The Power to Bless [Part 4]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. Listen, the problem in this world is not that there's too much encouragement going on. And encouragement at the simplest level is to put courage into someone. Encouragement is not to puff up.

It's to actually instill the courage to live the life that God's called someone to live. 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 to be sitting with Pastor Alan again today.

It is release week and we are celebrating the release of this brand new book, The Power to Bless by Pastor Alan Wright. And today Pastor Alan, we want to talk about blessing instead of cursing as it relates to our own lives, an incredibly important topic and one that is often misunderstood and the power to bless. You know, we all get different mental narratives going in our minds, don't we? And one of the things that often happens, sadly, is that when we experience wounds in life, those memories that we have and words were spoken to us that were cursed, not blessing, or when difficult things happen and we have troubles in our life that create wounds. And some of our listeners know what it is, sadly, to be through the deepest traumas of life and suffer abuse at the hands of others.

When that happens, we are likely to not know what to make of that. And so with it, we form mental narratives about our lives that are often untrue. So what happens often is that we begin to speak to ourselves. We've got a self-talk that is not accurate. It's not the true story.

And I think a lot of our listeners will understand what that's like to have a mental tape recording going in your mind that is constantly condemning yourself. I remember one time when Bennett was little, and he was, I don't know how old he was. He couldn't have been, he was still in elementary school anyway, and maybe fourth grade. And we had been, I think, on the way to play golf, as so many of our good moments were. And all of a sudden, he blurted out and he said, Dad, can you be addicted to gambling? And I thought, how is he asking me about addiction already? What is this?

This is terrible. I said, well, yeah, you can be addicted maybe to gambling. Why does that bring that up? He said that he saw on ESPN something about a professional golfer who'd blown $2 million gambling. He said, how can you be addicted to something like gambling? And he said, I don't understand. But he said that this man, he's famous, he's rich, he gets to play on the best golf courses in all the world.

And why would he be blowing his money on gambling? And I'm sitting there going, wow, I explained this to a 10-year-old. I didn't want to be having this conversation for many years. And I said, well, I finally just decided to explain it in the simplest terms I knew. I said, Bennett, as strange as it sounds, that pro golfer, though he's famous, he gets to play on great golf courses, he seems like he has a perfect life, I don't think he feels good about himself. I've read some things about his home life growing up. I said, in the end, I said, I think deep down, he doesn't feel good about himself. It was quiet for a moment. And then with a long, happy draw, Bennett said, well, I love myself.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry for joy, because I just said, well, Bennett, that's good, as long as you love yourself, you'll probably never be addicted to anything. I remember one time, Daniel, many years ago reading the, I guess my favorite story in the Bible is Jesus's story of the two sons. We call it the prodigal son story. But it's really the father who had two sons, and they were quite different.

They had equal and opposite errors in their life. But the younger, he went to a faraway land, and he squandered all of his inheritance and wild living. And I was just having a thought, you know, see, there's the problem, you know, it's gone off, it's thought about nothing but himself, selfishness, and all he cares about, the only thing he loves is himself.

And not audibly, but I just felt like I heard in my spirit, I heard the Lord saying, loved himself. And I started thinking about it, would you, if you think of somebody you love, somebody you really, really love, would you send them to the pigs and the prostitutes? Would you send them off to waste their lives and bring scandal on themselves and shame on their home? Would you send them off to that sort of destruction?

Of course not. You wouldn't do that to somebody you love. You'd only do that to somebody that you despised. See, the things that we love, we take care of.

You got a car and you love that car, you're not going to go out there and take your keys and scratch up the paint job, are you? And when you love something, you take care of it. And I began to realize that we've got a big problem in self-hatred. And so part of learning to bless is to learn to bless your own life, to accept yourself in Christ and love yourself as you love others, and therefore to get God's revelation about your identity and speak that to yourself, rather than the process of speaking curse to yourself that is a wrong narrative.

