Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing: a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. Today, this day, You have cause to rejoice and be glad simply because God made the day. Bad things happen in our days, but there are no bad days because God makes no bad things.
So I bless you to marvel in the day. just because it exists. and because you're alive to see it. This is the day the Lord has made. May you rejoice.
And be glad in it. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Alan Wright. Abraham believed that God was able to raise the dead. Whatever he was going on in his mind, I'll tell you what was not going on in his mind. Abraham had no notion that he was going to come back down off Moriah with a dead son.
You know why? Because he believed God. 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, Word and Spirit: The Beauty of Balance, as presented at Renolda Church in North Carolina.
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More on this later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. It was through faith. We could see mountains move.
That Jesus himself was the one who died in our place and did the work in our behalf. And the interesting thing is that actually, if you read James more carefully. And you look at James chapter 1, verse 21. James says, Therefore, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word. Receive a revelation, he's saying.
Receive the Word of God. And look what He says about the Word of God, which is able to save your souls. You're not saying your works save you. You're saying the word of God which comes in. And it's by that word that faith comes in our lives.
James also says in chapter 2, whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point, has become guilty of all of it.
So James is making it clear. That if you had every work of righteousness, but you failed at one point, then you'd be guilty of the whole law. When you read it more carefully, you realize That even when James says in chapter 4, there's only one law-giver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. We don't save ourselves. James knows it, and he knows it full well.
What he's saying is that If you look at faith, From one angle And you see the gift That faith celebrates, then you can see from this side that faith is the receiving of a gift. And so it has nothing to do with human activity. But if you were to look at it from the other side, you could see that faith, real faith, is by its very nature going to act. Or else it wasn't faith. He's saying that faith in activity, faith in works, faith in the demonstration of faith are so closely connected.
That on the one hand, they seem to be diametrically opposed opposites of faith and works, and yet what he's saying is that you actually look at it, it's one and the same. Hmm. We're all suspicious of these timeshare deals where they offer you a promotional and they'll give you something free if you come and listen to the spiel. Anne and I did one in Orlando, Florida one time. And um We were going to be given a festive luau that night.
It was neither festive nor a feast. And you've had these things happen before. The funniest one, my father-in-law talks about. that years ago, he and his wife, my mother-in-law, they went up uh to look at something in the mountains and they took them up the hill to these beautiful units in a beautiful big Cadillac. And they gave him the spiel and then they declined.
They said, see you later. And they said, well, how do we get back down the mountain? They said, well, you walk. Made a walk back down the mountain.
So you get something that tells you you've won a million dollars. You're like, yeah, sure, sure, sure. But let's say. Let's just say. you got a phone call.
And it sounded legitimate.
Somebody said that you have won a million dollars. All you have to do is go to the lawyer's office tomorrow, sign some papers, and receive the cashier's check. Would you go?
Well you would go if you believed it. Unless you got so much money that The million dollar doesn't mean anything to you, in which case, please see me after church. I want to talk to you about it. Got a few things we need to do. No, you'd go if you believed it, right?
So you could say the people that were down there signing and receiving their check, you could look at it from one angle and say they're signing for it and their activity of coming down here to get it is what got them the check. But on the other side, you say that didn't have anything to do with it. It was a free gift. And so it was just their faith that believed it. But if you look at it on the other side, yeah, but the reason you know that they believed it was they went down there and they signed the check.
They signed for the check.
So you could, from one side, say, no, it's just about faith. No, you said, no, no, it's just about the other type. Anybody that didn't come down here and sign the check, they didn't get it. Yeah, but in other words, The action Of going and signing for it was so much evidence of the faith that if you didn't sign for it, you'd have to say you didn't believe it. It was the faith.
But the action, the work of it, was the demonstration that that faith was real. If somebody said, Oh, I believe that that million dollars is for me, but they don't go down there and sign for it and get it, you'd have to say, You don't believe it. This is what James is saying. He's saying our faith, when you really believe something, it ends up getting demonstrated in what you do. In fact of the matter, I think what he's saying is that when you really believe something, it just shows quite naturally.
You can't just say, Oh, I love people. I love God. I've had this faith surge in me. I believe that God. And you meet somebody and you have this compassion for them and you feel the love of God bursting in your heart towards them, and you have provision and available means to help them.
And just say, Okay, off you go, be warm, be fed, and I. No, if you've got a faith in you, there's a mission that's in you also, and it just starts working like that. You can't even hide it if you tried. If it's real. Listen, the things you believe and you feel strongly about, you can't hide it.
You can try, but it will come out, it'll squirt out some years ago. It just so happened. That the Final game, the national championship game, the NCAA basketball tournament. Felt on a weekend that I and my family were at the beach, my brother and his family were at the beach. And um my father-in-law was there.
And my father-in-law is a Duke fan, and Duke was playing in the national championship. And I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'm not a Duke fan. I'm a Carolina fan. I don't know if I've ever mentioned that before. And my brother, who went to Carolina, and so.
