Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing—a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. Before God's voice thundered into the unformed cosmos, sending forth light at 186,000 miles per second, before He created the Canis Majoris star large enough to house seven quadrillion Earths, before He set the Earth on its elliptical course and started its spinning. God imagined you. His eyes saw your unformed substance, and your days were written in God's book, when as yet there was none of them. Psalm one thirty nine tells us, before the Lord formed you in the womb, He knew you.
Jeremiah one tells us, the pinnacle of God's creation is not seen in the expanse of the Grand Canyon or the towering sequoias of the redwood forest. You are the pinnacle of God's handiwork. His greatest masterpiece is not unveiled in a multi-hued sunset over a rolling ocean, or even in a radiant rainbow arched across freshly emptied clouds. You are God's masterpiece. I bless you to be as Ephraim and Manasseh, because once adopted by Jacob, they knew they belonged forever.
Heirs who could never be disowned. God made you, and then He adopted you. It means you are His for good. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Allen Wright. He didn't come so that people would remain cursed.
So God is in the business of getting people into a revelation, and He wants us to grow up in Him, and He wants us to mature beyond our sins, and He wants us to acknowledge His lordship in every aspect of our life. But what I read in Romans ten, praise the name of the Lord, is that all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. 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 this series, Beloved: A Study of Romans Chapters 9 through 11. It's 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.
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Here is Allen Wright. The preoccupation of the New Testament is not our confession of sin, though there is a place for it. The preoccupation of the New Testament is our positive confession of every promise and every statement that God has ever made about who Jesus is, what He's done for us, and therefore who we are in Christ. And so, God is much more delighted and interested in us coming into agreement and alignment with everything God has said about who we are. I'm not saying there's not a place for you to confess your sin, and I have had many, many times where I've felt great remorse over my sin and wept before the Lord.
And if the conviction of the Holy Spirit is really upon you to help you let go of a way that is not pleasing to God, doesn't work for your life, and leads to destruction, if you need to shed some tears over it, fine, shed your tears over it. But what He's interested in is you being able to come. To the place of revelation, where you're confessing that Jesus is Lord, and what you end up being as a Christian, therefore, is not a person who grovels before God Almighty, but a child and a co-heir who more cuddles up to your Father, who loves you infinitely and has completely forgiven you, so that your confession becomes, "I thank you, God, I'm forgiven." I thank you, God. I've been redeemed. I thank you that I'm a coheir with Christ.
I thank you, God, that I am seated with Christ in the heavenlies. Oh, I thank you, God, that I have been blessed with every spiritual blessing. Thank you, God. I might feel a little weak right now, but I thank you that your strength is perfected in my weakness. Oh, God.
I may not feel very good now, but you said I'm more than a conqueror, and I agree with you that I'm more than a conqueror through Christ. God wants us to confess what He's said about us in Jesus Christ. That's our confession. Amen. I feel pretty strongly about that.
There's no power in beating ourselves up and beating each other up over all our sins. You can't list all your sins anyway, so why spend all your time trying to do that? Romans ten nine. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, these phrases are not to be separated. As the same case for verse ten, for with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.
It is a literary device called parallelism, where you have two similar statements. That are essentially saying the same thing.
So it does not mean that if you believe you're justified, but not saved, or if you confess with your mouth but don't believe that you're saved. It means being justified and being saved are the same thing, and it's two sides of one coin. The mouth speaks what's in the heart, and if the heart isn't the source of what's being spoken in the mouth, then it's a lie and it doesn't have any power. And so, what we are are a people who've been given an unimaginable gift from God in Jesus Christ, who came to take the penalty for our sin, to bear our shame, and to give us His own Spirit, so that He could be Lord and direct every part of our life for our good. And to be a Christian is to be someone who says yes.
So, when someone says, "Well, when did you get saved?" the proper answer is, "Well, two thousand years ago, this man hung on a cross, and he got up from the dead." If that's what you want to know, that's when I got saved. If you want to know when I appropriated it, well, maybe that happened when I was in fourth grade, and my mom told me that Jesus was real, and I believed her, and I said yes. We're we're like one preacher said. We're like a person that was in prison. What power is there in a person just going, "I'm in prison"?
Yeah, I'm a bad person. Here I am in prison. The power would be if somebody came with the key and opened up the prison door and said, "You're free." The power is in saying, "I'm free," and you step out. I was thinking about just some of the sweetest stories of salvation, and my mind went back to dear lady that many of you know, Grace McCracken, precious, precious Grace. And she, by the year two thousand, she had just about given up all hope.
She didn't come out of her house. She didn't drive. She had seen every doctor she knew to see. The medications weren't. Just weren't helping.
