The Peace of War [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

You're in a spiritual battle, but the weapons that God has given you are not as the world uses. 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 called Peacemakers as presented at Rinaldo 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 Alan Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. The Hippocrates was the Greek actors that would hold up a little mask over their face on the Greek stage. That's what a Hippocrates is. That's what a hypocrite is, literally.

It's someone who has a mask over. That's what Jesus said to the Pharisees. He said, you're hypocrites.

You're like an actor with an outward appearance on your face, but it's not real. That's what you're living your life. He said to them, you are blind guides, Matthew 23, 24, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. What was he talking about? Well, the religious Pharisees were using their religion and they're following all the religious laws as a means of saying, we're okay.

Peace, peace, but there's no peace. And that we're actually better than others who aren't doing this because, look, we're keeping the law more meticulously than other people. And so that makes us better than the other people, which makes us okay with God, instead of looking at the deep matters of the heart. And Jesus said, you're straining out gnats and swallowing camels. Because what they would do is since it was unlawful to eat an unclean animal, like famously, you know, pigs are unclean animals, but there's a whole list of them. Well, technically the gnat was an unclean animal.

So they'd take their wine and put it through a really fine strainer so that they wouldn't accidentally swallow a gnat, which would be a violation of the law. And Jesus said, you strained out your gnat and you have missed the whole point of the gospel. You don't understand love. You don't understand justice. You don't talk to people about a relationship with a God who is the Father, who loves them.

You're straining gnats and you're swallowing camels. Peace, peace, but there's no peace. And so God, who is so wonderful in order to solve this, did the exact thing that we're so hesitant to do. He came in the person of Jesus right into the middle of the conflict. He came into that which was his own, but his own received him not. And he knew that would be the case because he was coming to love and be with those with whom he disagreed and who disagreed with him. He came, in fact, the Bible said, to those that were enemies of him. He came into it and he never once bent away from it, even though he came into a garden of Gethsemane and he literally sweat blood in his agony. And his soul, he said, was sorrowful to the point nearly of death, sorely tempted, and even asked the Father to please take this cup away from him. But instead he said, not my will, yours be done, because he had come into the conflict on our behalf. So that on the cross, there in an astonishing and surprising twist, the devil thinks that he's won, but instead loses. And all of our sin is put on Jesus. So if you trust in Christ, you trust that a great exchange has taken place and he's become your sin and you become his righteousness.

And you are there for his child and everything in your life changes. But beloved, this doesn't change. You aren't suddenly transported out of human problems, but instead until he returns, until we go to glory, we are here and there's a battle that's going on. It's a spiritual battle.

It's not against people. It's a heavenly cosmic battle and God's with you in it. So there's some really good news in this idea of peace of the war. And the first is this, it means that if you're going through something difficult, then that doesn't mean you're out of God's will.

It might mean you're smack dab in the middle of it. Where I saw this most vividly was years ago, I preached a long time from Joshua and it really caught my surprise, caught me by surprise when I started realizing that the promised land was a place of conflict. So the story of the people of God in the Old Testament is really a shadow of what happens spiritually through Jesus. The people were captives. They were slaves in Egypt, cruelly treated and they could not liberate themselves. So they had to have a liberator.

They had to have a deliverer. They had to have a man named Moses who would come and be used of God with signs and wonders in order for there to come a final plague in which a destroyer would move through Egypt, killing firstborns of the Egyptian persecutors. But by a revelation given to the Hebrew fathers, if they would take an innocent lamb, slaughter it twilight, put his blood on the doorposts of their homes, that wherever there was blood over the door pose, no harm would come to that family.

They would be saved. And so the story of the people of God in the literal physical realm was of slavery, needed a liberator to come with signs and wonders, a plague of judgment where the people were saved because of the sign of the blood of an innocent lamb. And that's our story. So we were in bondage to sin and Jesus came who is our true Moses with signs and wonders and the blood of the lamb is not an animal, but Christ himself.

And so when you trust in that, you're set free. And that's our story. But the story of the people of God didn't end in the Old Testament with that.

And our story doesn't end with just being saved. Instead, they were to move towards a promised land. And the promised land, they sent spies in there and 10 of them came back with a negative report. And they said, they're like giants in the land. We saw Nephilim in the land.

We were like grasshoppers. We could never win the battles there. So they retreated and in utter faithlessness and disobedience, they refused to go and take the land that had been promised them. So they wandered in a wilderness for 40 years.

They just wandered. So the picture therefore of the wandering in the wilderness is peace, peace where there's no peace. Nobody fighting battles, but nobody going anywhere.

You can't call that peace. And so Joshua comes along. Yeshua was his name or Yahushua, which is the same name that Jesus. And he was promised and Joshua won every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I've given to you. He said, no man shall be able to stand before you. I will not leave you or forsake you.

