Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing—a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. I bless you to be as Ephraim, Ephraim, the name that means twice fruitful. God blessed your earliest ancestors to be fruitful and multiply, and to fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion. Genesis one twenty-eight, and His will has not changed. He's likewise destined you, as Jesus said in John fifteen, to bear much fruit.
You are a sower, a spiritual farmer, whose harvest will come in due season. And so, I bless the seed that you have in the ground. May all your good hard work sprout and grow. Into sweet fruit that contains more seed, and I bless the seed you have in your hand, the good intentions and investments of your life that you're now scattering. Remember, the smallest seed can grow into the greatest, most fruitful tree.
Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Allen Wright, you can become a little bit more like Jesus today. And tomorrow, and the next day, in a year from now, you're not the same person that you are now. And how might that change everything in your life, your relationships, your marriage, your friendships, your parenting, your vocational life? Everything you can grow. 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 "Gateways to Grace" 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, which 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.
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Here is Allen Wright. There's nothing like going in your own backyard and eating your own homegrown tomato. I remember. When I realize that the spiritual life as a high schooler does require cultivation, it would only take years, though, for me to discover there's actually a spiritual battle to rob you of your friendship with Jesus. It's more than you realize, and in this crazy, busy, anxious, depressed world, even more so.
It's easy for The TV just to run with its bad news. It takes a little more effort to turn it off, and maybe take a long walk and listen to the gospel as you walk. But Paul says, if we're going to live by the Spirit, let's keep step with the Spirit. There's a walk, and there is a cultivation to the process. Of accessing the grace and power of Jesus, spiritual fruit is under attack.
It's fruit we don't produce it, but it requires cultivation. That's the picture I'm getting with my tomatoes. And there's something in you that's got to want it really bad. I want the love and the joy of Jesus really badly. I want it.
That's part of what will change the path that you're on and the way you structure your life. What you want, we're people who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, and so we want Him. We want intimacy with Him. We want the fruit. It's tricky because it's so important, and you know how much I love grace and how much we speak about the problem of the law.
And so it's tricky because you can turn anything into a law. When I was in high school, my my brothers in Christ and I, we wanted to hold each other accountable. We'd ask each other, "How's your quiet time been going?" And usually we'd be honest and say, well, you know, it's so-so. Or sometimes we'd say, I hadn't had one in ten days. Things are dry, dry as dust.
And but after a while, you know, people be holding me accountable. I found myself maybe a little tempted to lie about it. You know, and that's how you know something's gotten into a law. Either you start feeling really kind of puffed up, like man, I'm having better quiet times than all y'all, or it's feel really condemned because I'm not. And we can turn anything into a Pharisaical law.
That's what the Pharisees did. They took. Really, what we're offered by God is exhortation unto the kind of life that would afford real relationship with God, and then they ruined it by making a law.
So they would take something like the Sabbath, which we're going to spend two weeks just talking about rest and Sabbath and the rhythm of life that gives space for friendship with God. What's really really important, and but the Pharisees they would take it and say, "Okay, Exodus says don't work on the Sabbath," and so they said, "What does it mean to work?" So they came up with thirty-nine different kinds of work that constituted something you couldn't do on the Sabbath. And for example, one of them was you couldn't plow the ground.
So then later a rabbi added some midrash to this that said you can't spit on the Sabbath because if you spit, it will upset the ground, and that's sort of like. Plowing, so everything just becomes so legalistic. It's almost like there's like this. There are two pitfalls every time we're in anything in the Christian life. The one is like it becomes legalistic, and the other would be go, oh yeah, but it doesn't matter what you do at all.
You'll hear me talk a lot about Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline, which was a book that impacted me many years ago, and I still highly recommend this classic. As he talks about the spiritual disciplines, he says, "Picture a long, narrow ridge with a sheer drop-off on either side. The chasm to the right, the way of moral bankruptcy through human strivings for righteousness, legalism, or he says you could call it moralism. The chasm to the left, moral bankruptcy through the absence of human striving." This has been called the heresy of antinomianism. And on the ridge, he paints this picture: is a path, the disciplines of the spiritual life.
The path leads to the inner transformation and healing that we seek. We must never veer off to the right or to the left, but stay on the path. The path is fraught with difficulties, but also incredible joys. As we travel this path, he writes, "The blessing of God will come upon us, and reconstruct us into the image of Jesus Christ." But listen to this: we must always remember that the path does not produce the change; it only places us where the change can occur. That's the path of disciplined grace.
