Here's Pastor Alan Wright with Today's Blessing: A Biblical Faith-Filled Vision. for your life. Receive again the remarkable invitation of discipleship. Come. And you will see.
Think of it. You're invited by the Savior to see for yourself. There's a big difference between seeing a brochure about the Grand Canyon and seeing it with your own eyes. Jesus wants to show you the canyon of his grace, to see the beauty that he He sees.
So I bless your spiritual eyes today to see the grandeur as he does. Oh, that you might see. As Jesus sees. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Alan Wright, the Son of God, the Son of Man. who goes to a cross And there he bears the weight of the sin of the world.
Imagine this. Jesus becomes your sin. 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, No Worries, as presented at Ronalda 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 Allen Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. You can learn more about it and contact us at pastorallen.org.
That's pastorallen.org. Or call 877-544-4860. That's 877-544. 4860. More on all of this later in the program.
But now. Let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. He called up Uncle Charlie, who lived in Spruce Pine, and said, Charlie. Would you follow me?
in your car as I drive my car to a mechanic. In case mine breaks down. Then you'll be there. to pick me up. And Charlie said, Mac, I don't think your car is going to break down, but okay, I'll follow you to the mechanic, okay?
But here's what they have, this true story. Then Max called Uncle Stanley. Is it Stanley? Charlie is going to follow me in case my car breaks down on the way. If my car breaks down and then I get in with Charlie, what will we do if Charlie's car breaks down?
Will you follow Charlie? while he follows me. And of course Uncle Stanley said no. No. No, will not.
That's pretty advanced worrying right there. And I'll tell you another thing advanced worriers can do is they can draw people into their tent of worry. I mean That's what these guys did. Verse 1 of Numbers 14: the congregation raised a loud cry, the people wept that night. The whole of the people bought right into their worry, and all the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to him, Would that we died in the land of Egypt.
or would that we had died in this wilderness. In a moment where I was getting one of those lifetime, once in a lifetime fun things that I'd always dreamt of doing. and we were in the Bahamas. And so I splurged for Bennett. and me, we were going to go swim with dolphins.
I always thought I'd be in one. I'd always thought I'd be one of the fun.
So we'd signed up for the Swimming with Dolphins. And I'm sitting on the dock. waiting to get on a boat that's going to take us out to a place where where the dolphins are out in in in the harbor in the ocean somewhere and go swimming with them. And while I'm sitting there, getting ready for one of the happiest things I could ever do. And a stranger came up and sat down next to me.
And he was first, he seemed friendly. He started chatting with me and he said, Well, what are you getting ready to do? And I said, Well, I'm going to go take my 10-year-old son, we're going to go swim with dolphins. And he said, uh-oh. I said.
I said, what? I said what? The truth. He said, you know, most people don't know this, but dolphins bite. I said, dolphins bite?
He said, yeah, they got little teeth, but they bite, and it hurts. I said, oh, I didn't know that. He said, and they'll ram you too. He said, people think they're friendly, but they're not. They will ram you.
And I was sitting there like, huh. He had me convinced I was going to be swimming with great white sharks out there. You know, and I'm just like, I could feel myself. And all of a sudden, this thing that just turned on me, I said, no. No!
No, I got up. I got up. I just walked away from the man. I'm like, this is crazy. He's got me worrying about how mean dolphins can be.
The friendliest animals on the face of the earth. But it's amazing how Contagious it can be. You need to surround yourself with people that Have what-ifs about what God can do. I mean that's wrong. I mean these spies They weren't just pessimistic.
I think Ed Welch counselor and authors True. Right when he said they were False prophets. Because You know how seriously, especially in the Old Testament, God took it for... false prophets. To forecast something is if you know that it's going to come to pass.
And it's not. It's a serious thing to do to the people of God. Worry is so destructive because it's in the first place It fills our hearts and minds with wrong and ungodly beliefs that hold us back. Author Michael Hyatt used the illustration, I think, aptly. of what our Wrong beliefs do to us, and how they can limit us of an invisible fence.