And that's why it's really important to learn this. The Power to Bless released this week, it's by Pastor Alan, and it's available everywhere. That means your favorite bookstore, go into stores anywhere and be able to find that, or online through online retailers, or even your e-reader, get the power to bless. And Pastor Alan, in one of the chapters you wrote, the inability to accept and love ourselves may be the single greatest obstacle to living the blessed life God intends for us. So you're saying through this book, really, that we can learn to love ourselves, to bless ourselves, and that's a good thing. It's such an obstacle because think of this, if the devil's mission, right, is to be the accuser and liar who is painting a negative forecast of curse over our lives, that keeps us bound up with false expectations of doom, and keeps us in anxiety and really bondage with no hope towards the future. If that's the mission of hell, to proclaim that sort of message, wouldn't it be in the spiritual battle, the greatest thing in the world from the enemy's perspective, to get us to regularly be cursing our own lives? I mean, even to just be speaking words to ourselves about, I stink, I can't do this, I can't do that, nothing ever works out for me, I'm so stupid.

Just to speak the words that, if you think about it, what I'm going to say, listen beloved, is that why would we ever want to be agreeing with hell's message about our lives? Learning to love yourself does not lead you into selfishness. Learning to love yourself is going to liberate you into receiving the blessing of God. And so I think, Daniel, this is why it is so, so important, and it might be the greatest obstacle in our lives that we got to get past, is the inability to truly, authentically accept ourselves in Christ. You know the person we're probably least quick to forgive? Ourselves. Person we're most slow to bless?

Ourselves. And I realized this in my own life many years ago, it was just I had a hard time even receiving a good compliment. And what are you saying to yourself?

And how are you speaking to yourself? And taking inventory of that and then learning God's way, that's an important chapter in the book on this whole subject, learning to love and bless your own life. And you mentioned that, is there a way to receive a blessing, especially from someone else? Do you say amen? Do you say thank you? Yeah, you know, I mean, it's almost like receiving a good compliment. And I've learned to say, and I think some of our people have learned to say this, Daniel, say, well, thank you, I received that. I like to even say the words, I received that. It's interesting, you know, when the pastor, in most places, will hold his hands up at the end as I do and speak a blessing. And I often will just speak the traditional words of what's known as the blessing of Aaron, the Aaronic blessing, the high priestly blessing, Lord bless you and keep you and be kind and gracious to you and make his face to shine upon you and give you peace. And I've tried to educate people that this is not a prayer. This is a blessing. And so that's eyes open.

And, um, but I think the best posture, I like to even symbolically take your hands and, and lift them up, hold them up like you were someone's getting ready to hand you something, you know, like in the motion of because sometimes a good in your body just to receive it. But I think that I've tried to learn over the years, listen, there is so much curse in this world. If somebody blesses your life, whatever you do, don't reject it, open up your heart to it and go, here's a blessing. And I take that and I receive it. What you're saying is I let that become part of me. I take it in. Um, when someone's blessing your life, listen deeply, uh, receive it deeply.

Um, you know how to, uh, to, to, to worry. Uh, well, that's a form of meditation. You can do the opposite. You can take blessing and meditate on those good words and let them stir over and over in your heart and become the meditation of our all. That's part of just receiving blessing unto yourself.

And Daniel, I just want to keep reiterating. That is not a selfish thing to do. Right.

Yeah. Because we're only going to bless others to the extent that we know ourselves blessed. The book is the power to bless. And I think part of the to bless a verb action there is also knowing how to receive it.

So that's what we're talking about today. It's a brand new book written by Pastor Alan. As we've said many times, this is a work the Lord is doing. And so if you certainly want to get your hands on it, but also once you read the book, if you'll give an honest review, that's going to help us spread that message on far and wide, you can get the book wherever good books are sold in stores, online, even through your e-reader. And of course, you can find out more at pastorallen.org.