So call it a gateway to grace. Call it a path. Call it simply apprenticing with Jesus, whatever you want to call it. Just remember this: that the path is not producing the change; the gateway is not producing the fruit. It is just the opening to it.
And the grace and the power of God are accessible to everyone in Christ, and we can avail ourselves more and more by the ways that we structure our lives.
So it mustn't become a law over which we become prideful. Boy, I read the Bible for thirty full minutes today, and I prayed. And it must not become a thing of condemnation. I just remember that was my problem. I realized sometime I was I was starting realizing I've taken my quiet times to a point where it's like, oh no, I didn't have a quiet time today.
I might get hit by a bus. You see how that can happen legalistically. After I had learned all about the. Place of having that cultivated spirituality of quiet time. In college, I had the wonderful, wonderful experience of beginning to experience the power of the Holy Spirit, and I began to learn there was this whole like world opened up to me that wow, God is powerful in their gifts of the Holy Spirit, and I remember like when I began to experience God, just like.
Like maybe you do in the midst of worship, or sometime in a prayer, you like I've sensed the presence of God, and it's so real, and my faith would be so built, and I was so overjoyed. That there's a party that going.
Well, who needs the quiet time? I just need to encounter God. I mean, like getting one good encounter with God's like a hundred good quiet times.
So this is just while pursue this, but it's only as you mature that you realize that it's not either or. It is. It is all of this, and you can be sure that hell. Is seeking to destroy your relationship with God and rob you of friendship with Jesus, and so we walk the path. We walk the path, and we're going to talk all about that.
We'll talk some more about just the habits of Jesus Himself, and. We'll talk about Sabbath and what it means to rest in Jesus. Instead of striving, we're going to talk about meditation and how to read scripture devotionally, and we're going to talk about wonder and worship and exaltation of God and and the life of joyful servanthood and the experience of the fellowship. and We're going to look during all of Advent at all the prayers through. Christmas and just focus on prayer.
This is what I want to do. This is the path. These rhythms of grace.
So there's a lot of good news here, beloved. And the first is this: this means you can grow. You can grow. It's the greatest thing in life. Just look at a two-year-old.
Little Mia's favorite thing to say is, "What's that?" What's that? What's that? Why? Because we're designed to explore and grow. No two-year-old thinks next year I'll be the same person I am now.
We may not have our bodies continuing to grow, and we might be fighting just to hold on to some muscle mass as we age. But your soul can grow. Your character can grow. You can grow in the spirit. You can grow your whole life.
You can grow up until your final breath. That's just thrilling. It's a process to get there. I loved watching the Olympics this year. It just was.
I don't know some special, special track and field stuff, special stuff in the swim meet, but watching the fastest men on the hundred meter dash, they run, I guess, less than ten seconds, and you just watch it one one thousand, two one thousand, three, and it's over. It was like whoa. What you don't see is the years and years and years of discipline that enabled them to run that fast. You can become a little bit more like Jesus today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and a year from now, you're not the same person that you are now. And how might that change everything in your life, your relationships, your marriage, your friendships, your parenting, your vocational life?
Everything you can grow. And the second part of the good news of thinking about these rhythms of grace, about the gateways of grace, is that these are gateways to growth that you can choose. You don't really choose to have a tomato because you can't make a tomato. Right, only God can make a tomato. It's got to be something that's grown.
You can't just choose and say, "I'm going to be patient," and then you're patient. I'm going to be joyful, so I'll be joyful. It doesn't work that way. But what this does is it allows you to come back to what you can choose, and you do get to choose the rhythms of your life. You do get to choose the space and time of your life.
I like the way John Mark Comer puts this: What we we do, what we can do, read Scripture, pray, practice Sabbath, eat a meal with community, to be formed into people who can eventually do what we currently cannot do to live and love like Jesus. Listen to that again: We do what we can do now. To be formed into people who can eventually do what we currently cannot do. A discipline is a way, he writes, to access power. I love that.
And here is the best news of all, beloved. You can carry this with you as you think about the rhythms of grace in your life and spiritual disciplines. Just know this, Jesus. Really wants to be with you, and he wants to be known by you, and that is extraordinary. John one forty three.
This is how Jesus called people into discipleship. He found Philip and said to him, "Follow me." He taught his disciples in John fifteen, "Abide in me, and I in you. As a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me." Revelation three twenty, John saw this image of Jesus saying, "I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I'll come in and eat with him." Everywhere in the Bible, you see this is the throbbing, longing heart of God to know and be known by you. J.I.