You know, how a dog can put on a collar and you put an invisible fence under the ground, and I don't know if it administers some unpleasant thing for the dog every time he gets near the boundary, so the dog figures out the boundaries. And then you can take the collar off of the dog, and the dog will not go beyond that boundary. You can stand on the other side with a treat and the dog's not going to come over there. Even though The collar is off, and the dog will experience no consequences of going across. And there's a sense in which that's what worry does to us.
It's like it puts this boundary around us in which we're not going to go beyond the limits of our worry. But it doesn't just limit us from moving forward. That's what it did for the people. They didn't go forward into the promised land. But there's something else that happens with worry.
It's an odd thing.
Sounds strange to say it, but When you predict something, Even if it's bad, you sort of want it to come true to prove yourself right. Maybe you've experienced this, but You can worry about something, and you're almost relieved when it finally happens. There's this lady that was in our church in Durham. She was sweet as could be, but she was one of the most advanced warriors I'd ever been around. And she worried all the time about getting sick.
She was kind of hypochondriate. She'd always talk about it. And she just wasn't that sick. She'd have little things here and there, had some arthritis and stuff, but No major diagnoses or anything major, but she'd talk about it. And she said, I'm going to the doctor about this.
I'm going about and I'm I'm concerned I could be this, you know. And she was a melancholy person.
Well, one day I went to visit her and she had come back from the doctor with a pretty bad diagnosis. And you know, she was just plum giddy. I mean, she was the happiest I'd ever seen her. You know. It's like, it is so strange.
But if you predict something, you kind of want it to come true. And so the thing that she had worried about had come true. But here's the bottom line of this. What is so diabolical about worry is that worry. Is a kind of what-if that leads towards the thing it worries about in the same way that the Wright brothers envisioned a plane and it led towards an actual plane existing.
In the opposite direction, worry leads towards. The negative. I've used this illustration a lot, but If you were to put a board, maybe a 12-inch board across the platform and say, Alan, could you walk across it?
Well, yeah, I could walk right across that if it was just sitting right here. I could probably do it backwards. I might be able to hop on one foot across it. Maybe. But But if you took that same plank of wood and put it up in the sky.
a thousand feet between two buildings. Like, did you know that there is a glass ledge in the Willis Tower in Chicago, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere? that you can step out onto and look down Thirteen hundred feet below you is the Street. And I stepped out on that thing. And here's what happened to me.
It took my breath away and I stepped back this way. But I did step out on it. If you put that plank of wood up that high between two of them and say, can you walk across that? Here, two things would happen. One, I'd say no, absolutely not.
And secondly, if I did start walking across it and look down, it would take my breath away. My heart would beat funny, I'd be way more likely to fall. The player who's worried about missing the last-minute shot is much more likely to miss it. Interestingly, the thing that the Israelites were worried about Was essentially this: they were worried, they were afraid. We won't be able to Get the promised land.
and will die instead. And ironically, They didn't get the promised land and they died in the wilderness instead. And it's very pointed in the scripture, the irony of this in Numbers 14:34. According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, a year for each day, you shall bear your iniquity forty years, and you shall know my displeasure.
So they wandered in the wilderness. For 40 years. The only thing that could have kept them from inheriting that land was their fear that they wouldn't inherit the land. because it was their land. God had already designated that.
So what does God want to do about this? He came in the person of Jesus. To do a work in which we are forgiven of our sins, made holy unto Him, and we are given a new mind in Christ. He wants to do is sanctify your imagination. That's Alan Wright.
And we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. This month's featured resource from Pastor Alan is the untroubled heart. A powerful digital bundle, including audio messages and a digital study guide. In this series, Pastor Alan unpacks Jesus' promise from John 14, 27. I leave you peace.
My peace I give you. I do not give it to you as the world does.
So don't let your hearts be troubled or afraid. With practical insight and biblical encouragement, You'll discover how to quiet anxious thoughts and rest in Christ's peace that endures. When you give today to support Allen Wright Ministries, we'll send you the Untroubled Heart digital bundle as our thanks. Call us at 877-575. Five four four.
