Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing, a biblical faith-filled vision for your life. Open your heart to receive today's blessing. May God make you like Ephraim. Joseph's second born, whose name means fruitful. you're destined to be more fruitful than you can now imagine.
Joseph had a dream, but he could never have seen this coming. After 30 years of abuse and trauma, slavery, false imprisonment, God put him on a throne in Egypt? It looked like he was going to die in an Egyptian dungeon. Instead, God used him to save the world from famine. to save his own family from starvation.
I'm blessing you to be like Ephraim. Blessing this to be a year of double fruit. May whatever good you can imagine be double. Fruit, sweet fruit. Not the stuff of raw ambition and worldly success, but real fruit.
the byproduct of the branch abiding on the vine.
So, may God's Spirit nourish you, fill you, and produce the fruit in and through you. I bless you to be like Ephraim. Twice. fruitful. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Alan Wright.
The king of the greatest empire on earth. suddenly befuddled. Having no idea of the meaning of his life. And there's Daniel, who holds no power or prestige or place of prominence, a captive in a foreign land. And God is gonna show Daniel the answer.
Isn't that incredible? That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. Yeah. I'm Daniel Britt.
Excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series called Daniel, 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 Allen 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 877-544-4860.
That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. What a setup this is.
Do you see this? He set it up. Where Nebuchadnezzar knows that his soothsayers often come up with bogus interpretations of dreams that are based on their own folly and their own minds. And he's like, I will not be satisfied with anything other than a supernatural revelation of my dream. And it's an incredible setup.
Because there's nobody that knows that dream except for Nebuchadnezzar and God who gave him the dream. That's it.
So what are they going to do?
Well, don't you know, they remind me of all those magicians in Pharaoh's court. They start trying, I'm sure, to do all that they can with all of their incantations and stirrings and crystal balls and everything they can possibly do. But of course, they can't come up with this. It is no digression to highlight here that part of this message is. the futility of the worldly magicians and the dangers of the occult.
The Babylonian soothsayers and sorcerers They may have been the ones that were most steeped in the literature of the Chaldeans, but they're also the ones who practice all these ways of occultic magic. And the occult is man's attempt To to manipulate things supernaturally Outside of a relationship with God. See, the reason God Condemns all occultic activity so sternly in the scriptures. Is it When you try in any way to manipulate things supernaturally outside of a simple personal relationship with God. You are trying to put yourself into the position of a God.
And so what happens in the occultic is that in people that are reaching out, trying to tap into the spiritual realm through all of these means other than a relationship with Jesus. What happens is, without realizing it, oftentimes, and sometimes on purpose, they are connecting up with demonic realities.
So, the stern warnings against the occult, which by the way, in the scripture include everything. Everything. Be aware, Christians. Everything from the simplest, seemingly harmless astrology reading or horoscope or palm reading or Taric cards or crystal ball or magic eight ball or seance or any sort of occultic activity. You don't want to have anything to do with that whatsoever.
Not even as a game. Not even for a child to have a little game. Why? Because this is the realm of the demonic. Any manipulation of the supernatural outside of a relationship with Jesus, trying to put yourself into the position of being the one who's in control.
Beloved, you and I will never be in control. God is in control of his world. The world is in our Father's hands. Don't have anything to do with the occult ever, period. These soothsayers and sorcerers, some of them, I believe, were most certainly intimately connected with the demonic.
But guess what? The demons are just fallen angels and they don't know everything. They're just creatures. And the demons themselves didn't know Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Only God and Nebuchadnezzar knew what Nebuchadnezzar had dreamt.
And so the only way that anybody would ever be able to know Nebuchadnezzar's dream would be that God would tell them. What a setup. What a setup. And the stage is set for, therefore, God to glorify himself in Babylon. and to pour out favor Upon Daniel.
Because Nebuchadnezzar would not be impressed and he would not know God, until there was a revelation that he was assured It was from God.
So Daniel sought the Lord. He asked his three friends to pray for him. And he sought the Lord. And The Lord revealed the mystery. It's just an amazing thing when God speaks to you.
Yeah, all of us. Maybe you've been really observant, or maybe life just rushes by and you don't have much time to observe. How much God's speaking to you? on a daily basis. And you have moments in your life where you know, God spoke to me.
And it changes everything. It's interesting how Little we are told in this text and in all of the Bible about how it is God speaks to different people. All we're told here is that the Lord revealed the mystery to Daniel that night. One prophetic friend of mine said he thought that maybe Daniel just prayed about it, went to bed, and dreamt the dream that Nebuchadnezzar had dreamt. I don't know.
I often look in the scripture and I want to just find: give us 10 steps on how to effectively hear the voice of God. We're not told.
Sometimes angels show up.
Sometimes it just says the Lord told them.
Sometimes they just had a witness of the Spirit. You know why I think God gives us so little information about this? Because He doesn't want to make it a technique. It's not a technique hearing from God. It is a relationship.