Be strong and courageous. And I always kind of thought with a promised land, we sing songs about the promised land. We think that's heaven where there's no more battles. But in the Old Testament, the promised land was a place of many battles. And I realized many years ago, that means your promised land is your battleground. And the battles that you're facing today do not mean that you're distant from God or that God's not with you and that you won't have any peace until you get them all resolved. Instead, you're probably just in the middle of the promised land and there's some Jericho walls that are needing to come down and keep marching.

That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Prayer. As a Christian, you know it's important and you want to make it a priority. But if you're like most, your prayer life can slip so easily into routine, lacking fervor and passion. Maybe you're wondering what is the key to praying with real power?

In Ephesians chapter six, the apostle Paul has a clear answer. Pray in the spirit. But what does it mean to pray in the spirit?

Some would say that Paul is referring only to the spiritual gift of a supernatural prayer language. But in Alan Wright's unique series, Praying with Power, Pastor Alan reveals five different ways of praying in the spirit. Discover how praying God's word is praying in the spirit. Learn how to listen to the spirit as you pray. Come to see Jesus as your prayer partner.

It's practical, it's powerful. Get Pastor Alan Wright's Praying with Power and discover the power of praying in the spirit. Change your prayer life and you'll change the world. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. 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 Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org.

Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. It means that there's something inside of you that's not satisfied with the way things are and that something might very well be the Holy Spirit within you who is in you for the purpose of fulfilling the promise that the battle belongs to the Lord and that you're in the battle but he's in you and so you're going to win it. You know, I know people have differing levels of feeling of competitiveness. I'm a real competitive person, you know, I had to learn to tame that, you know, like you're playing the board games and everything and they're like calm down honey, calm down, you know, and it's like and so but I first saw this of me when I was a kid and I had started liking tennis and it was a little boy. I played for the Green Valley Swim and Tennis Club Championship against my best buddy Bob Phillips. I don't know how old we were but little boys hitting the ball over, lobbing it over, lobbing it back, you know, it's going forever slow. I don't know who was the first one it happened to but we were playing a little bit, maybe it was me, I'll take the blame and I lost the game and I just cried and then I won the next game and Bob cried. It was the longest match he ever had in a junior championship because one of the other of us had to cry after every game. That's why I realized it so that winning matters to me and I think the reason that we feel that way is not because of tennis tournaments or monopoly games. I think it's, you know, or not even in the business world or whatever it might, I think it's because you've been wired for a spiritual battle and you're not supposed to be content with the taunts of the giant.

You're in it to win it. Here's the second piece of good news about the peace of the war. It means, beloved, that it's okay, don't despair if sometimes it gets worse before it gets better and it does. You know, it's so interesting, we got back from sabbatical a day earlier than we planned. We'd taken this wonderful trip up to Vermont, been on the road for 10 days, all this stuff and we were going to come back one day later, stop overnight because we were in a long, you know, long drive but it was one of those things where you've been on a trip in the car and it's like the horse has smelled the barn and we're like, you know, you think we could just ride all the way home. It was like a long day and finally we just kept going further and we kept saying, well, we just go another two hours.

And then we just finally said we're going all the way. So we arrived home a day early but it's like 1 a.m. and slept in our own bed. It was nice. The next day there was a gully washing rain and I was sitting out there and I was thinking about how hard it was raining and I was remembering back more than a year ago, we had water coming our downstairs, our lovely finished downstairs of our house and it was because we finally found out there was an underground drainage pipe that had become clogged. It was backing up. Water was coming out and running right down next to the side of the house instead of draining away from the house and that was the cause of it. It was a big, big ordeal over a year ago. Hadn't had a single problem since. Didn't even think about it.

Didn't think about it all time. But it was pouring and it must be the Holy Spirit, a little voice, go down there and check on that and go downstairs. I went down and right about the time that I went down there, water started pouring in the house.

Just pouring in down there. I started hauling and I gave Anne the shop vac. I said, you stay and vacuum it up.

And I said, I know exactly what the problem is. I can see the water running down. I said, I'm not going to be able to unclog that drainage pipe right now but I could go out and dig a trench and try to channel that water away from the house and save our downstairs. So I went out and put on my mud shoes, went out there and put a hat on and the water's pouring.

I can barely see. It's raining so hard. Find a shovel and go out there in the mud and start digging a trench. And I'm digging and slopping and mud's flying and rain's splattering and I'm desperately trying to save the downstairs of my house. And I'm looking up to him and say, you know, I want to say, well, some fine welcome back home, some sabbatical. But the fact of the matter is I had to praise him because I think it was the Holy Spirit that sent me down there and we would have been gone one more day. You know what I'm saying? Could have been the whole downstairs of my house, a foot of water in if we'd waited one day.

And here's the image for you. I had to get muddier before I'd have any peace. I could have sat inside and watched TV in my robe and slippers and had no peace. I have more peace out there digging in the mud than I would have sitting inside. Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better. The surgery might hurt worse than the cancer, but you got peace because the cancer is being taken away.

And one final piece of good news. Beloved, the battle belongs to the Lord. You're in a spiritual battle, but the weapons that God has given you are not as the world uses. All of this still 100% fits everything that you're learning about being a peacemaker.

