watch a game with somebody who has a divided heart. It could, you, you couldn't find a Baylor fan would want to watch with me and you couldn't find a Carolina fan that would want to watch with me. And everybody was texting me before the game saying, what are you going to do? And who are you going to pull for? And I said, I don't know who I'm going to pull for. I said, I keep trying to tell myself, Alan, the good news is you can't lose, but my heart keeps telling me, Alan, you can't win.
And I have to admit that throughout most of the game, it was more the latter that I felt like I could not win. And when my Baylor bears, the defending national champions got down by 25 points, 25 points, I said, Lord, this is embarrassing for the bears. And I started pulling harder for the bears to come back. And when they came back from 25 points down in less than 10 minutes and tied the game with Carolina, I thought of Carolina, Lord, this is embarrassing for the University of North Carolina. I thought, oh my goodness, Hubert Davis, who's a new head coach. If he loses this game, he's going to go down in history as the biggest collapse in the history of the NCAA tournament. I don't know if he'll ever be able to recover from this poor Tar Heels. And so I started pulling for the Tar Heels again.
And then they went into overtime and people are texting me, who you pulling for? I said, I don't even know. I'm just wandering around the room. I didn't know whether to be happy or sad. I find that life is strange in that I think sometimes we almost have to be instructed of the Holy Spirit as to whether we're supposed to be happy or sad.
Because there is a real need for grief in this broken world. And yet there is a voice of joy that comprises the essence of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God consists of righteousness and peace and joy and the Holy Spirit. And what we see in this prophetic text is both Rachel's tears and God's exhortation to weep no more and a response of the people in their shame and God's assurances. And I want us to dig into this text and see something wonderful of the gospel. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series.
the way Daniel did. When you give before the end of the month, we'll send you Pastor Alan's audio series, Daniel, a favored foreigner. You may feel like a stranger in this world, but as God showed favor to Daniel in his foreign land, God's grace is upon you as well. Your donation will not only help you navigate through these troubling times, but it will also help someone else. Thanks for your partnership with Alan Wright Ministries. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks. 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. Let's go back to verse 15. Thus says the Lord, a voice is heard in Rama, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children.
She refuses to be comforted for her children. Rama. Why Rama? Well, Rama is the place which was kind of the first stop or the departing place for the exile.
This pathway that would be sort of the journey to Babylon. And if you look just on the next slide, right above Jerusalem is Rama. So just basically Rama was the place where the people started their journey of deportation. Rama was the place where mothers perhaps that were staying behind saw their sons and daughters being carted off to Babylon. Rama was the place where families were broken up.
Rama is the place where they contemplated an uncertain future and they wept in Rama. And so it is a piece of poetry, prophetic poetry to say a voice is heard. It's like the Lord is saying, I hear a voice. Do you hear it?
Yes. It's the voice of sadness. It's the voice of mourning. It's the voice of longing. And it is, figuratively speaking, Rachel's voice. Not a ghost of Rachel or something like that. No, this is poetry.
This is figurative language. Rachel, a symbol of the weeping for the children that are no more. Why Rachel? Well, Rachel was the wife that Jacob loved, fell in love with at first sight. And when Jacob wanted to marry Rachel, Rachel's father, Laban, said you'll have to work for seven years if I'm going to give you her hand. And he agreed to. And somehow on their wedding night, Laban tricked them all and Jacob married Leah instead of Rachel, married Leah, Rachel's sister.
And so then Laban says you'll have to work seven more years. And so this is the story that Jacob winds up being married to these two sisters, Rachel and Leah. And it's always important to remember that this is our family tree.
We come from a dysfunctional lot. The tribes of Israel are formed from this chaotic household. And it is a household in which there is a lot of bitterness and sorrow, especially on Rachel's part. Because we read in Genesis 29, 31 that when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. So Leah started having children. She had these sons, Reuben and Sibian and Levi and Judah. And then she stopped having children. And when at verse one of Genesis 30, when Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister. And she said to Jacob, give me children or I shall die. So there is more than that deep maternal instinct. There is more than that sorrow of infertility that some under the sound of my voice have experienced.
And it is so deeply painful. This is something that becomes a symbol for all of Israel of the weeping Rachel who has no children. And who not only has no children, but compares herself to Leah, her sister, who has borne these children and who wants children more than anything.
Give me children lest I die. That's what people know of Rachel. And so maybe you know the story, Rachel brings in her maid servant Bilhah to be a surrogate and Bilhah has sons. And then Leah brings in her servant Zilpah, who has a surrogate, who then has children as well. And what happens is that then Jacob has fathered 10 sons and none of them are Rachel's until they have a boy who's named Joseph, which explains much of the narrative of the Old Testament. And Jacob loved Joseph and favored him because it was Rachel's son. And when Rachel conceived again, she gave birth to Benjamin, but she died in childbirth.