The therapy sessions had just not helped, and she pretty much given up. But she had some neighbors that she didn't know were praying for her. Mickey and Trivia Thigpen, sometimes their daughter Olivia, who was young at the time, who liked to walk their neighborhood, which is a wonderful thing to do, by the way. Just pray for people. Walk by their house and pray.
Sit in the airport, wait on your flight, pray for people. Don't just people watch. Pray for people. Anyway, they would walk by every day and say, "Lord, bless the lady and that man that lives in that house, and lady we never see, and bless her, Lord, that maybe someday there'll be an opportunity we could have to share the gospel with her." You would reach her heart, and they prayed this regularly. We had sent out sometime in that period of time a card.
We didn't often do that from the church, just inviting people to church. It was some interesting little card, and she'd held on to it. I don't know how she learned about it, but we were going to have an alpha class on Wednesday nights, exploration of Christianity. I guess maybe the card had advertised. I can't remember for sure.
And by some miracle that we can't fully explain, except we pray for this every Sunday. We pray every Sunday morning, Lord, you help people be able to get here that can't because they're too discouraged in their own flesh right now. And I believe God draws people, and so I guess it was just the people prayed. Making Treeve had prayed, and somehow she got herself up and she went that class. And she came to Sunday morning service the next week.
It was a miracle in itself. And I met her. I'll never forget. I met her, and she was trembling like a leaf, just trembling like a leaf. She went back to that Alpha class, and the speaker, on the video, Nikki Gumble, at this moment, he's talking about the gospel, and he says it's right.
God, like God, has written you a check. It is completely a gift, and all you do is you just take it, endorse it, and cash it. And at the end of that evening, she was talking to one of the table leaders in Alpha there, man named Bruce Lantaum, and he was just saying, "What did everybody think?" And Grace looked at him and said, "I want that check." She came to church on Sunday morning again. Again, a miracle. I'll never forget it.
She went back here to get prayer, and the spirit of God came upon her, and began to bathe her for two hours. And the ministry team stayed with her, and all the shame of her childhood, and all her feelings of inadequacy, began to just be melting away from her. Such that when I saw her the next time, she did not even look like the same human being, and she became so confident and buoyant and joyful, and became an evangelist in her own right. And there was going to be a baptism that we had scheduled at Doris Hall's house at her pool. And there were several others who had been moved by all of this that were recommitting their life to Christ.
One or two others had accepted Jesus, and we had been praying for Grace's honey husband Denny, who was not a believer. And I'll never forget that day. We were down there at the pool, and everybody was getting ready for the baptisms. And here came Denny walking down the street carrying a towel. We said, Denny, what happened?
He said, "Well, God must be real because He gave me back my wife that I hadn't been having for all these years." And what did Grace do? She just said, "I want that check." That's what it means to be saved—to say, "Yes, Jesus is Lord. I believe." He's God raised from the dead, and everybody who calls on the name of the Lord, whether it be a thief on a cross in his dying breaths, saying "Remember me," and Jesus saying, "Today you'll be in paradise," or whether it be the most upright and moral person who has tried to live by their own righteousness, who finally says, "I can't do it," and I just trust in Jesus. And this is what salvation is. There is in this such a beautiful, two beautiful implications that must not be missed in this text.
The first is at verse eleven, Romans ten eleven. For the Scripture says, "Who everyone who believes in Him, everyone who believes in Him, will not be put to shame." So, being saved is not just to be saved from the penalty that is due our sin. It is not just a guarantee that you will go to heaven and be with God forever. As wonderful as those things are, there's more. It means that God will never expose you to the painful and embarrassing and shaming revelation of your shortcomings.
So it will never be held over you. All of the ways that you have failed, it will never ever be from God that you would feel in the slightest disqualified for His love. There would never be a moment in which you would sense the Holy Spirit motivating you by dangling a carrot of love and acceptance in front of you. Anything that you experience of such shame is not from God. In fact, it is the way of hell, and it's very hard for us who have experienced such imperfect love in this world, and are so prone to disqualify ourselves because of our own mistakes, failures, and sins, to really believe the gospel of Jesus Christ is so full and so complete that we would never be put to shame by God, and that means in this world, and at judgment day.
And in the world to come, we'll never be put to shame by our Father. He's came to cover our shame, to take away our shame, to make sure that we don't feel the shame. He doesn't want us to feel the shame. He hates it when we feel ashamed. And so, when you do, it's not from God.
It's not from God. I had I had a revelation this this week. I some many years ago now actually. I just, I just did a horrible thing. I've had a few moments in my life.
We've all had it where I'm just go, What is what? What my flesh? You know. And I was, I was mad about what somebody did, and I wasn't, I wasn't nearly as mad as what I wrote. But I was interacting with somebody else, and yet it got copied over to the very person I was mad at.
