Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing, a biblical faith-filled vision for your life. Open up your heart and receive today's blessing. May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh, favored. Graced. All your days.
When Joseph brought his boys to their grandfather, why did Jacob cross his arms? The old patriarch knew that the strong right hand of higher blessing. should rest on the firstborn son, the deserving one. But old Jacob, He crossed his arms. and he placed his right hand on Ephraim, the secondborn, the undeserving grandson.
Joseph tried to correct the scandal. But Jacob refused to reorder his hands. He left his right hand on the younger brother's head. Why? because that's what God has done for you.
Christ, the firstborn of all creation, who only deserved his Father's right hand of blessing. hung on the cursed cross, and felt the forsakenness. Because the father crossed his arms in the heavens. And extended the right hand of blessing to all the Ephraims, to the secondborns, to the undeserving ones, to you. Anime.
He who knew no sin. became your sin. and you in Christ became His righteousness.
So I bless you today to walk in the favor of the God who crossed his arms. For you. That's today's blessing. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Alan Wright. Wisdom, I could understand, but to call himself mighty, that's puzzling because he is an exile, deported to Babylon, holding no political position, having no position of power, no outward sign of strength whatsoever.
And he says that you've given me wisdom and might. The wisdom creates The strength. 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 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. We are in the book of Daniel, chapter two.
Daniel was exiled along with others out of Jerusalem and Judah around 600 years before Christ, and he becomes favored while a foreigner in the land of Babylon. And today we pick up the story in Daniel chapter 2, where the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, has. Had a puzzling and strange dream that has perplexed him, and he has asked his wise men not only to interpret the dream, but to tell him what the dream itself was. And otherwise, he promises to kill all of the so-called wise men of Babylon. And we pick up the story where Daniel realizes that he and his friends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, they would be slain along with the other wise men unless someone can tell Nebuchadnezzar not only the interpretation of his puzzling dream, but also tell him what the actual dream was.
And we pick up reading at Daniel 2, verse 17, Then Daniel went to his house and made this matter known to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, his companions. and told them to seek mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery, so that Daniel and his companions might not be destroyed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon. Then the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision of the night. Then Daniel blessed the God of heaven, and And Daniel answered and said, Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might. He changes times and seasons.
He removes his 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. Therefore, Daniel went in to Arioch, whom the king had appointed to destroy the wise men of Babylon. He went in and said thus to him, Do not destroy the wise men of Babylon. Bring me in before the king, and I will show the king. The interpretation.
I want to focus on that part of Daniel's praise where he says, You've given me wisdom. And Might. Wisdom That I understand. Because Daniel was a wise young man. He was intelligent.
He was sensitive to the Lord. He had grown up in the scriptures. He was recognized even by the authorities of Babylon, that he was Super gifted and intelligent, he was wise. But he was a captive in a faraway land. He had been captured and exiled, and he was in a position of no power.
He had no political standing, he had no authority, he was not only a foreigner, he was a servant. And yet, he described himself as full of wisdom and Might. Mighty? How could you be mighty? when you are a captive in a foreign land.
There's a relationship between wisdom and strength. Victor Hugo, the author of Les Mills, wrote elsewhere, All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come. Those words remind us of the words that are credited to Francis Bacon: Knowledge is power. But the source actually has much more ancient roots. For Proverbs 24, 5 says, A wise man is full of strength.
And a man of knowledge enhances his might. A wise man is full of strength and And knowledge enhances his might. If you know something that others don't know no matter who you are For where you are, you're in a position of strength. There's an old story of a man that was seated in a big office behind a big desk. In a big building of a big corporation, and he was paid $100,000 sitting there in that big empty office.
And one day an employee passing by asked his manager, said, Why in the world is this guy getting paid so much money just to sit there? And he was told, Well, Some years ago, this man had an idea, a wonderful idea, that netted our company about $10 million. And so he's paid to sit there with hopes that he'll come up with another good idea. It is amazing how, if you had one piece of revelation, it could be so. Powerful.
You ready for some good news? Every Christian has is his or her inheritance. The capacity to hear from God. And if you lack wisdom, the Scripture says, ask God. It'll give it to you generously.
You can hear from God. And when you have revelation, no matter where you are or what season you are in life, He increases your might. In fact, One little reassuring word from the Lord that He has for you to-day. And you will find that your strength is renewed Like the Eagles. We subtitled the series Favored Foreigner because Daniel was unique in this way.
He is an exile. And he loses everything that's dear to him. His homeland, his temple, his people are scattered. And now he and his three friends, along with so many other Jews, are been deported to Babylon where they grieve the loss of the way things used to be for them. And we're saying that we can, I think, in some ways identify with this because we have seen our world change so much.
There's strange times that we live in, and sometimes maybe you feel like this. You feel like a foreigner in your own country.