And they buried her outside of Bethlehem where many passers-by and tourists and Jews remember Rachel and her sorrow. The sorrow of the children that she didn't have and then what she did have, having Joseph who was sold into slavery and thought dead as if Joseph was no more and then had Benjamin, but died and was never able to nurse her baby boy, Rachel. She is the tears of grief and longing and yearning.
A voice is heard in Ramah. It is Rachel weeping for her children who are no more for they have been deported in exile to Babylon and she's weeping for them. There is a real grief in this time of exile and God does not run from the grief and he does not want the people to run from it. Jeremiah wept so much that he became known as the weeping prophet and there was in fact a battle between the false prophets and Jeremiah that was shocking because you might think that the false prophets were the ones that were perhaps going to spell out too much doom, but instead it was the false prophets who were giving an overly optimistic forecast and who said that Jerusalem would be safe and that the people wouldn't be exiled and they hated Jeremiah for saying the things he said about the coming discipline of the people of God. So much so that in Jeremiah 6 14 we see one of the refrains of the Lord who says of the false prophets they've healed the wound of my people lightly saying peace peace when there is no peace. These false prophets do not want to face pain and yet if we are going to be mentally and emotionally healthy in this world we must face pain. There is a false prophecy still prevalent that says if you are Christian you're not going to have to face pain.
Yes you are. In this world you will have trouble Jesus said and our troubles often look very similar to the troubles of those that don't even know the Lord. Scott Peck in his best-selling famous book Road Less Travel said at the beginning life is difficult and this is a great truth one of the greatest truths it's a great truth because once we truly see this truth we transcend it and once we truly know that life is difficult once we truly understand and accept it then life is no longer difficult because once it's accepted the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. So it makes me think of how often I experienced this in life and I bet you do too where it takes a while to accept that something's going to be harder than you thought it was going to be. I remember as a kid I played so much tennis I played so many tennis matches and I always wanted my opponent to just give me the match. I just I want I want St. Peters the peacocks of St. Peters to walk on the court against my UNC Tar Heels and just shudder and go that's the University of North Carolina we might as well give them the game.
I remember in high school many a time many a time getting on that van riding to some other city where we had a match to play and maybe I'd had two exams at school that day not slept than much the night before and I was tired and I loved tennis but didn't even feel like playing tennis and I'm supposed to go out there and win the match for the team and I remember many times going out and knowing who it was I was going to play and it's somebody I've beaten before and knew that I could beat and should beat and walking out in the court and just just hoping that they just would double fault the match away that they just give it to me and I can't tell you how many times I can remember this I'll go out and lose the first couple games and just everything within me going oh no I'm gonna have to play hard. Do you know what I'm talking about? What sometimes you just want life to be easy? Just please let it get easy and as long as you're walking around thinking it's just going to be easy you're in a real dilemma but I think Scott picks right that once you accept okay it's gonna be difficult then something transcendent begins to happen and grace begins to flow. Alan Wright today's good news message Rachel Weeps No More it's from our series Remade and Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio sharing a parting good news thought for the day in just a moment stick with us. Maybe you're like many Christians in America today you're stunned by how fast a nation's culture has turned away from God the values of our country have changed suddenly most people don't go to church or have a biblical worldview it can make you feel like an alien in your own culture there's a lot to learn from Daniel when he was exiled to the pagan land of Babylon through our special offer this month you can learn to live under the favor of God in an alien culture the way Daniel did when you give before the end of the month we'll send you Pastor Alan's audio series Daniel a favored foreigner you may feel like a stranger in this world but as God showed favor to Daniel in his foreign land God's grace is upon you as well your donation will not only help you navigate through these troubling times but it will also help someone else thanks for your partnership with Alan Wright Ministries we are happy to send this to you as our thanks call us at 877-544-4860 that's 877-544-4860 or come to our website PastorAlan.org back now here with Pastor Alan and our parting good news thought for the day for the person listening right now Pastor Alan they could hardly wait for the next broadcast what's your takeaway that we can hang our hat on well I especially especially want to speak a word of comfort to anyone who is grieving that includes not just those who've lost a loved one but grieving a loss of a job a change of context life transition beloved pet that's no longer there I mean any loss the result of that the necessary result is grief and so God has comfort for those that mourn and there even can be a blessing in it and Daniel you know we've been through in our household so much grief this year my mom and my father-in-law and you know first quarter of the year I'd people say how you doing I say well we're crying most of the most days for the whole first quarter of the year and then you feel the presence of God and you you find joy comes in the morning and so Rachel had her tears but she didn't have to refuse to be comforted and so it is that you might have tears but God is here to comfort you and the comfort of the Holy Spirit is very very real we've got a lot more to learn about this tomorrow and to hear God say to us we know more is one of the most beautiful things we could ever hear from him a look forward to that next time today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries
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