I'm a little embarrassed to say this because ACC conference should pull for ACC conference and all that. And Carolina and Duke, only 20, 25 minutes apart from each other in Chapel Hill and Durham, we're so closely knit. Uh We should pull for each other, but maybe if you're from around here, you've noticed we don't pull for each other.
So we're in this quandary where we're going to watch the national championship game. And Graham, my father-in-law, is kind of like, Now, are you guys going to be pulling for Duke? You know, here are you going to be polite about this? And we're like, oh, you know, yeah, sure, we are. Yeah.
We just can't wait for Duke to win another national championship. And hear about it all year long. Yeah, we can't wait for that. We'll pull for Duke, Blue Devils. And so, dutifully, throughout the whole game, we were like, you know, Duke would score.
We're like, oh, that was a nice, good move there. Yeah, very good. And. We were very polite, and we were very, and then about five minutes left in the game. They called a foul.
I don't remember who Duke was playing in that championship game, but they called a foul on the other team. And just forgetting himself, my brother. leaps up off the couch. And goes, oh, come on, ref. He sat back down and he said, I just mean, you know, if you want to kind of call me up.
Let's see, what he'd done was we'd watched a whole game, nearly 35 minutes, this whole basketball game. We got down last night, and he just revealed that the whole thing was a lie. That the whole time he'd sit there, like, I wish these guys would lose, you know, and you just reveal it because you can't help it. What's in the heart eventually gets exposed. And I think that's part of what James is saying here.
How could you call that? Why would you say somebody's got faith? when it we can't see it at all.
Well you you say you're pulling for Duke. But you're mad that the ref called a foul on the other team. No, you just, your action expose what you really believe.
So, faith is so closely connected with its activity that James is saying faith without this is dead, it's not even real. I don't think he's saying that we're not saved through our faith. He's just saying here's what saving faith actually looks like, right? And it's manifest in your life. It changes everything inside of you.
It changes your priorities. It fuels our Sense of mission. And It is therefore something that is much more than mental assent. The Christian faith is not intellectual assent. to biblical doctrines.
What James is saying is that biblical faith, real faith, Is a trust relationship that changes everything. He says, even the demons believe. Again, the Prince of Preachers, Charles Spurgeon, said it well. He said, I have no doubt devils are very orthodox. And get this line.
I love it. I do not know which church they belong to. Though there are some in all churches. There was one in Christ's church when he was on earth, for he said. Speaking of Judas, one was filled with devils.
Devils, he said, believe all the facts of revelation. I do not believe they have a doubt. They have suffered too much from the hand of God to doubt his existence. They have felt too much the terror of his wrath to doubt the righteousness of his government. They are stern believers, but they are not saved.
This is James saying, let me tell you what faith is. Faith is not, oh, I can check off and tell you intellectually I believe these things and get all my doctrines right. And oh, you know, it's something it's in the heart and it's demonstrated in the life. There's a famous story, one of my favorite illustrations of such, of a circus performer who went into a busy downtown area and he took a tightrope and he stretched it between two buildings a couple stories high. And a crowd began to gather beneath him.
And he hollered down to the crowd. He said, How many of you believe I can walk across to the other side? And they said, Yes, we believe, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he walked across to the other side. And on the other side, on the top of that other building, there was a wheelbarrow he had put there, and he took the wheelbarrow in his hands.
He said, How many of you believe? As the crowd began to grow, how many believe that I could push the wheelbarrow across to the other side? And they all chanted, Yes, we believe, we believe, we believe. Go, go, go. And he pushed the wheelbarrow across to the other side.
And then, as the crowd had really grown in numbers, now he cried down to them and he said, How many of you believe that I can actually take a person, put them in the wheelbarrow, push it across to the other side? And the huge crowd said, Yay, we believe, yay! Go, go, go. It's it okay, one of the believers, come on up, get in the wheelbarrow. And the crowd dispersed.
You find out what you believe, right?
So not mental ascent. It's not saying the right thing. It's something deeper than that. That's what James is saying. That's what it means to have faith.
It really means in the end that You take the balance of your life. the weight of your being. And you trust God. Yeah. I trust you, God, for my salvation.
A trust in you for what you've done for me in Christ. I yield to you, I trust in you. I gladly get in the wheelbarrow. Yeah. The faith is uh Faith is not a work, but faith works.
It signs for the check because it believes it. It demonstrates it out of the heart because that's where its affections lie. It gets into the wheelbarrow because that's the way trust works.
So when James references This mysterious, disturbing, and marvelous story in Genesis chapter 22. We're Abraham Is told by God. I want you to take your son, your only son, whom you love. That sound familiar? Your son, your only son, whom you love.
And go up to the Mount Moriah. And there I want you to offer him. Upon the altar. And in This breathtaking act of obedience, Abraham gathers up wood and puts the wood on his son, so that Isaac is carrying the wood up the hill.
