Here's Pastor Alan Wright with Today's Blessing: A Biblical Faith-Filled Vision. for your life. Maybe your miracle is in the next cool dip into the Jordan. Proud General Naaman's leprosy had a cure. Washed seven times in the Jordan, Elisha instructed.
Why seven immersions instead of one? You'll have to ask God. Why don't our prayers get instantly answered every time? And you'll have to ask God. Why do we need to bless others over and over?
Why do we have to endure hardship after hardship? Why do we need to Wait on the lore.
Well, we'll just have to ask God. But I bet old Naaman, he felt like a fool after the Fifth dip or the sixth. This ain't working, and we got better rivers back home.
Well, I bless you to keep on immersing yourself in the grace of God. Maybe you're a miracle. is in the next cool Dip. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Alan Wright. I was searching something about pandemic and it just popped up.
I couldn't believe what it said. It said, is it normal to experience pandemic fatigue during the COVID-19 pandemic? Is it normal to be tired during the pandemic because you're tired of a pandemic? Uh Yeah. We're all tired.
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, The Power to Bless, taken from Pastor Alan's book of the same title and as presented at Renolda 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 pastorallen.org.
Or call 877-500. five four four forty eight sixty. That's eight seven seven five four four five. 4860. More on that later in the program.
But now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here. is Alan Wright. Are you ready? for some good news.
God doesn't pressure you to be fruitful. He blesses you to be fruitful. and we can do the same. Unto others. We're talking about the power to bless, to speak a positive vision and faith over others' lives, this great theme that runs all the way through the scriptures.
And we come back today to this foundational blessing for 3,700 years, 3,700 years, Jewish dads have been speaking this blessing on the Sabbath day over their kids. May God make you as Ephraim and Manasseh. And today we're going to focus in on the part of this that has to do with what Ephraim means. This is a story in Genesis 48, in which Joseph has brought his two sons to his dying father Jacob so that Jacob could rouse himself and bless these boys. At verse 3, Jacob said to Joseph, God Almighty appeared to me at loose in the land of Canaan and blessed me.
I want to pause right here to say one of the things we've learned about Jacob. Is that Jacob struggled his whole life Because he didn't feel blessed.
So he's always trying to manipulate, always trying to strive, always trying to earn a blessing that God already had intended for him. But at his deathbed, he finally gets it. And he sees here, he understands he had been blessed. And notice the nature of it, verse 4. And said to me, Behold, I will make you fruitful.
and multiply you. and I'll make of you a company of peoples, and will give this land to your offspring after you for an everlasting possession. I'll make you fruitful. That's at the heart. of the blessing that he had.
Genesis 48 verse 19, after Joseph has brought these boys to him, Jacob did an unusual thing. He crossed his arms and he put the strong right arm, the right hand of blessing that should be for the firstborn, and instead he put it on the younger son's head, Ephraim. Yeah, the younger grandson Ephraim got this stronger blessing. And Joseph realized that this was violating protocols, so he tried gently to move his father's hands back to say, no, Dad, this is the firstborn, Manasseh. Put your hand here, the right hand here.
But Jacob said, no, he knows what he's doing. Verse 19. The father Jacob refused and said, I know, my son, I know. He also shall become a people, speaking of Manasseh, and he also shall be great. Nevertheless, his younger brother.
shall be greater than he. Speaking of Ephraim, and his offspring shall become a multitude of nations. He's speaking of the increase that he spoke over Ephraim.
Now, if you have your Bible with you, go into the New Testament in John chapter 15. to hear these words of Jesus that help explain the The nature of the Christian life is one of bearing fruit by abiding in Him. John 15, verse 5. Jesus said, I'm the vine and you're the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, He it is that bears much fruit.
For apart from me you can do nothing. Verse 8: By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my Disciples. We're talking about the name Ephraim today, which means twice fruitful, and what it means to live a Fruitful life.
So we're talking in many ways, in a broader sense, of, in the very, very best sense of the word, of succeeding. There was a middle school teacher and she had a class of of young aspiring entrepreneurs, and so she had arranged for all of them to have, I think, ten dollars and go. She said, Go out and see if you could start a little business, maybe sell sell something, see if you could make some money off of this. They came back three weeks later. And a first little girl came up and she returned on the teacher's desk $29.