And that is the principal call on your life is to go into the places where maybe people haven't been loved and maybe they don't agree with you and love them anyway. So I can tell you my favorite story of the week. So Christy Williams, who's a fireball, force of nature, a lady in our church who she's just, I don't know how she does everything she does, volunteering for all these ministries and works so much with Love Out Loud and Christmas for the City and everything she does, but also been working and volunteering with Windshape, which is an independent ministry that has Christian day camps for kids all over the nation. And it's really cool.

They just do them all over. I had one here. Christy helped with it and it was held at the Galilee Missionary Baptist Church. And they just had a great time.

It's games and fun for kids all day long, teach them the gospel, do all kinds of tremendous activities with them. And it was just, they just had a great time. And it was just loving, loving kids, loving kids, a lot of these that might not have been able to go to camp otherwise.

And then the last day, the finale of the thing, they had these mascots to come and be part of it. And Chick-fil-A, I think, helped sponsors this. So you're going to get Chick-fil-A cow. But Christy's the kind of person like, she'll just ask you. It doesn't matter.

Just ask. And so we didn't have one Chick-fil-A cow. There must have been five of them, Chick-fil-A cow. But she started getting all the mascots. The Demon Deacon called them up, got the Dash, whatever the Dash mascot is, I still don't know.

And then all of these, I don't even know what all the mascots are, but one of them's got the Winston-Salem State University. They sent the Ram over. Well, the way the Ram came was that I think it was an associate athletic director there that was involved in the camp. And he asked the football coach for the Ram.

And I think that maybe the regular mascot wasn't around. He said, well, I'll get one of the football players to volunteer, come over and wear the Ram deal and come over. So this young football player comes over and he, they said, yeah, he was like awesome.

I mean, his dance and he was just, he was the best, best, best mascot, just totally into it. And afterwards, everybody was invited to church the following Sunday. And the young man, the football player from Winston-Salem State who had been the Ram came to church and it was, Chris, he told him, said, thank you so much.

He said, no, thank you. And he hadn't been to church in a long, long time, maybe since he was a young person, been involved in games when he was young and he hadn't been to church, but he had been watching the gospel at work, watching people get loved. And that day at church, he gave his life to Christ.

Isn't that a good story? And the point is this beloved, that you go as a peacemaker, primarily with this mission, love people. And when there is something that is buzzing in the night, you got to know you've got some spiritual resources at your disposal. You don't have to just ignore it. God empowers you to move into it.

And I'm blessing you that you will have the discernment of the Holy Spirit to know the difference between Nathan Wheeler at the door or water flooding into the home, because there's no formula for this. There's some things that we just need to, don't bicker about it. It's no big deal.

And there are other things that it's real, it's substantive. Don't be afraid of it. You can have peace for your war. And that's the gospel. Alan Wright, our Good News message today, the peace of the war from our series Peacemakers.

Stay with us. Pastor Alan is back in the studio here in just a few moments, sharing a part in Good News Thought we all can use today. Prayer. As a Christian, you know it's important and you want to make it a priority. But if you're like most, your prayer life can slip so easily into routine, lacking fervor and passion. Maybe you're wondering, what is the key to praying with real power?

In Ephesians chapter six, the Apostle Paul has a clear answer. Pray in the spirit. But what does it mean to pray in the spirit?

Some would say that Paul is referring only to the spiritual gift of a supernatural prayer language. But in Alan Wright's unique series, Praying with Power, Pastor Alan reveals five different ways of praying in the spirit. Discover how praying God's word is praying in the spirit. Learn how to listen to the spirit as you pray. Come to see Jesus as your prayer partner. It's practical.

It's powerful. Get Pastor Alan Wright's Praying with Power and discover the power of praying in the spirit. Change your prayer life and you'll change the world. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. 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 Alan Wright Ministries.

Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860 or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Back here with Pastor Alan and as we put the conclusion on this teaching, the peace of the war, it's also I hear like using discernment and finding peace in that discernment. Well, I think that sometimes we're tempted on the one hand to look for conflict where there is no conflict or to exacerbate an existing conflict. And God says, no, blessed are the peacemakers. Be committed to peace. But on the other hand, Jeremiah prophesied that sometimes we say peace, peace, where there is no peace. I think we all know what that means. It means that sometimes, and our listeners right now, the thing that you may dread the most, that difficult conversation that you need to have, if you don't have it, then you got peace, peace with no real peace. You've got the appearance of it. And the invitation of the gospel is to go deep.

And I think that's part of what the invitation is to say that there is peace of the war in the sense that, yes, there are going to be conflicts, but God has a way of bringing shalom, peace and order and well-being and prospering of soul in the midst of being real about the challenges that we have. So, yes, use discernment of the Holy Spirit. What are the things that you need to just let go? Don't worry about it. That doesn't need, that's a conflict that needs to just be let go. But what are the things that are important?

Because if so, deal with it. You can have peace for your war. 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.org. That's pastorallen.org. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.