4860. That's 877. Five four four four four four four four four four four four four. 4860. or come to our website.
pastorallen.org Um Today's teaching now continues. Here once again. is Alan Wright. I love the show Shark Tank. Anybody watch Shark Tank?
I don't know why I love it so much. Entrepreneurs come in with their inventions and they try to pitch their idea to five business tycoons to get some investment money from them for their venture. And there have been some of the crazy things. In the pilot program, the very first, and there was one of the most bizarre that ever happened, was one entrepreneur came in and he said, Bluetooth earbuds that you listen to music and stuff from your phone, said they move around too much in your ears.
So he had invented one that could be surgically implanted in the ear and like a q-tip type thing that goes in and charges it at night. That's true. Nobody gave him any money for that. I was watching one the other night. I think it was maybe from season six, in which there was a man who was accompanied by another guy.
I said, That guy looks familiar. It was Pat Boone. It was Pat Boone, and they were in there pitching a car that runs on air. Yeah, compressed air. And as airlifts, it moves the car along.
And one of the sharks said he would invest $5 million in it. I like watching this show. But what happens on the show is these crazy ideas that come in. And I love watching the imagination. How do people think these things up?
But then once they make their pitch, the sharks, the business. Tycoons, they start asking them questions. Hard questions. They start applying reason to it. How much does it cost to make this product?
How much are you selling it for? What's the cost of customer acquisition? Tell me about your own work life and how much time do you have invested in this? Are there any other monies? They start asking all the business questions about this and Sometimes they say, oh, this is ridiculous, and they say nothing.
And some of them they say, oh, it's great, I want to invest in this. When imagination then meets Reason. and intelligence, and those two things come together. It's explosive. It's wonderful.
I'm fascinated by um C.S. Lewis and how he became a Christian. And C.S. Lewis If you're not very familiar with him, he wrote a book called Mere Christianity. which is a logical defense of the Christian gospel.
And I read recently that Other than the Bible, more people report becoming Christians because of mere Christianity than any other book.
So he's written this incredibly insightful, logical. But he also wrote all the chronicles of Narnia. fanciful tales of a magical land where little boys and girls are kings and queens. What a mind. But he was an atheist.
And as an atheist and a literature professor, He loved the world of the imagination. But this is what he said about those days as an atheist. Such then was the state of my imaginative life. Over against it stood the life of my intellect. the two hemispheres of my mind were in sharpest contrast.
On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth. and on the other, a glib and shallow rationalism. And listen to what he said. Nearly all that I loved I believe to be imaginary. Nearly all that I believe to be real I thought grim and meaningless.
What he was saying Was that the things that I love Art and beauty. and music and story. And thoughts of another world. All that I loved and made my heart sore were in my imagination. And I figured they're not real.
And all that I thought was real the stuff I could touch and analyze in the world of reason. was just boring to me. But what happened, and this is why he became a Christian. In conversations with people like J.R.R. Tolkien.
and other imaginative people. He began to have this thought. What if The things that I can imagine might be as real or more real than the things I can reason about. And he started realizing. That the reason he longed for a A magical, fanciful, different world is that one must exist.
And when he began to see the Christian gospel, He saw that this was the imaginative truth. that he'd always longed for. And let me put it this way. When the right brothers had tested and flown a number of times a few hundred yards at Kitty Hawk. And then they spent some years continuing to try to develop their concept and get a patent on it.
They first approached The United States military with the concept in order to try to secure a contract from the United States. And the United States military rejected it out of hand. Didn't want to invest a single dollar in such a preposterous idea that this could be of any benefit to us militarily.
So they went to France. But the reality was While the rest of the world and really, really smart engineers were saying we're not even interested because that's reason. tells us not to be interested in that. The Wright brothers in their imagination They were upon something more true. Than all the United States military at that time.
Sometimes the thing that you could only imagine now is actually more real. than anything your reason could analyze. And C.S. Lewis became a Christian. And he began to write.