The teacher said, That's wonderful.
So, what did you do? She said, I sold t-shirts. She said, I bought some plain white t-shirts. I tie-dyed them myself. I sold them.
I reinvested the money back into some more t-shirts and kept doing this for several weeks. And that's how I made $29. The teacher said, Well, that's wonderful. Another little girl came up and she had made $79. They just said, Wow, how'd you do that?
She said, I sold informative magazines. She said, I sold enough that I was able to reinvest, buy more magazines, and I stood out in front of a shopping center. And I told people that this was to help enrich their lives. And people kept buying them. And look, I made $79.
The teacher said, that's wonderful. And then a little boy came up and opened up a big box and dumped out $2,738. And then she said, What is this? What did you do? He said, I sold toothbrushes.
She said, You sold toothbrushes and made all this money. How did you do it? He said, Well, I started out by giving people free ice cream. She said, and so then just because they wanted to make sure they didn't leave sugar on their teeth, they they bought toothbrushes? He said, No.
He said, I gave them the free ice cream and they all said to me, This tastes like dirt. And I said, It is dirt. You want to buy a toothbrush? Everybody in this world, in one way or another, is trying to find a way to sort of get ahead. And if you feel like that.
You just got to do it in any way possible to make it happen, then you'll start cutting corners and you'll succumb to the feeling of pressure. I got such a chuckle out of reading this week, a joke, about a man who called 911. He said, My friend is bleeding very badly. I'm really afraid. What should I do?
And the operator said calmly, well, a bad hemorrhage like this could lead to death, so the first thing you need to do is apply pressure.
So the man hung up the phone and he said to his friend, listen, stop bleeding right now or else you could die. Yeah, no pressure. Just stop bleeding. See, what pressure does is it just makes someone uptight about what they are supposed to be able to do and it ends up just exhausting them. One thing that happens to me, I think, throughout a lot of my Christian life was I hear a preacher gets up and starts talking about being more fruitful.
And I'm like, oh no, here we go again. I'm not doing enough. That's the message. You're never doing enough. You're not serving enough.
You're not giving enough. You're not bearing enough fruit. You're not witnessing enough. You're not doing enough. And it just makes everybody tired.
I was Googling something this week about pandemic. You know how when you Google and it comes up and it drops a couple of questions right there that are like, these must be the most commonly asked questions related to your search. And I was searching something about pandemic and it just popped up. I couldn't believe what it said. It said, is it normal to experience pandemic fatigue during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Is it normal to be tired during the pandemic because you're tired of a pandemic? Uh yeah. We're all tired. And it can feel wearisome if, on top of all of the weariness of life, somebody says, Hey, and you need to be more fruitful.
So we come to this part of what it means to be blessed, of the name Ephraim. In Hebrew, there is a dual form of nouns.
So like we have singular and plural, like you and y'all. In Hebrew, there's singular and plural, but there's also this dual form to speak of two of something.
So it always ends with aim. One day is Yom, uh Yom, but two days is Yom Aim. And so Ephraim, Ephraim, means fruit from the root of Ephra and Aim, meaning two.
So it means doubly fruitful. And so when you see the name Ephraim or you speak this, as Jewish dads have over their kids, may you be like Ephraim, you're saying may you be very fruitful, twice as fruitful as maybe you ever imagined, twice as fruitful as you ever could be by your own power. I want to talk to you about that today. And then we're going to, after laying out the depth of theology for this, we're going to just talk some in real practical terms about what's the difference between pressuring somebody and blessing somebody so that we could understand how we can better help people live fruitful lives. 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 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 877-475-845-8525.
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. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. Let's start with this. There is a fine line between idolizing success.
and pretending that Success doesn't even matter. I've been part of for a long time of a men's fellowship in town called a chapter of a national organization, New Canaan Society. And part of what we do every week is we let guys tell their stories. And I just love hearing the honest testimonies of guys who get up. And one of the values we have in New Canaan is honesty.
