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 pastorallen.org. Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing: a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. Good news.
Your appetites can change. The sugary drink that once seemed so vital can become too sweet. The fried chicken and french fries can start tasting too fried. But more importantly, your soul's appetite can change. The sin that once tasted sweet can become foul.
The temptation that looked appetizing can become. disgusting. The text says, now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification. Romans 6, 22.
So I bless your spiritual taste buds. To long for all that is good and right and noble and pure. May the Holy Spirit whet your appetite. For the things of heaven. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Alan Wright.
You are free from sin. But you're free unto... A relationship with Christ Wherein everything about who he is now becomes the ruling priority of your life. 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 am Daniel Britt. Excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, It's All Right Now, from Romans chapters 4 through 7, as presented at Rinolda Church in North Carolina.
Okay.
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More on that later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. When Lenin says you got to serve yourself, he's trying to propose. an erroneous notion of freedom.
That says, when no one is telling you what to do and you're under no submission to anything, that's when you are free. And this is where the The biblical image of freedom departs radically from the modern notion of freedom. You will see this in Everything in culture right now. All throughout TV shows and movies and commercials and what celebrities are saying. is that freedom is the absence of constraint.
That freedom is when you no longer have to be encumbered by any authority. or anybody telling you what's right or wrong. That's what the myth of freedom is in the modern age. And what Paul is saying here is that's completely wrong. That in fact there is no such thing.
That even if you were to do what John Lennon says, you just got to serve yourself, then what you're serving is your own self-absorption and pride. You're serving selfishness. You're going to serve somebody. And Freedom is a paradox. Because What Paul's saying is that you are free from sin.
But you're free unto A relationship with Christ Wherein everything about who he is now becomes the ruling priority of your life. Freedom is not a move from, oh, I was under constraint and rules and such, and now all of a sudden I got nothing. That's not what Paul has been talking about when he says you're no longer under law and under grace. And he's clarifying it here. I could give you many examples of how this just plays out in life, but.
I don't know. I've been trying to lose the same few pounds now for five years.
Something changes. You get a little little age on you. And um I think my problem is I like sweets. I do like sweets. And I've discovered a formula.
It's not 100% scientific, but. But I'm pretty sure that it's scientifically true. After age 50, one dessert equals one pound. And so you can just count on that, you know, like you want. One dessert, one pound.
Um and I would like to be free. You know, there's this view that says, I am free to eat as much. Ice cream is I want to eat. How's that work? And I am.
I'm an adult. And and and and nobody's here to tell me that I can't. I'm free! Hi. I have also read some of the research, in addition to one dessert.
One ice cream equals one pound. Too much sugar shortens your lifespan, ups your blood pressure, heart disease risk, may be linked to Alzheimer's, can lead to fatty liver disease and can lead to depression.
So there's that too. Here we go. Yeah. Do you see what I'm saying? There are two competing types of freedom.
On the one hand, I want to be free to eat all the ice cream that I want to eat. And on the other hand, I want to be free to live a long time. You got to choose. Which freedom do you want?
Okay.
Have you ever had a dream that you could fly? How many of you ever had a flying dream? I haven't had one in a long time. I love. There are times that my I've had a dream of flying.
And it's just so real. I'm just flying. Just fly. I think in heaven we get to fly. Don't you think we get to fly?
Surely we get to fly. Why would we want to fly so bad if we don't get to do it sometime? And you wake up and you're like, oh, man, I would love to be on fly. I just want to go up on a roof, jump off that roof. And you could go up and say, I am free.
And go up on your roof and s Freely jump off. And find out that you are a slave to gravity. You You've got to choose which master you're going to serve: your own desire to be able to freely jump through the air. or the master called gravity. Let's go a little bit deeper.
Mm. Science is learning what we've always known. We need friends.
Some say loneliness is epidemic. Isolation about kill us. We need friends.
Everybody wants friends. We're designed for friendship. But the modern notion of do whatever you want, serve yourself and no one else. That's what freedom is. That doesn't work in friendship, does it?
That does not work in friendship. And you say, I want to be friends. What do you want to do?
Well, I want to do what I want to do.