Packer, in his classic Knowing God, he Is trying to describe the marvel of this, and he makes a very important point that the quality and extent of our knowledge of other people really depends more on them than it does us in the end. Isn't that really right? If there is somebody that you would like to get to know, whether you get to know them in the end depends more on their desire to be known. And he says, "Imagine that you would like to get to know someone of great high office, like maybe it's the Queen of England." He says, or the President of the United States. In the end, he says, "The more conscious I'm reading now from his knowing God, the more conscious we are of our own inferiority, the more we shall feel that our part is simply to attend to this person respectfully.
We'd like to get to know this exalted person." But we fully realize this is a matter for him to decide, not us. What happens is that the Almighty Creator, the Lord of the Host, the Great God, before whom the nations are as a drop in a bucket, comes to you and begins to talk to you through the words of Holy Scripture, and you come to realize, as you listen, that God is actually opening His heart to you, making friends with you, and enlisting you as a colleague. A partner, you can grow in friendship and intimacy with Jesus because He wants to be known by you. There's nothing like going in your own backyard and picking your own homegrown tomato. But as the Lord would have it, to give me a prophetic picture to get ready for this, y'all, this week.
I looked and there were a few decent-looking tomatoes on one of my plants, and I said I'm gonna let them just have another day or two, and then I went and I plucked one. It's not perfect; it's got some weathered looks on the top, but. It's it's a pretty decent looking tomato, and I thought I'm gonna let it sit for a couple days and ripen just a little bit more. I was like, what am I gonna use it for? It's gonna be so delicious.
And I want you to know, this morning, the day had arrived, the inaugural day of our new Gateways of Grace sermon series on how we can cultivate spiritual fruit. I ate it. I prepared a cheesy omelet with some bacon, and I sliced up that tomato and put it on it. I'm telling you, you put some tomato on some omelet, and it just add it, and it might have cost nearly a hundred dollars, but. There is nothing like going in your own backyard and plucking your own tomato and having a vine-ripened tomato in your own house.
It was really good, and y'all, I'm gonna tell you, there is nothing like being able to walk with Jesus and have His love and His joy and His peace and all the fruit of the Spirit. It's absolutely free, but it's gonna take some farming to get it. You can grow. And that's the gospel, Pastor Alan Wright. Our good news message, the gateways to grace, from the series by the same title, Gateways to Grace.
Stay with us. Pastor Alan is back, joining me in the studio, sharing his parting good news thought for the day. In just a moment. What if growing closer to God isn't about trying harder?
So often, we approach spiritual growth with a list of things we need to do. Pray more, read more, be better, but what if the secret to spiritual transformation isn't found in greater effort, but in experiencing more of God's grace? In his book *The Gateways of Grace*, Pastor Alan Wright invites you to discover a fresh perspective on spiritual growth through timeless practices like Scripture, prayer, meditation, wonder, and rest. You'll discover how to create space for the Holy Spirit to work in your life. These spiritual disciplines aren't obligations that earn God's favor; they're gateways that open our hearts to experience more of God's goodness, peace, and transforming grace.
When you give to Allen Wright Ministries, you help share the gospel with listeners around the world. And when you give today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's book, The Gateways of Grace, as our thanks. To discover these aren't just disciplines; they're gateways. Step through them and discover the grace that's been waiting for you. The gospel is shared when you give to Allen Wright Ministries.
This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support. When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Allen Wright Ministries. Call us at eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty.
Or come to our website, PastorAllen dot org. Pastor Alan Wright, we're back here in the studio on the Gateways of Grace, our series, and this opening message coming to a conclusion here. And Pastor Alan, the illustration of the garden and the farming and the the grow in grace phrase comes to mind.
Well, I had I hope others got a chuckle over these days, radio of me trying to just grow some tomatoes. Yeah, and but it was like a prophetic picture. Picture for me, Daniel, because yeah, there's nothing like going in the backyard and picking your own homegrown tomatoes. Nothing like it is.
So, it's so delicious. But between the diseases of the plant and the green hornworms and the storms that came through and droughts, anybody that any farming realizes that you don't make something grow, but you do create conditions for it. Yeah. And I think the takeaway as we open up this whole series. Is just don't forget the incredible words of Peter: "Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord." Grace is free, but you can grow in it, and that's what the gateways of grace are all about.
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