Prince of Peace [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

A child that was born and a son that was given who would have the government upon his shoulders and would be the Prince of Peace, because what Jesus would do for us is He would satisfy the Seal of the Lord of Hosts for justice and for reconciliation of humanity unto God. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Merry Christmas, and 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 Prince of Peace as presented at Rinaldo Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout our special Christmas teaching today, 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. That's pastoralan.org, or call 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860. We'll tell you more about it later in the program, but now let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. When you come into an awareness of the profound finished work of the gospel wherein He became your sin and you became His righteousness, it does change everything in your life, but not to try to manipulate God, but because you have discovered life itself changes everything. The zeal of the Lord of hosts. It's not some random zeal without authority. It is a zeal, deepest passion, strongest emotion. Zeal means a ferocity of commitment that is fueled by your inmost being that has become consumed as if a fire towards its object. And the zeal of the Lord, He has a zeal.

It is not random. It is connected to His ultimate cosmic authority. Because if you've got zeal but no authority, all you've got is a temper tantrum. I think as some of you have heard me tell before, when I was in high school, my senior year, I suppose I was sort of a leader on the tennis team, and our coach, Bill Brown, was also assistant coach for the basketball team, and Page High School had a good basketball team that always made it deep into the playoffs, and so my senior year, our team was going on to win the state championship, and Coach Brown was occupied with that, so he came to me, and he said, there's a time here where tennis practice needs to start, but I'm still obligated to basketball. He said, Alan, I'd like you to convene the guys, and we want you to hear the sprints. I want you to run, and here's what I want you to do. Divide them up onto the courts according to their various strength as players. Make sure they've got tennis balls, and oversee the practice, and make sure everybody stays hydrated, just kind of run the thing until in a week or two we'll be done with basketball, I'll be there running it, and I said, okay, coach, sure.

So I did, and we went out and ran and did the stuff, and then I divided the thing up. Well, there was one kid on the team that was a sophomore, I think, that just got on my nerves. I just didn't like it. He was just kind of a bully, and he had a bad attitude. I hate a bad attitude.

I just hate a bad attitude, and I just, I didn't like that bad attitude on my team, and I don't know what, this is what happens when you got zeal and no authority. One day, I was on court one, and I looked down on court four, and what I saw was this kid. He took a ball, and he just slammed it right, right, it just hit one of the young kids, a freshman or somebody, just a new guy on the team, and just hit him with the ball, just like slammed it right at him. I didn't know what was going on.

I just saw it. I didn't, that was it. I had lost it. I threw my racket down. I ran across four courts while the rest of the team would just stop looking like this.

I go down to this kid who was a lot bigger than I was. I didn't care, and I looked right at him, and I said, I have had it with you. I said, we ain't act like that on this team. I said, I'm sick of it. I said, just get out of here. Just take your stuff and go.

Just, you're off the team. He picked up his stuff, and he just sort of slumped away, and everybody was staring at me like, what has Alan done here? And I was like, everybody get back to practice.

You know, I went down there, I thought, oh my word, what have I done? And that night during dinner, the phone rang. I picked it up, and I heard on the other side the voice that said, is this coach right? I said, so you heard, Coach Brown. He said, yes, Alan.

He said, when I told you to coordinate practice and run some sprints and make sure everybody had tennis balls, I did not authorize you to kick one of our best players off the team. I had zeal, but no authority, which meant there's something that is explosive and dangerous, but in the end has no real effect. I want you to know this about God. The zeal to accomplish his word is connected to his ultimate creative and cosmic authority over all things. So when you get down, and you're wondering where your faith's gonna come from, please remember, the zeal of the Lord of hosts is a reference to a cosmic divine army of angels is on your side. If God be for us with all his zeal and authority, who could be against us? But a zeal that has so much passion and yet no real wisdom would not do us good either.

The word in Hebrew for zeal actually is a reference to a very, comes from a word that references a very red face. You know what I'm talking about, where you're just, you are furious, but this word and then this context in a righteous way, especially as regards jealousy to recover what has been taken from you, it's that kind of zeal where you can't think about anything else because this is too important to you. It's like saying of a parent, if you were in a crowd and lost your little child in the crowd, you couldn't think about anything else till you found your child.

Nothing else would matter because of the zeal to find your child. Well, that's the kind of zeal that we're talking about. But it is connected with, it is a kind of jealousy that is connected with wisdom, compassion, and self-control. People so misunderstand what we mean by saying God's a jealous God. People, that's not bad news, it's wonderful news.