Okay, well tomorrow what you want to do? I want to do what I want to do then too. You can't go to the restaurant you want every single time. And think that eventually your friend's not going to say, well, I'd like to maybe go somewhere else sometime. You can have the freedom to do everything you want.
But you won't be free to have friends. Let's go one step further. Marriage. Today is my wife's birthday. And it's a good one.
It's got a zero on the end of it.
Okay.
Coming up on 38 years of marriage. Let me just tell you this. You get married. You are doing one of the most countercultural things imaginable. You're taking the modern notion of freedom and just chunking it right out the window.
Would you sit out there and say, I'm exclusively yours? And you are mine. I am giving up all of these freedoms. to be with other people. in order to gain A deeper freedom.
The joy of covenantal commitment. that lasts a lifetime, There is a treasure unspeakable. What I'm saying is that Paul means to clarify You are going to serve somebody. And for the Christian. It is a Enslaved connection to sin that's broken.
By the gift of Jesus, and now you bond to Jesus. And in that sense, you're a slave to righteousness. And such good news that at verse 17, he just exclaims, but thanks be to God. That you who once were slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart. This is the key to the standard of the teaching to which you are committed.
The system of grace, the whole new covenant.
Now you become obedient to God from the heart. Verse 18, having been set free from sin, have become slaves to righteousness. This this is This is what Paul's saying. He said, can you imagine how wonderful it is to have everything changed so that your life and thought and behavior begins more and more to conform to exactly the way God has designed you and exactly what's best for you according to the obedience from the heart of all the things that are good and true and right and holy. In other words.
Yeah. So many people that got this idea is like being a Christian is like, well, okay, I'm going to be a Christian, you know, so I can go to heaven. But man, I hate giving up all the other stuff. I got to give up now. As if sin is good.
And the holiness stuff is bad. It is so ridiculous. Let's just take this thing of lying, for example. If Karen movie is like, oh no, no, I can't lie. In fact, he gets his little boy another cake, sits him down in a park, at a picnic table and says, undo the wish.
Yeah. Yeah. This is terrible. I can't lie. But what the movie's trying to show, and what is the actual case is, wouldn't it be fantastic?
If you just couldn't ever lie. Like Yeah. She You don't have anything in your life. that you're having to hide and cover up all the time? Our Uncle Stanley used to say in his counseling ministry that most people are like someone who's standing in the ocean and trying to keep about five beach balls under the water all the time so nobody can see them.
And they're all trying to cut up.
So much. cover up that we're exhausted with it. And the thing about it is like If you are always just putting up an image for everybody in your life according to what you think they would want from you, don't you know in the end? You're lonely because nobody knows the real you. Oh, there might be some temporary.
cost to telling the truth. But in the end It's only truth tellers. They can have any authentic peace in this world. And if you just would go through any of the catalog of the Types of sins You'd recognize the same thing. Wouldn't it be, for example, fant wouldn't it be the greatest thing in the world if poof You just couldn't covet any more.
You know what would happen? Your gratitude level and your joy level would skyrocket in an instant. You just no longer have the capacity to covet. You can't be looking at somebody else's life and suddenly lose your joy because you go, I wish I had that. You can't suddenly start having this terrible feeling of I can't be happy until I have what so-and-so has.
If you took that out of your life, can you imagine how wonderful that would be? What about if you could just get rid of the sin of bitterness? Jesus says, Forgive. and you are forgiven. Be set free.
Hebrews says: Do not let any bitter root spring up. lest it defile many. Could you imagine what would happen if you just couldn't be bitter, couldn't hold anything against anybody, kept no record of wrongs. You try, you just can't keep a record of wrongs. Can you imagine?
The joy and freedom of such a life Could you imagine Suddenly. You can't worry. No matter how hard you try, you can't worry any more. Jesus said, Do not be anxious about tomorrow. What if?
You just couldn't worry. I've had times in my life Back in 93, this Beautiful, powerful Holy Spirit renewal was moving, and I got so touched with joy. Just Every meeting, joy, joy, joy of the Lord, joy of the Lord. I mean, joy to make your belly laugh, joy that just transforms everything in your life. And I had so much joy come in my life.
