Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing, a biblical faith-filled vision for your life. I bless your soul to bless the Lord and all that is within you to bless His holy name. And as you bless Him, may you forget not all His benefits. I bless you to uncover yesterday's God moments like a treasure hunter unearthing precious jewels. The Lord in Christ forgives all your iniquity, heals all your diseases, redeems your life from the pit, crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.
satisfies you with good so that your youth Is renewed like the eagles. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Alan Wright. 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. 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. To understand any portion of Scripture, you must interpret that scripture in the context of the whole of Scripture.
Now, if you ever have heard me preach much, you'll. pick up on this. And I want to reiterate it over and over with you: the Bible is one great story. This is one of the things that's so amazing about the Word of God. How could it be that people who have different pens and different cultures and different era of time.
or writing down scriptures that then compiled From all of these different eras of time, protected in astounding ways with their accuracy, and then come together in this one book that has in it narrative literature and has wisdom literature in it, and apocalyptic literature and has instructions in it, and has stories in it, and has all variety of manner of cultural influence that might have come in through these writers. But you put it all together, and it's absolutely mind-bending to me as a student of literature how anything like this could come to pass when, right from the very beginning on page one, you begin to see shadows and types of understanding what will actually be fulfilled in Christ Himself, so that the whole of the Word of God comes together in this amazing, seemingly seamless tapestry that has been woven together. It has to have been orchestrated by an author who is beyond it and above it and transcended over the marvelous. thing about the Bible is that it is one great big metanarrative telling the redemptive story of a God who made a beautiful world and made people in his own image and how those people in their rebellion against God found themselves by their sin separated from God in a gulf, a chasm so great that no one could ever climb over it or get through it. No one could ever pay a price that was dear enough, an infinite price, an ultimate price.
No human being was righteous, not one of them.
So no one could come or climb their way back to God.
So this God, this God, this creator of the ends of the earth, had so much love and so much compassion and so much longing that he did the unthinkable. He came and his only begotten Son, a God who became flesh. Who'd ever heard of such a thing? And this human being, Jesus of Nazareth, lived the sinless life. He lived a life that we couldn't live.
He paid a price that we couldn't pay. He was a hero. He was a hero who'd come to rescue the damsel in distress. And this hero was not just a heroic character. He was a real man in real history.
And yet he is God himself. And he's ascended on high. And he's made us to be his bride forever and forever. And so it is that we have been given a great co-mission in this world. And we are part of the redemptive story because we're telling the whole world about the love of Jesus.
I'm telling you, it's one story from Genesis all the way to Revelation. And it's all woven together by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. I love the Word of God. And so when you read a text, you read that text. saying where does this fit into the story?
Where does it fit in to the story? And if you don't read it like that, With this primary hermeneutical principle, Scripture interprets scripture. If you ever come to unclear text that's unclear to you, don't get worried about it. More clear scriptures interpret the less clear scriptures. We know this, God is love.
If you read the Bible, one thing you know for sure, God is love. The steadfast love of the Lord endures forevermore. His loving kindness is new to us every morning. God is love.
So, if you come to a prophetic verse that says. The Lord says, Esau I have hated. You don't all of a sudden go, oh no, everything's wrong. You go, where does this fit into what I know to be true about who God is? See?
Let me give you a kind of a natural example. In the natural, you could see something like this, maybe make sense of how we also look at the spiritual things. Our daughter, Abigail, 18, wonder if my wife went to Abby and said, Abby, We need you to clean up your room. And let's say Abby responded and said, Which she would not do. But if she responded and said, See there, you just had me so I could work for you.
I'm nothing but a slave around here. I'm just Cinderella in the ashes. I'm just sick of it. I think I'm going to run away from home because that's all this is about. But this whole time, there's nothing else about here.
It's just work, work, work. That's all anybody cares about right here. That's all anybody wants from me. That's all you care about. And as there's such a headache with you.
Well, she wouldn't say that. She wouldn't say that. But uh The reason, really, she wouldn't say that is, she might say, I don't feel like cleaning my room, but the reason she wouldn't say that is because there's a whole story. that if you try to sum up our story by Abby Go clean your room. You'd miss the story.
Now if you're going to understand this story, You're gonna have to go back to that delivery room and watch my wife labor and Bring that child into the world. And see the love. that started then. If you want to know the story, you'd have to See the See the father stand there with tears rolling down his face. You'd have to know the story included uh A time that It was a terrible car accident that could have taken that child's life.
Angels were there attending.
So she was not harmed. You'd have to know 18 years. Of parents sacrificing for her and loving her and speaking blessing over her life every day.
so that it would go well with her, You'd have to understand from a parent's perspective what love really is. And you'd have to know. that that father would be willing to lay his life down for her. How foolish it would be. to say it sums up the story of this household By the verse.
Abby, go clean your room. You see what I'm saying? I love God's Word. You don't pull out a little text from James and go, oh no, this unrivals it. Instead, you look at the text.
And you say, well, what is God saying to us through this text? since we know that God saves us not according to our own merit.
Well, the first thing that you do is you understand the nature of God. Our theology arises out of the Word of God. And that theology arises out of the understanding of the. wholeness of the word of God. Right?
So in the end, our theology matters. And what you understand about who God is. and why he came to justify us. through his grace by the mechanism of faith. If you understand that this God Who created us in his own image loves us so very, very much.
That he would rather Come and be insulted. and persecuted Marked Tortured. suffocating and dying On our behalf, rather. than to simply annihilate us. God wants people in heaven.