Would be something terribly wrong, terribly wrong. If there were a man whose wife were unfaithful to him and the man were not jealous for her, you would question whether he loved her. You don't just let something that you love just be taken from you and it not bother you or else it just prove you didn't love it. But if the love that you have is endlessly deep and ferocious in its unquenchable power, then that love is accompanied by a zeal to have what it is that is yours and you love.

That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Want to give someone a present this Christmas that they'll never forget? Let us help you give a gift that money can't buy. This Christmas, give someone your blessing, a positive biblically-based faith-filled vision for their life.

In the beginning, God blessed Adam and Eve and then told them to be fruitful and multiply because in God's design, blessing isn't the reward for productivity, it's the fuel for it. Now, more than ever, someone you love needs your blessing and we're here to help you craft it. This month's special offer from Alan Wright is a beautiful booklet that will teach you how to craft a meaningful blessing. The easy step-by-step instructions are biblically-based and even include a worksheet that helps you write your blessing. So this Christmas, give someone you love a present not found in stores, a gift from your own heart that will encourage and empower. Write down the blessing and put it in a package under the tree or put it in your Christmas card.

They'll never forget it. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries this month we'll send you this booklet as our thank you so you can discover the power to bless. Now we are in our final days of offering this special product. Call us at 877-544-4860 or visit pastorallen.org.

Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. Have you ever had a time where you had zeal but you had no real wisdom connected to it or no real self-control? That's just a dangerous thing.

It doesn't help anybody. I'm trying to think back of times in my life where I've had such zeal. They're not moments I'm proud of when the zeal was not accompanied by self-control or wisdom. I think maybe a moment in my life that I felt this ferocity of feeling maybe more than any other moment that I can ever remember. It was fairly early in ministry years here and we'd gone through a very difficult season, a very difficult time.

Ministry was challenging. We went through a season of being understaffed. We felt like sometimes the weight of the world was on my shoulders. My wife's younger sister Mary got a cancer out of nowhere that she fought and then took her life. Have you ever been through a season where you just felt like the devil's trying to take everything from you?

We were in one of those seasons. Just in the middle of that, I've worn out. One day I was in the office and one of the staff came rushing in, broke into a meeting that I was in and said, quick, you need to get on the phone. Your wife's on the phone. I could hear her. She was very upset and she said, come quick. She said, I've been in a terrible accident. I said, are the kids okay?

She said, I'm not sure, come. It's a hard thing to drive to the scene of an accident where you don't know if your children are alive. I knew my wife was alive because I'd heard her on the phone and I got there and the car, the sight that I saw, it looked like nobody could live.

It was completely demolished. It was upside down. A man who had run a stop sign full speed, never even braked, ran right into the side of her and I began frantically looking around to see who was alive and were the children okay? Great relief when I saw that my mother-in-law had little Abby who was a baby in arms. I later learned that Abby had hung upside down in the car for a pretty long time.

People were afraid to try to rescue her because there was so much gasoline that was linking. Finally, one courageous soul went and got her out. Found out later, my son was fine.

He was in a different vehicle. My niece was in the car and she was okay, but in the midst of this emotion, I'm just saying, maybe you felt this way. I think I was just, I'm just so mad at the devil. Just so mad at the brokenness.

I'm just so mad at it all. I just want what was mine and not be taking anything else taken from me and I was furiously jealous for what was mine. For what was mine and the man who had run the stop sign was there and he was thankfully okay and later I talked to him and he's a good soul and he made a bad mistake and anybody could make but he made it and later was, but on that day when they said this is the man and he's coming over, he probably was coming over to apologize to me, he probably was, but zeal had overtaken me. I had to turn to one of the firefighters and say, keep me away from that man. Literally move him away from me and move me here because I wasn't gonna be able to contain myself.

I was gonna go after him. Because I had zeal, but I was just in the flesh. I had no wisdom, I had no self control, I had no providential understanding of situation. Zeal without compassion and self control is just dangerous.

Zeal without authority is ineffective. We need a God whose zeal is accompanied by both his authority and his wisdom. He's a wonderful counselor.

The word in Hebrew for wonderful is actually the word that is most commonly associated in Hebrew for the supernatural. It really is to say he is a counselor of wonders. He goes beyond the natural in his capacity to know wisely how to release his zeal. He's both effective and wise in what he does with his zeal. And you know what God's zealous for?

At least these two things, primarily, probably these two things. He is zealous for his own glory and righteousness and justice in the earth. He is holy and he's just. He's zealous for justice. And if you're zealous for justice, it means that sin must be punished, righteousness must be rewarded. There is no definition of justice that excludes sin being punished and judged. And he's zealous for justice.