I remember one time in the middle of a big joy fest one time in the Holy Spirit, I just made a little experiment. I tried to worry. I tried to resurrect everything that could possibly go wrong. I tried to think of it, I tried to worry about something, and I literally realized I could not worry. At least in in that moment.
That's what heaven's gonna be. There's too much joy. You can't even worry. What we are being invited into here is an image of being a slave of righteousness, but what it really is, is the image of ultimate freedom. Sins are problem.
And He's offering a life. That's the most fantastic life imaginable.
So it is like saying, beloved, our appetite can change.
Some years ago, my daughter convinced Ann and I to go on the whole 30 diet. It's ridiculous. It's it's too hard. Yes. They don't just say no ice cream, they say no sugar for 30 days.
And I did find this out. Sugars and everything. And I tell you, whole thirty. I tell you another reason they call it whole 30, it's gonna take your whole paycheck to do it. Because you got to go to Whole Foods and take your whole paycheck in there and get the ketchup that doesn't have sugar in it, and that costs four times as much as regular ketchup.
And then it doesn't really taste like ketchup. But No sugar and no sugar substitute. No splenda. For thirty days. I'm telling you, I will say this.
By the end of that 30 days, I had lost. a craving for sugar, I'm not saying ice cream wasn't in the back of my mind. I knew it existed still. But a grape at the end of 30 days and no sugar, a grape tastes like a piece of candy. A grape tastes like a piece of candy.
Right now, grape tastes sour to me, but I mean And I made the terrible mistake That At the end of the whole third day. We were having a kind of a meal to celebrate the end of it. And I got chicken parm. You know, that just did something to me. And then a few days later, I had some ice cream.
I hadn't been back on hole 30, but I am saying. Your appetite can Change. Let me give you a more ridiculous and gross illustration of this. Had a beagle, uh, his name was Reese. Anyone ever had a beagle knows that they they love they got a nose and they like to hunt.
and they like to find vermin. And he would be so proud if he found a chipmunk or squirrel or mouse or something in the backyard. He's so proud of that. pouching in with that dead thing in his mouth. And I know he was confused his whole life why I did not like it.
When he would drag in, he could come and go through the sun room. It kind of became his room. He would drag an animal in there and every now and then He'd get one in there, I didn't know he did, and I'd walk in that sunroom, and the stench would just hit me. I don't need it. Conjure up the thought of the stench of a dead animal smell, but it's just Terrible, isn't it?
Ugh. And I remember one time he had, I think it was a dead chipmunk. He'd been nurturing that dead thing, it smelled so rancid. Ugh. Yeah.
tried to chase him down and get the thing and get rid of it, you know, and he was guarding it. And he was just standing over it and looking at me and looking down at it. And he just looked at it and just. Licked it. Ah, oh, oh, that's right.
But you couldn't, I don't think there is an amount of money you could give me. To pay me to lick. A three-day-old dead chipmunk.
Okay, you make me a millionaire on the spot. I'm not doing it. I'm not going, I'm not going, you can't, I can't lick a dead chipmunk. And the dog loved it. Alan Wright, our good news message.
You gotta serve somebody. From the series, It's All Right Now. It's a teaching of Romans chapter 4 through 7. And Pastor Alan is back here in the studio in just a moment with today's parting good news thought for the day. Stick with us.
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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 to click away at pastoralen.org. Back here in the studio to share Pastor Alan's parting good news thought for the day as we continue our teaching again next time and put a bookmark here.
At this place today on the teaching, you gotta serve somebody. Pastor Alan. Sin, the conspiracy of hell. promises to make things better for us and then it destroys us. Our covetousness will just make us miserable.
Bitterness'll just make us sick. worry just make us depressed. And so Paul is celebrating that you are not just no longer a slave to sin, which we have seen in previous days. But that we're in a new realm. under a new lordship, submitted to Christ and that changes Everything.
your whole appetite can change. And so you can find yourself in gospel power by the power of the Holy Spirit. in a process of growth where you really are finding that the deepest pull on your life is the very thing that's pleasing to God. And I'm praying that, I'm praying that, because you're going to be serving somebody. And in the kingdom, We're serving the Lord.
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