And so people will tell their stories honestly. And I would just say, as I look back over many, many years of hearing guys tell their stories, that there's one theme that seems to come up. A theme of regret or disappointment of what they would do differently in their life. And the theme is that there's a guy who gets really involved in his business, really involved in his work, and in a sense makes an idol out of success and spends so much time building up a successful business, maybe becoming wealthy, maybe becoming starting a bunch of other businesses, whatever it might be. To the point that it neglects his other relationships and has cost him a lot of pain, sometimes cost him a marriage or a relationship with kids and led to other destructive things.
Over and over, I hear those stories. Because there's just a great pressure on people in the world today, and maybe men and women experience it a little bit differently, but it's a pressure to be successful. Um and whether you're a businessman or Perhaps you're in a career as a lady and you're feeling a pressure to keep advancing. Or maybe you're parenting and you're at home with the kids a lot and you can start feeling the pressure to have the perfect kids.
So pressure is a bad thing. It's an anxiety-producing thing. And as part of it's like, we don't want that anymore. But the other side of this is that it's not right, on the other hand, to just think that we're supposed to just never win at anything. Part of this got preached into me from my youth because the great evangelical preacher of my youth, Roy Putnam, he was victorious.
And I was drawn to that. I was drawn to the message of the gospel that's victorious. He wrote a book on Ephesians called In It to Win It. I always loved that. I'm in it to win it.
I've got a kind of competitive nature, and I've had to kind of deal with that off and on over the years. When our son Bennett was little, I wound up ending up coaching his soccer team there for a while. Dan Anthony, elder in our church, he was coaching, and then I helped him a little bit. They were pretty good back there when Dan was doing it. By the time that I had the team, though, I don't know, we'd lost some of our key players, and we just weren't very good, and we were losing most all the games.
It was part of the more laid-back league in town, the Optimus League, where there's not a lot of pressure on it in the first place. I remember the guy at the time that was heading it up, and he got all the coaches together for a training, and he said, listen, he said, your kids, there's two things they want to do. They want to kick the ball, and they want to eat a snack. He said, so here's what we do in the Optimus Soccer League. We make sure every kid gets a chance to kick the ball and every kid gets to eat a snack.
And so it was required that every kid get to play at least half the game and you always had to have a snack. He was a pretty funny guy. He said, also, when your practice is, I want you to employ the dead man's rule. We said, what's a dead man's rule? He said, that means that you can't do anything at practice, ask your kids to do something that a dead man could do.
And that includes just sitting still and listening to you talk. Say, want to kick the ball and have a snack. And so, you know, we aimed to just have fun with this, but we just kept losing week after week. I mean, I think maybe the first season, I'm not even sure if we won a game or not. And every week we'd be leaving the house, men at nine.
I'm walking out. I got my little whiteboard that I draw stuff on, and I've got practice soccer balls, and then Bennett, and we're going out. And every week, my wife, she'd say, she said, now listen, Bennett, just go out there and have a good time. Remember, it's not so much whether you win or lose, but just that you're having a good time doing this. And we're like, okay, all right.
I mean, it got to be, it was just regular. As we got ready, she'd take, now remember, and we were like, we know, you know, I know, mom, it doesn't matter whether I win or lose, you know, like that. And it did a little like every week, and she meant so well with it. And she also was aware that we were losing most of the time, and so she didn't want to cover a disappointed son coming home. But finally, I got with Anne, I said, honey, I said, We Would you mind not saying that anymore?
Honestly, I'd like to win sometimes. And I said, and the other thing is, I'm trying to help teach these boys some life lessons. And one day they're going to probably grow up and have a job. And it's going to be a little bit competitive. You know, I mean, I said, I think there may be a kid on the team.
He grows up and he's in a sales job. And he comes home and he's just lost a $20,000 a year commission. And he says to his wife, he said, honey, I got bad news. I just lost one of my biggest clients. And I don't think I did a good job on the presentation.
And they're going to go with somebody else. And his wife's probably not going to say, well, honey, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. Just did you have fun? It's probably not going to be the case. It might be one of these boys, might be a surgeon one day and comes home and says, I lost a patient today.
And his wife's not going to say, well, but did you have fun? No, sometimes it matters whether you win or lose, doesn't it? And Jacob didn't lay his hands on these two grandsons and say, I just bless you to have fun in life. Always remember, it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. That's not what he said, is it?