Christian gospel's not good news because in any way it implies that God just overlooks sin. He despises sin. And he's a God of justice and he is zealous. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty. And the other thing he's zealous for is you. For your fellowship, for his children to be with him, reconciled in peace, living in joy. He's zealous to give his children an eternal and glorious inheritance. He is zealous for your wellbeing, for your healing, for your deliverance, for the unity of the body of Christ, for your own peace with him, with others, and in this world, God is zealous for you. He loves you with a love that's unquenchable. He loves you more than can be described.

He loves you so much that Paul can only pray that you could even begin to understand how wide, how deep, how long, how high is the love of God. He has a zeal for righteousness and justice and he has a zeal for your wellbeing. And yet these two things seem to be in conflict because we are the sinners. We are the ones who rebelled against him.

We were the ones who were alienated from him. We, like all who have been born in this world since Adam fell into sin, have been born into sin and so there was a dilemma. God has a zeal for justice, which means punish sin and reward righteousness. And yet there was no one on the face of the earth who had no sin that needed no punishment and there was no one who was righteous who merited reward.

And so God in his zeal of authority and compassion so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son as a baby king, a God man, a child that was born and a son that was given who would have the government upon his shoulders and would be the prince of peace because what Jesus would do for us is he would satisfy the zeal of the Lord of hosts for justice and for reconciliation of humanity unto God. And Jesus was full of zeal, but it was accompanied by his compassion and his submission to the father. So when he called the ground of Gethsemane and sweat blood, at first he said, could this cup pass from me?

I would rather not drink of it. My flesh would rather just call down the Legion of angels now and destroy them all, skip the cross and move on to glory. But instead he said, not my will, yours be done.

I want my zeal to be accompanied by the wisdom of your providential plan. And so he went to the cross and there on the cross, brothers and sisters, your sin and mine and everyone who accepts Christ saving work, all of our sin was nailed to that cross and was punished there. Every single one of your sins has been judged and punished through the cross of Jesus Christ because God is just and he brought forth justice through the cross of Jesus Christ. And in that same cross, all who trust him receive the unimaginable gift of the imputation of the righteousness of Jesus, wherein God regards you not only as if you'd never sinned, but as if you'd lived Jesus' meritorious life. And so he becomes propitious towards you, favorable towards you, justice shifts and it's on your side through the cross, God is both just and justifier. His zeal for justice and his zeal for you come together at the cross where his wrath and mercy meet. At what God wants most, he rescues back to himself, you.

Ahaz, like the pagans and those who get lost into the emptiness of legalistic religion of any sort, thought if he could ramp up his commitment and devotion and express his zeal even to the point of sacrificing his own side, that he could manipulate the heavens and bring favor of God down upon him. And the gospel says just the opposite. It says behold the love of God that came to you because the zeal of God. Every good gift in your life comes down from God. And you can count on this and rest in this, be buoyed by this and transformed by this knowledge.

It's not your zeal, but the zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this and that's the gospel. Alan Wright, today's good news Christmas message, Prince of Peace. Hey, stick with us, Pastor Alan is back in the studio sharing a parting good news thought for the day in just a moment. Want to give someone a present this Christmas that they'll never forget? Let us help you give a gift that money can't buy. This Christmas, give someone your blessing, a positive biblically-based faith-filled vision for their life.

In the beginning, God blessed Adam and Eve and then told them to be fruitful to multiply because in God's design, blessing isn't the reward for productivity, it's the fuel for it. Now, more than ever, someone you love needs your blessing and we're here to help you craft it. This month's special offer from Alan Wright is a beautiful booklet that will teach you how to craft a meaningful blessing. The easy step-by-step instructions are biblically-based and even include a worksheet that helps you write your blessing. So this Christmas, give someone you love a present not found in stores, a gift from your own heart that will encourage and empower. Write down the blessing and put it in a package under the tree or put it in your Christmas card, they'll never forget it. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries this month we'll send you this booklet as our thank you so you can discover the power to bless.

Now we are in our final days of offering this special product. Call us at 877-544-4860 or visit PastorAlan.org. Merry Christmas back here in the studio with Pastor Alan and our conclusion to this Christmas message, Prince of Peace, not just for Christmas but I think all year round. How can it change our way of thinking by remembering, again, not just at Christmas but he's always and forever our Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government there shall be no end. That's a good word, isn't it, this Christmas, right? The government that we want to increase is the government of the one who's the Prince of Peace.

He is governing and he is committed to peace. I think that so often, as we've been learning today, we think that it's all about us becoming more zealous, all about us becoming more motivated, us becoming more this or that and what we realize is all of it is gonna be accomplished by the zeal of the Lord. So Merry Christmas, everyone. Season to take a deep breath and release all your anxiety to him because he cares for you. Jesus is your Prince of Peace. Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.