Who I loved with all my heart, and I'm like, immediately realize, and I called him, and I said, I, I'm really not as mad as that seems, and and and I'm so sorry, and I apologize and apologize. He was so Christ-like. He said, Alan, all is forgiven, but please, I apologized again.
Next time I spoke to him, he said we shall never speak of it again. He sent me this big frame of a picture that said "Grace upon Grace," and um, and so we we just never spoke of it again. But I saw him not long ago. I hadn't seen him in some time, and I saw him not long ago. And guess what was on my mind?
Guess what was on my mind? And I realized that there was a little part of me that was hesitant to even see him or embrace him because I was ashamed and I felt a little bit disqualified for this friendship. But he's not thinking it, and God just showed me. He said, "This, this, this is the way I am with you and all of my children." God's not. God came to qualify us.
It is we who disqualify ourselves. We're not good enough to come in the presence of God. We think I've done too much. I've said too much. This is the primary obstacle that people have in fellowshiping with God.
It is the primary obstacle people have in being continually filled with the Holy Spirit. It is the primary obstacle people have for joy in their life. And God says, "Those that are saved will never be put to shame." And here it is, with its culmination of beauty, verse twelve. There's no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing His riches, spiritual riches, what Paul calls every spiritual blessing, bestowing. All of this goodness upon all who call on Him.
For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Everyone, anyone, all who call on the name of the Lord, Greek or Jew, one Lord, one salvation. One gift of God in Jesus Christ for all. Just believe. Just cash the check.
Just say yes. That's why we call it grace. It's a gift, and anything that's not a gift is not grace. You don't work to receive a gift; you just receive.
Well, what if somebody lives a scoundrelous life and brings scandal upon others, and then at the last second and breathe in their last, they say, "I confess Jesus is Lord." Do they get they get all that? Yes, they do. Yes, they do. Why wouldn't they? Of course, they do.
Praise God. What about somebody doesn't know much about Jesus, like a thief on a cross, and all they say is, "I don't know that much, but I believe in you." Yes, they're in. What about those who who who never do mold their life to Christ very much, but but they have said they believe Jesus is Lord. They've confessed it with their mouth. They just never grew up that much.
They say yes, they're saved. God came.
So that people would be saved, he didn't come so that people would remain cursed.
So God is in the business of getting people into a revelation, and He wants us to grow up in Him, and He wants us to mature beyond our sins, and He wants us to acknowledge His lordship in every aspect of our life. But what I read in Romans ten, praise the name of the Lord, is that all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Amen. Praise the Lord. That's why, when Ann got a text yesterday, we're right along in the car, and all of a sudden she bursts into tears, looking at the text.
I said, "What?" She said, "So and so just said that their their grandchild raised their hand at VBS to accept Jesus." And this person said, "Would you please pray for my my grandson? He'll be at VBS and." Have not been near God. I mean, you—you got a whole life in front of you when you say yes to the saving grace of God. You got a whole life of growth. You know, He saved me, and I feel like He's saving me every day.
But there's a beginning point, and it's not complicated. All who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. And that's the gospel. Alan Wright. Today's good news message is saved.
It's in our series, Beloved: Study of Romans. And Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio, sharing his parting good news thought for the day. In just a moment, unlock the power of blessing your life. Discover God's grace-filled vision for your life by signing up for Allen Wright's free daily blessing. If you want to fill your heart with grace and encouragement, get Allen Wright's daily blessing.
It's free and just a click away at PastorAllen.org. Back here now with Pastor Alan in the studio at the conclusion of our teaching, saved. Which you know, if we're not careful, is kind of a religious word, but and you might just kind of brush over that. But if you let, if you savor it, if you understand what it means, it can change your life and give you that new perspective. Pastor Alan, what's your parting good news thought for the day?
Well, I I wanted to bring us back to this thought about confessing or saying. In agreement, calling upon the name of the Lord, and it's it's you confess that Jesus is Lord.
Well, that word means to say with, or to speak in the same way.
So, when you confess in your mouth and believe in your heart, then there's something that's happening with that. And maybe for somebody today, you need to let the mouth speak what's in the heart. Maybe just even right now, you just confess, just to say, "I profess, I agree with God. You've done the work of salvation in Jesus Christ, and in Him I am saved." You agree with God, and agree with God about everything He has to say in your life. Read the scriptures this way.
What does God have to say about who I am and what He's done for me in Christ? Agree with God. Don't run from it, but agree with Him and say yes to all these amazing promises of God. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at PastorAllen.org or call eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty.
That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. If you only caught part of today's teaching, not only can you listen again online, but also get a daily email devotional that matches today's teaching, delivered right to your email inbox, free. Find out more about these and other resources at pastorallen dot org. That's pastorallen dot o r g. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.