Sound familiar? And on the way up, Isaac. who was the son of promise. He was the promised son, the miracle. That was the living fulfillment of the promise that Abraham gave, that God gave to Abraham and Sarah, that they would have a son and that there would be a nation that would be born through them.
This boy, Isaac, he looked at his dad and he said, Dad, he said, We got the fire, we got the wood, we got. He said, But where's the lamb? And Abraham said, One of the most Powerful prophetic verses in all of the Old Testament. He said, God will provide. himself a lamb.
And people read that story, and I've heard preachers preach that story like this. Or see what? God tested Abraham, and Abraham was willing to give up the thing that was most precious to him. Are you willing to give up the things that are most precious to you? God might come and ask and take something away from you that's precious, and you demonstrate like that.
That's not what this story's about at all. Because Abraham said to his servant, He said My son and I are going to go up and worship and we'll return. The writer of Hebrews said, In Hebrews 11 in the Hall of Faith fame. He said that Abraham believed that God was able to raise the dead. Whatever he was going on in his mind, I'll tell you what was not going on in his mind.
Abraham had no notion that he was going to come back down off Moriah with a dead son. You know why? Because he believed God. He believed God, and that's why the scripture says he believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. It's why Paul echoed this, and he said it was Abraham's faith, it was his belief that justified him, and he was credited with righteousness.
What did he believe? He believed the promise of God. God had said, I'm going to make you into a nation. Look, Abraham, into the stars of the heavens. If you could count them, so numerous will all your descendants be.
In your old age, you will have this child. Abraham, look, if you could count the sands of the beaches, so will your people be. And Abraham had Isaac, his only son. He was the son of promise. He was the means through which God was fulfilling all of his promises to Abraham.
And Abraham believed God. And therefore, he believed that he would go up on the mountain with Isaac. And he came down from the mountain with Isaac. And the only thing he knew to say was, God himself will provide a lamb. And sure enough, they got up there, and the angel stopped his hand and showed him.
The mercies of God, and there was a ram in the thicket rustling around that became. the center of the sacrifice, and they worship God. and returned.
Well, why is James referencing this then? Because he's saying Abraham went and signed for the check. He believed God. The irony of the story If Abraham hadn't believed God's promise, I don't think he'd ever gone up on that mountain. He was not about to kill his son.
Child sacrifice was an abomination in Israel. In other words, His faith Worked. It's still a story about faith. But which angle are you looking at it from? In a few weeks, We will our family will keep a custom.
and the lights will dim at the Stevens Center. and Tchaikovsky's Music will begin. And we will watch once again the story in dance across the stage of little Clara, Who is uh Recipient of a gift from Uncle Drosselmeyer. A mysterious uncle. Of a wooden soldier, a little nutcracker, just a toy, wooden, inanimate object, until There's a great dream.
and a little magic sprinkle. and you realize that the soldier comes to life And he fights. against the King of the Mice. and he is glorious. And there is joy.
and everything changes. James 2 is here to say to you, You are not an inanimate Wooden toy. You're not a wooden soldier. You're alive. Princes and princesses in the kingdom.
Warriors with the sword of the Spirit. You got faith and your faith Works and that's Yeah. Alan Wright. At the conclusion of not only today's teaching of faith and works, but the conclusion of the entire series today: The Beauty of Balance. Alan is back here in a moment with additional insights on what we've been taught and a final word for today in the series.
Unlock the power of blessing your life. Discover God's grace-filled vision for your life by signing up for Alan Wright's free daily blessing. If you want to fill your heart with grace and encouragement, get Alan Wright's Daily Blessing. It's free, and just a click away at pastoralan.org. Alan, beauty of balance, faith, and works.
What a great way to end this. And thinking of that story of Abraham, I think, is a very appropriate way that we can take and say, okay, I see it. I like the light switch illustration you've also used in this.
Well, when you have faith, just let's try to remember it this way: when you have faith, that faith acts without even, you don't even have to think about it, right? And so, so many times we look at scriptures like the story of Abraham and the call for him to sacrifice Isaac. And these texts could almost be scary to us because they're like, oh boy, you know, I would never. When we see it rightly, as we have today, and we start understanding what James means, that what happens when you have a faith that has come by the gospel, you see what God's done in Jesus Christ, and so it arouses faith, belief, confidence, trust. in God and His saving work for you.
Well, the more that you see that, the more you have faith, the more you're going to live your life that way. You're just going to act in that way. And so it's a very natural thing. And I hope that's what we've been seeing. And all throughout the whole series, Daniel, just a.
The beauty of balance is to say That these things that might seem in conflict, whether it be celebration and contemplation, or whether it be faith and works, what we're really saying. is that it's both. And it's the beauty of God. And there's balance in God and there's balance in his church and there's balance in his people. And that's how we soar through life.
Is through really two wings, and we spread them wide, and we live this life of grace and truth. Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.