He blessed the fruitfulness of their lives. And Jacob himself had had the fruitfulness of his life be blessed. And so, the answer to having peace in this world and to not feeling pressure can't be to just simply pretend that success never matters. And as we look at who God is, and I want to show you the theological foundation of fruitfulness, you'll realize that it's in God's heart and his own nature. For that which is good and made by him as something good to be able to prosper, to flourish, to increase.
But let's start back in Genesis chapter 1 at verse 11. God said, Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind on earth. And it was so. The design of God is that there would be plants and they have branches, and those branches. Will blossom, have leaves and stuff that blossom, right?
And then from that, fruit, and inside the fruit is seed. And you could take the seed in that fruit, plant it, more trees grow, more fruit, more seed.
So it's a plan for exponential increase. And at verse 26, we see the pinnacle of God's creation, Genesis 1:26. God said, Let us make man in our image. In our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on earth.
So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created him.
So he's made humanity in his own image, very much like God. That's who we are. And then at verse 28, God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful. And multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of heaven.
So the nature of God is to create. Bringing order, Form and beauty out of the chaos, and to take that. which he has created and bless it. to identify how good it is, to will its increase, to bless it with a positive vision for the future, so that what he has made will increase. And this is the way God has made everything in the world.
There's seed, it's planted, it grows, it flourishes, it's fruitful. And this is the nature in which he made people. to live fruitful lives. And what is compelling in the scripture when you realize is that God is relentless in his intent. to bless humanity to be fruitful just as he originally said.
After the fall of humanity in Adam and Eve sin, And there's such brokenness in the world, you'll see throughout the scripture, God's still intent on increasing. The place of his good people and his good intentions in the world. Genesis 8, 22 is 2. Is after the great flood, and God promises Genesis 8:22, while the earth remains seed time and harvest, there it is again. Cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
So, do you see this? The thing that was spoken to Adam and Eve, and then great sin comes in the world, and there's a huge flood. And God, in a sense, is starting over with this one man, Noah, and He blesses him, and He says the same thing He did to Adam and Eve: Be fruitful, multiply the earth. He blesses them. Alan Wright, today's good news message: blessed to be twice fruitful.
It's from the series The Power to Bless, which is also the name of Pastor Alan's book. And Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio sharing his parting good news thought for the day. in just a moment. 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 877-452-0. Five four four.
4860 or come to our website. pastorallen.org Back now sitting with Pastor Alan in the studio in our parting good news thought for the day. And and we know from Genesis that God blessed them to be fruitful. What's this about being twice fruitful? That sounds even better.
The name Ephraim means twice fruitful. Um it's a beautiful name. Uh Hebrew. has both Has not only singular and plural expressions of nouns, but but also the dual form.
So like in the South, we know to say you in the singular, and y'all is the plural, right? We've got to we've got to we don't have a word that says two of you. But in Hebrew there is an expression for that. And any time you hear a word that ends in Aim, That means that's the dual form of it.
So this is Ephraim, Ephraim, from fruit and double. It means double fruit or twice fruitful.
So I think when you bless someone to be like Ephraim and Manasseh, part of that is you're blessing the fruitfulness of their life.
Now, part of this was Jacob. Had Ephraim in Egypt as the second born.
So part of it was just as simple as, hey, the Lord's made me fruitful again here, another son. But I think that just there's so much prophetic about the Ephraim and Manasseh blessing that. This is partly God saying, I want this name on people, twice fruitful. I want this on everybody, twice fruitful, twice as fruitful as you would ever be by your own power. And I think ultimately, prophetically, twice as fruitful, meaning you were fruitful because he made you, but you're also fruitful because he fills you with the Holy Spirit and you've redeemed of him.
So. To bless someone is to envision their life being fruitful. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at pastorallen.org or call 877-477. five four four forty eight sixty.
That's 877-544-4860. If you only caught part of today's teaching, not only can you listen again online, but also get a daily email devotional that matches today's teaching delivered right to your email inbox free. Find out more about these and other resources at pastorallen.org. That's pastorallen.org. Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.
Yeah.