So I've been on the watch for just these funny things that make me feel like a foreigner, you know, just reading the newspaper and going, man, that's what I'm talking about. That makes me feel like what country do I live in. But a funny one, this week at New Canaan Society on Friday morning, our speaker was a friend who has moved to Portland, Oregon, and he was in town, and he was our speaker, and he was telling us a little bit about. About Portland, and I didn't know. I didn't know, maybe you knew this, that Portland's unofficial motto is Keep Portland Weird.
It's on Thousands of bumper stickers all over the city. You'd see it. They think to keep Portland weird. And so he shared some stories about how weird it was, but he said that he was walking down the street with his wife and down the sidewalk, and all of a sudden he just saw, it was kind of caught him by surprise. You know, you see something, you can't believe you just saw that.
But it was a man. He went by and he had a bicycle helmet on, but he didn't have anything else on. And he thought this was kind of weird. And so what he learned was, I didn't know this, maybe you were aware, that one of the big events in Portland, Oregon, this is our country, they. They host an annual event.
It's called the World Naked Bike Ride. The event hosts as many as 10,000 participants who ride en masse through Portland on their bicycles with nothing on but their helmets. And this past year, organizers were a bit disappointed. They didn't reach their goal of 12,000 bike riders, and they blamed it on the light drizzle that night. The organizer of the event said the goal of the World Naked Bike Ride was described by the Y'all think I'm making this up, don't you?
I'm not. I'm talking, this is our country. The goal, he said, of the World Naked Bike Ride was we're using nudity as a way to draw attention to cycling. and the folly of oil dependency. We hope motorists We hope motorists will begin to suspect cyclists have more fun, and hence, maybe they don't need their cars as much as they thought.
See, this is the kind of thing that makes me feel like a foreigner in my own country because, you know, I'm not mad or upset or anything. If they want to ride their bicycles naked around Portland, I don't care. But I just don't understand this. It's an unusual custom. And the thought of seeing 10,000 naked bike riders.
And it doesn't it doesn't make me want to ride a bike more. I'm all for bike riding. I'm all for using less fossil fuel, but but it doesn't seem fun. I mean, the problem with riding a bicycle already is that they're uncomfortable because of those little narrow seats that you sit on. And The idea of sitting on one of those, you know, directly is.
Not, I can't envision. I'm honestly, I can't envision this. I can't envision this. This is this, I can't see this. I mean, can you envision that?
Don't try to. I was going through my mind. I'm just like, you know, riding around. It's like, hey, there's Pastor Chris. How are you doing, man?
Nice night, isn't it? Yeah. Have you seen anybody else? Yeah, I saw Pastor Keating and Gladys right back there. No, I just can't.
I can't. I can't identify. with this. It's a funny world we live in now around us. I just uh But what I'm really saying is something a little deeper than that.
A lot of people under the sound of my voice right now, you you especially if you grew up in the South, you'd probably say you might could remember a time that you didn't hardly even know anybody that didn't go to church. And and now by some some reports, just in one generation, in one generation, Some reports 85% of people don't go to church regularly. But I'm not even really talking about that. But it's something more than that. It seems to have happened where.
There is so much judgmentalism in our culture. And honestly, it has gone both ways. And sometimes you do reap what you've sown. And maybe there's been too much hypocrisy and judgmentalism in the church. And people have now sown it back towards the church.
not this particular church, but just The church in general. Thinking that Christians, so many people think Christians, they think they are selfish, religious bigots that are just interested in forcing their opinions and behaviors. on others and um And this hurts, this hurts, because the real Christians, the people that I know, You all, we're not perfect by any means, and we stumble, and we need to ask for forgiveness, and we need. We need to keep growing up. But the Christians, the real Christians that I know, they love people and they love God and they want to serve and they want to make a difference and they.
They they want to help people and they want the world to know. About the love of God and about forgiveness and mercy that is available in Christ. And they want people to know that if you're lost and without hope, that there is a way of salvation. And it hurts, and I grieve that our message is lost upon a culture that has made a judgment against the church without knowing who the church really is. That's more of what I'm talking about.
I had a dream. I had a dream the first week of January of this year, and it was unusual because it just appeared out of nowhere. It wasn't after some troubling thing had been going on in my life. It was after, of course, the atrocity, the murderous atrocity in Newtown. But I think it was more than just processing something.
I think it was a message from the Lord. I've learned over the years, I can get a sense usually of when a dream has got a message to it, and sometimes they do. And in the dream, I dreamt there was a wicked man who I somehow knew he had an assault weapon and that he was going to harm people with it. And knowing this, I, in the dream, I bravely extricated the weapon from the man by overpowering him. And I'll just save Pastor Chris from having to say it later.