Because when imagination and reason Come together, and you realize that truth and imagination do not have to stand apart from one another. Explosive things happen.
So Jesus came as the living word of God. The reformer John Calvin said, The scriptures are like spectacles. That You put on, and then everything. becomes clear when you look through it. The Bible is not something you so much look at as something you look through.
And you see everything in life through the truth of God's Word. And this is why Jesus came. He came so that we could be forgiven and set free. And he came so that we could see God up close, and behold, the word become flesh. And that the whole of your imagination could be wed together with the Word of God so that your imagination looks through the lens of Scripture's truth.
So that you can, in that sense, let your imagination run wild. And that's why everywhere Jesus went, what was he doing? He was telling stories. Parables and using metaphors in order to awaken the imagination of a slumbering people. He would come and say things.
Imagine with me a man went out to sow seed, and some of it fell on hard ground and some fell amongst the thorns, but some fell onto fertile ground and it produced a hundredfold. Imagine that mountain being thrown into the heart of the sea. Imagine this taking up your mount, your pat, your pallet, and walking instead of lying on it. Imagine a father who had two sons, and one of them went to a faraway land and brought shame on the family. But could you imagine the day that the father went running down a dusty road to weep upon his son's shoulders because he was so happy to see him?
He was saying, Imagine Father God with me. Imagine life. And the whole of Scripture ultimately beckons us to imagine a new heaven and a new earth. And Jesus was essentially saying, I want you to be able to see this ultimately because I want you to imagine this. The Son of God, the Son of Man.
who goes to a cross And there he bears the weight of the sin of the world. Imagine this. Jesus becomes your sin. Imagine that. And when you accept His saving work on the cross.
Imagine this, His righteousness, the merits of His life. Accredited to you So you have to have become the righteousness. Oh God, if you can begin to imagine that, then you can imagine that you're seated in the heavenlies with Christ. That you have been chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, and that therefore nothing could really ever stand against you because you're in the one who has already won the great cosmic battle. And you could imagine this: that He's going to come back one day and take us to be with Him where He is, and that we would reign with Him in a new heaven and a new earth.
Just imagine it. Because when you look through the lens of Scripture You take the God-given faculty of imagination, and worry goes to the side, and instead, faith arises. You can live. a worry-free life. by having Jesus sanctify Your imagination.
Imagine that. That's the gospel. Alan Wright in today's teaching: a sanctified imagination. It's in our series, No Worries, and Alan is back here in the studio here in a moment, sharing his parting good news thought for the day. This month's featured resource from Pastor Alan is the untroubled heart.
a powerful digital bundle including audio messages and a digital study guide. In this series, Pastor Alan unpacks Jesus' promise from John 14, 27. I leave you peace. My peace I give you. I do not give it to you as the world does.
So don't let your hearts be troubled or afraid. With practical insight and biblical encouragement, You'll discover how to quiet anxious thoughts and rest in Christ's peace that endures. When you give today to support Alan Wright Ministries, we'll send you the Untroubled Heart digital bundle as our thanks. Call us at 877-452-0. Five four four.
4860. That's 877. Five four four four four four four four four four four four four. Or come to our website. pastorallen.org I love the thought that C.S.
Lewis presented, and I think this is where you've really taught well here in this, Alan, about future trips taking these these worries, mind trips, and God is never the rescuer in our worrying, you see. You know, a thing we'll keep coming back to and learned long ago: God doesn't really give grace for hypothetical situations, but for real situations. And so worry gets out into a category of something that might happen, that I dream up would happen. And I think why it's so painful is there's really not. There's not really grace for that.
God gives grace for real life, and no matter how difficult our troubles, His grace will be sufficient.
So we need to take our imagination. and instead let God sanctify it. and turn all of our what-ifs instead of what if and fill in the blank with all the negative things, let's turn it around and say, what if? and put it in God's word and put it in God's hope. And that's where our worries turn to faith.
Today's good news message is a listener-supported production. of Alan Wright Ministries.