Imagine a little child wanting to Get some answer from his father and thinking he has to go through a technique. I just can't imagine. Imagine my children saying, you know, wanting to find out what are we going to do for the Super Bowl tonight. Can you imagine them getting together and saying, well, let's stir up a pot and get us a brew and speak some incantations, and maybe then we'll decipher what it is that our father wants to do during the Super Bowl tonight. That's not the way children interact.
You just ask, right? You know what James says about wisdom? Ask God. Ask him for wisdom. He speaks in so many ways.
But we've had a beautiful story in our family this week. It's one of those stories where God speaks to you in the little ways. In order to make sense of it, I gotta kind of start. Before the story, and make sure you know our beloved family, my wife's sister Catherine, and her husband, Kevin, they're not only family to us, they're in our church, they're our dearest of friends and partners in ministry. And they have three children.
And Jake is an engineering student, sophomore year at state, and Anna Catherine's a high school senior. And they have little Zach. Zach's special. He's a little guy. You wouldn't know that he was 14 if you saw him.
He's had developmental challenges his whole life, including autism. And um Last week, we were we were sponsored by my ever-generous father-in-law for four delicious days in Orlando, Florida. I know it was the coldest week of the year here. I'm sorry I was away. And Spend three of those days at Disney World, and you've never seen what real excitement is.
You've never seen. You've never seen it until you've seen Zach Curry at a character breakfast with Tigger or Piglet. If you've seen that, you've seen the definition of an overly excited child who can't contain himself. And throughout the week, I was, once again, just marveling at Catherine and Kevin and how patient they are and their commitment to care for Zach and face the challenges, go into the theme park and go out to eat and do the things that you do as a family, even though it'd be easier just to withdraw and just stay at home. But they don't do that, and they're just so full of God, and it's just wonderful to watch.
But there are a lot of challenges every day with Zach. And on the last day of the trip, we just. We just enjoyed the sunshine in Florida and swam and rode bikes. And that evening went to downtown Disney and shopped about. And we ate at the crowded, noisy Rainforest Cafe.
If you've ever been to one of those restaurants, loud animatronic animals are making noises, and there is an occasional realistic sounding thunderstorm. And we were seated near animatronic elephants that would waggle their ears and raise their trunks and trumpet at us very loudly. This is unsettling for Zach, to say the least. It's not necessarily an easy place. And so, in the midst of that, it was kind of a challenging thing for Zach.
He didn't want to eat, and he wanted to kind of. Kind of get a lot of attention. He needed it. But in the middle of it, Catherine told a story that was a highlight of the dinner. And she said, I have a God story to share.
And so in the midst of the animals trumpeting and Zach crying and all, she told her story. The precious story began actually with something that happened a couple weeks ago at our New Year blessing service. For anybody unfamiliar with the way we begin the new year at Renalda, instead of exhorting one another with the law and saying, let's try harder to be good Christians this year, instead we speak the promises of God over one another, believing that blessing empowers us for righteous living. And so we have this incredible weekend of ministry encounters. And Catherine and Kevin and her family, they were blessed by another precious couple in the church, Rick and Pat Peacock.
And in the midst of that ministry time, it came up. I don't know if it was Rick or Pat that said that they fed a sense that the Lord might be saying to Catherine to be on the lookout this year for those little signs, the little evidences of God's love, of how much He really loves you, and that He's really with you and noticing you. And Pat shared an example from their own lives, and she said that for her, she said that for whatever reason, This little reminder of God's attention to them was always Canadian geese that would fly by. They'd lived up north and had seen these geese at all these important moments in their life. You know, do you ever had something like this in your life?
There's just these little signals you like, yeah, that's God's little thing for me. It just keeps coming up. And so then they move down here, and then there'd be a moment where there's just some little reassurance, and there'd be a Canadian goose honking or something. And she said, maybe God's got something like that for you. And Catherine thought about it for a moment, and it became clear to her what her little God-wink thing was: pennies.
All her life, she said, she she tended to find pennies. And this was what came to her mind. She said, I I think it's pennies. She said, when I find a penny, I think of God, and I'm going to think of God this year when I find a penny, and I'm going to think of how much God thinks of me. And so it was.
And on that day that we ate the Rainforest Cafe, we'd been by the pool, and Catherine, she went into the locker room, and there of all things, she looked down and there she saw it, her first penny of the year, just lying there. And she picked up the penny and she said, Well, thank you, God. I'm thinking of you. There's a penny. And I believe you're thinking of me.
And then she moved about, and there she saw on a little shelf and looked over, and there were three pennies right next to each other. One, two, three. And she said, Three pennies. Right there. She picked them up and she said, You.
You really are thinking of me, aren't you? And I'm thinking of you, and I love you. And as she was leaving, the last she looked and she saw, there was a dime. And she picked up the dime. She said, Well, that's ten pennies.