Okay, this is how you know it was a dream. I overpowered him. With You can do things in dreams you can't do otherwise. But I overpowered him, I extricated his weapon. And in so doing, I left him lightly wounded, perhaps a broken nose, some blood on his face.
And the wicked man in the dream cried foul, and he complained to all the bystanders that he was never intending to harm anyone. And who was I to come and attack him like that? And very soon, the whole crowd turned against me with criticism and scorn, accusing me of being overbearing and insensitive and intolerant toward the innocent man. And I was condemned for being so intolerant. And when I awoke, I told my wife, I told her the dream.
I said, why in the world would I have a dream like that? And she laughed. And she said, Boy, you must be really feeling unappreciated these days. She said, there, you're trying to save the world and nobody's thanking you, but they're booing you instead. And we chuckled.
But as time went by, it began to make more sense to me because this is close as any way when I say feeling like a foreigner, this explains it here, is that in many ways, I think that Christians feel this way in our culture, that this wasn't a dream about weapons. This wasn't a dream about violence. It was about ideology. It was to say that the supreme value in our culture today is tolerance. And at risk of vastly oversimplifying the whole psyche of a nation, I would say that because people have perceived too much intolerance and have seen judgmentalism, they don't want anything to do with that.
They see that this is a problem. And there is a sense in which tolerance is a virtue because we need to be able to tolerate people who have different views than us. Yes, we do. Of course we do. And when you see intolerance carried to its extreme, you get fundamentalistic terrorism.
And no one wants that. It's very important that we are able to tolerate people with different beliefs. But, and this is a big Big. But There are most certainly times when it is not the loving thing. to tolerate someone.
In my dream, it wasn't the ultimate loving thing to just tolerate a wicked man with an assault rifle who I knew was going to kill people. People need to be warned of such. A wolf in sheep's clothing. Such wickedness needs to be confronted. If, here's the point: if others in that dream had known the wicked intentions of that man.
then I would have been heralded a hero. for stopping it. But if you are blind to the intentions of the enemy. You will not even recognize and heroic effort when you see it. And the Bible teaches that the God of this age, Satan himself, has a way in which he has been allowed to blind the hearts of men and women.
And what the gospel does is it is a light that comes into the darkness and you see things you had not seen before. And it has never been a message that was tended to be intolerant in the sense of being unjudgmental, but it has always been a message of truth. For it is the truth that sets us free. If you've ever had only good in mind for someone, only for them to misunderstand you and condemn you, then you have a faint glimpse of the pain of the Savior. For Jesus came into his own, but his own did not receive him, and he was treated like a foreigner amongst his own people.
He came to save them, and they killed him just like they'd killed the prophets. And Jesus stood over his city and said, Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how much I have longed to gather you like a hen would gather her chicks under her wings, but you would not. You were not willing. Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. And you could hear Jesus weeping as if to say, I came to love you, to redeem you, to teach you, to lay my life down for you, but you have rejected me because you do not even recognize your own Savior.
And this is the essence, I think, of the emotion. of the Christian in the culture that does not understand Christianity. It is much more. Than seeing unusual customs and strange things and people not going to church. It is.
It is being put into the position of having the power of the gospel. which is powerful enough to dismantle and disarm the enemy. By the truth of God's goodness and grace And yet to be misunderstood, it is into this kind of culture that Daniel is thrust. He is exiled and deported. And placed in the middle of a pagan culture that has no knowledge of God.
Alan Wright. and today's teaching, Wisdom and Power. Ever feel like the pressure is always on? What must I do to be accepted? There is only one solution: the grace of God that lifts our shame.
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That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. or come to our website, pastorallen.org. Wisdom creates the strength. Is this a universal truth that all the world can use? And how is it helpful for the follower of Christ in particular?
Well, I do think that there's a lot. I mean, all truth is God's truth. And so, even if somebody doesn't know the Lord, but if they've gained practical wisdom in life, that really is associated with their strength for living as well.
So, you know, the Proverbs, for example, just chocked full of this wisdom. And so, many of those pearls of wisdom really apply to the believer or the unbeliever. It's just that the believer is the one who has the access to the Word of God and to the insights of God through the Spirit. And so, the believer is promised that if you lack wisdom, you can ask God and He'll give you wisdom. What we're just making the point here is that you might think of Daniel in a very powerless position, and yet he praised God for giving him wisdom and might.
The two are. always go together. I've heard it said that even if you're not a believer and you don't trust Christ, if you take the Bible and you follow this book, In as much as you can abide by it, you'll be more successful, happier, healthier. And so, that sense it is a universal truth there. Yeah, I think all truth is God's truth.
And so, if somebody's living in truth, that they didn't learn it directly from the scriptures or they didn't learn it because they knew the Lord. It's just part of God's, what we call his general. Grace, His common grace that is extended to all people. He's merciful. The rain falls on the just and the unjust.
Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.