God wants fellowship with his people. It's who he is. He's not trying to Keep people out.
Some people have this idea of God. It's like he's like sitting up here and like you said, wow. He messed up. That was it. You didn't have enough works, you're out.
I went to the Dixie Classic Fair, as we do always this year, and I went over to play my regular game. that I always win. I have hidden talents.
Okay. And one of them is the small basketball toss at the Dixie Classic Fair. It's a small basketball. And a very small rim. The ball will barely fit into the rim.
But the rim's not very far away, and I win it every year. I win a stuffed animal or a Basketball prize, or something like that. I win every year. And so I went over this year and I gave him my five dollars, which entitled me to play three games. You get two tosses, and you got to make Both of them.
No problem. And I went up And I started my procedure. I'm going to go ahead and clue you in. This is for free. The secret to the small basketball toss.
at the Dixie Classic Fair. You must do it underhanded. If you try to do it overhanded, what happens is that the arc and the height increases the level of difficulty to which you'll probably never make it. Any little mistake, it'll hit the rim and it'll bounce violently out. But if you toss it underhand with a gentle backspin on it, I win it every year.
Until this year. I paid my $5. I went up. I took my little spin the ball backwards a few times to get the feel for it. Told my family, back up, don't be in my peripheral vision.
Get my faith up. Pray in the spirit. And then... I have teeth. I make my tallest.
And the man looks at me and he says, I'm going to let you do that over again. He said, but I need you to look at the sign. And I looked over the sign and in real small print Down at the bottom of it, something new had been added. No underhead throats. Uh yeah.
You know what I did? He said, give me my $5 back. Yeah. changing the rules on me like that. I've been going that thing for 20 years.
I am entitled to my animal. Give me my $5 back. Animal's not worth $5 anyway.
Some people think God's like that. It's like we're bound here. No underhanded throw, and I'm going to make it a little harder for you to get into having. Uh Really? He died for you.
Greater love hath no man than this, than he lay his life down for his friends. He didn't come. Because you want to make it harder for us. to be in relationship with him. He wanted to make it possible.
I come to the scripture, therefore, with this deep Assurance. God is utterly for us and not against us. He so loved the world.
So I don't come to James going, oh no, it undermines everything. Instead, I remember Romans 3:20. Paul says, For by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight. I remember Galatians 2, yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. Come to Galatians 3, for all who rely on works of the law are under a curse.
Spurgeon, the prince of preachers, said it succinctly and well. Whatever the statement of James may be, it could never have been his intention to contradict the gospel. It could never be possible that the Holy Spirit would say one thing in one place and another in another. Statements of Paul and of James must be reconciled, and if they were not, I would be prepared sooner to throw overboard the statement of James than that of Paul. Luther did so, I think, most unjustifiably.
If you ask me then, how dare I to say I would sooner do so? My reply is, I said I would sooner throw over James than Paul for this reason, because at any rate we must keep to the Master himself, the Lord Jesus Christ. And he goes on to preach that Jesus himself said, whoever believes. That 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. You read it more carefully, you realize That even when James says in chapter 4, there's only one lawgiver 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.
Okay. 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 them 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 a few things we need to do. But.
Now, 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 from the other, it said, 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 thing. 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 have 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.
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. Alan Wright.
Boy, that's true. Faith and works is the teaching, and you're probably thinking, aha, a gray space ministry, and they are talking about works. We've got Alan back here in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and a final word. Yeah, we'll explain that to you. Alan Wright Ministries is more than just a daily radio broadcast.
Here are Daniel and Pastor Alan explaining another layer. Pastor Alan, we love putting resources into the hands of believers and those who are looking for ways to improve their life through the good news of the gospel. And those resources show up in a variety of ways. One of the coolest ways I think, though, is every day a resource called the Daily Blessing pops in my email inbox. And what a way to start our day.
This is absolutely free. It's the best way to start your day or to. Pillow your head at night. Put this down into your heart, the sound of a blessing. And by that, we mean a positive biblical vision spoken in faith over your life that helps shape your identity for who you really are.
And with it, fuels you for a positive future that God has intended. It's a world that's real quick to curse. You don't have to go very long into your day before somebody is ready to speak negative things over you. We need the true word of God spoken over our life. And so, Daniel, I write a daily blessing every day and would love to send it.
All you have to do is just give us your email at pastorallen.org and we'll get you signed up and start including you. That's pastorallen.org. And be blessed with a fresh word from the Lord today.
So, Alan, you have faith and works. How does this work? Pardon the pun, in a grace-based teaching where you really still have the language of works still involved here. What do you mean by that?
Well, when we say grace works or faith works as we call today's message, we're really affirming what I hope is being communicated in every message that we bring forth, and that is that the grace of God at At work within us does produce good works through us, but it is not as many people suppose. Right. Works is something that is an external attempt. to conform to external laws and expectation. But faith works in this way.
When there's a gospel awareness that comes in your life and you see the finished work of God in Jesus Christ, faith comes. Faith comes by hearing. Faith comes by hearing the word of God. And so when you have faith, you naturally act on it. I hope that's what people, listeners, are picking up on.
If you believe that you step in a dark room, that that light switch is going to cut it on, that's faith. And so what do you do? You turn it on. It would be foolishness to stand in the dark when you believe that you can cut that light switch on.
Well, if it's so simple, if it's real in a simple situation like that, how much more so the greater matters of life? Faith by its very nature moves us into activity.
So we never meant to have never meant that grace leads to idleness. Grace and the faith that joins in. is active. Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.