Now, Catherine told me later that she'd been picking up pennies ever since.
Some years ago, I made an illustration in a sermon in which I had talked about how It's maybe not worth it to most of us to bend down and pick up a penny, but I had figured out how much. In relative terms, a penny would be to us as compared to how much would be to Bill Gates. And anyway, I'd figure it out. It was roughly about like. Us picking up a penny would be about like Bill Gates picking up $10,000.
And I just kind of made this point. I said, you know, even Bill Gates would pick up $10,000, but it's only like a penny to him. Anyway, don't get lost on that. I don't even remember what my point was, but she... She started picking up pennies after that, partly also because she ran into another member here, Dick Stone, who they had a conversation.
He said, Oh, he said, I pick up all the loose chains and declared that he had a couple thousand dollars of it by this time, which says something about how old Dick is.
Sorry, Dick. But no. But both of these things, they led her to be picking up pennies. And so she'd picked up these pennies out of the locker room at the pool. And it really touched her because it was just a week and a half earlier that she'd had this moment in the blessing service and said, pennies will be my thing.
And none of the rest of us saw a penny and then three pennies and a dime. But she did, and she knew God was thinking of her. And it blessed her. You know, just a little thing. And it blessed us.
And it was a blessing 'cause it was a difficult dinner that night with Zach. And uh Anyway, we went on and we got back in our busy lives.
Well And my wife was teaching at Awakenings, our women's Bible study, on Thursday morning, and she was speaking about how. It builds your faith when God speaks to you, and that's how faith grows. And so she thought it'd be a good thing to have Catherine come and share about her penny testimony. And Catherine said, sure, she would. And Catherine got up on Thursday and was preparing to leave and come and share her testimony about the pennies that I just told you.
But she checked her email. Before she left. There was a surprising thing, I had not known about it myself, neither had Anne, but our daughter, 14-year-old Abby, had sent Catherine a note, an email. And I had never known Abby to send an email like this before, but this is what she wrote: Hey, Auntie Catherine, at the Rainforest Cafe, when you were sharing about seeing the pennies in the locker room, God spoke to me and gave me a word. And I completely forgot to tell you.
I wanted to email you because by the time I see you next I will have forgotten. You said that the first penny you saw was right at your feet.
Well, God says that that penny was you.
Next you saw three pennies on that little shelf, and those were Uncle Kevin, Jake, and Aunt Catherine. Last but not least, You saw a dime. That, God says, is Zac. God's working ten times more in Zac, Not that he isn't working through your whole family. The dime was the last coin you saw, and And Zach is the least likely in your family to look at for what God is working in his life.
But God is working in Zach ten times more than you could possibly imagine. You just can't see it now. It's hard to quantify the kind of strength that comes into a mother's soul when she gets a word from the Lord like that.
So simple. It's not so much about even the content of the word, something as silly as pennies.
something as simple as a fourteen year old girl. sharing a God inspired thought. What's important is it is a word from heaven, and it witnesses to something that makes you know This is God. There can be a word from the Lord to you that would mean nothing to anyone else. But in your heart, in your spirit, you know only God could know.
But that That was trying. To be at the Rainforest Cafe, and instead of being able to just relax, a parent of a special need child is always on. And sometimes you feel like you're not. Seeing the The fruit of your labors and all of the secret things that might go on in a mother's heart. that God sees.
and that through some simple means He speaks. And suddenly Your strength is renewed like the eagle's. For where there is revelation, There is strength. We get only a scant statement about how Daniel received the revelation, but then we get four full verses of Daniel praising the Lord. Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might.
He changes times and seasons, he removes kings and sets up kings. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding. He reveals deep and hidden things. He knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him. To you, O God of my fathers, I give thanks and praise, for you have given me wisdom and might, and have now made known to me what we asked of you, for you have made known to us the king's matter.
Daniel went in to the king and he said, Do not destroy the wise men of Babylon. Bring me before the king, I'll show him the interpretation. God spoke. And he made Daniel strong. He was in a foreign culture.
Hmm. But he was favored. Because of the word of the Lord.
So are you. And that's the gospel. Alan Wright. And today's teaching: wisdom and power. Ever feel like the pressure is always on?
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So we've heard a great message, Alan. At this point, for the person listening and they now understand this, What do you have to say to them? How does this make all the difference? What if you began to see your life more like Daniel's? What if you began to see, I feel like I'm in exile.
I feel like I'm in a place where I don't fit in. But Perhaps You could begin to envision that, nonetheless, the favor of God is on your life. And what this does is you begin to wake up in the morning and realize, you know, I may be going through a hard time, but I am still blessed and highly favored, is that you begin to have a confidence for moving into your environment. And this is what happened with Daniel. And there is a way that God joins together the wisdom that He gives us with power for influence in the world.
And so, we want to say, Daniel, to each and every one who's listening now, In Christ, you, though may feel like you're an alien in this world, are highly favored. Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.