But, but places like Amazon, Barnes and Noble should have this. And yeah, let's talk about that. So many people will, will come and they'll say, well, where does humility fall in line with this? I'm concerned about it, about it coming across selfish or even narcissistic to say that I'm going to build myself up or receive such a high compliment. I think people are worried about that. And it's part of the reason, maybe the biggest reason that parents and teachers and coaches and authorities and preachers even often withhold the blessing is we're afraid all I know is going to go to their head. You know, I think we even worry about giving somebody a compliment.

Sometimes I all know they're going to get big headed about it. I don't want them to become prideful. Well, let's just start with this and say, listen, the problem in this world is not that there's too much encouragement going on and encouragement at the simplest level is to put courage into someone, right? Encouragement is not to puff up. It's to actually instill the courage to live the life that God's called someone to live.

Well, blessing is encouragement that is joined together with spiritual faith and spoken in accord with God's word with a positive identity and future that is connected with it. And when that happens, it does not lead someone into the kind of selfishness and narcissism that says, oh, I need to be all focused on myself now. Look how great I am. Instead, what it does is it helps remove the insecurity of their lives that keeps them full of self absorption. So in other words, if I like the way Tim Keller has spoken of this, you only think about a part of your body if it's hurting, right? Like I'm not thinking about my big toe right now, because my big toe is just fine. But if I walked in and took my shoes off and stubbed my toe on the corner of the door, I'd be thinking a whole lot about my big toe. In other words, if something is bruised, if something's not healthy, it makes us think about it all the time. Otherwise, you're not supposed to be thinking about it.

You're not supposed to walk around thinking about your big toe all the time, right? Well, in the same way, the ego, the soul, we're not designed to be going around thinking about ourselves all the time. We're supposed to be free enough to be self forgetful.

Freedom is where we don't have to be thinking about ourselves all the time. When someone is having to talk about themselves, puff themselves up, speak pridefully, and come across as self absorbed, and in the worst case, narcissistic, it is proof that the ego is bruised, that the soul is wounded, that there's a deficiency there. Because the soul that is satisfied and is blessed doesn't need to think about itself. So that's the paradox of this, is the more that you know yourself blessed, the less you have to think about yourself.

And that's the way it works. And that's the way grace works. So narcissism in the most extreme form is where a person doesn't love himself, but has become absorbed with himself. Narcissus of the mythology fell in love with his own image. So it's about the image.

It's about therefore life's about me, about me, about me. Well, that's not what blessing does to us. Blessing roots us and grounds us in the love of God.

Blessing makes us secure. It's as interesting from the earliest times we learn that children through the bonding, the experience of the affection, the unconditional love of a parent, that's where trust is born. Without that sort of deep attaching love, an infant doesn't learn to trust.

And if you don't learn to trust, then you can't have confidence and security in this world. So it's a child that's been denied blessing that becomes clingy and insecure. The one who's been given blessing becomes an explorer, adventurer, and makes a difference in life.

So there's a huge difference between self-love, which is godly, and self-absorption, which is the preoccupation of hell. themes found in the book The Power to Bless by Pastor Alan Wright. And we're sitting with Pastor Alan today, taking some time away from the pulpit teaching to really kind of digest parts of this book and encourage you also to get the book for yourself and read it from cover to cover. And not only find yourself blessed, you'll receive a blessing quite literally in the pages of the book, but then also you'll learn how to bless others and develop those relationships in that way. You can get the book.

It's available this week, launch week, everywhere, in stores, online, through your e-reader and your tablets. And that's at pastoralan.org to also find out some more information about it as well. Pastor Alan, this phrase is often used, and we've talked a lot about how people throw around the word blessing, but maybe not fully unpacking it.

But a lot of times I think we'll hear the word in this context. Well, with your blessing, I will do this. Or if you'll give me your blessing, and usually maybe that comes to translate permission. Do I have permission? Or with your blessing, I'll do this.

With your permission, with your authority, I'll do this. But do you think there's actually somewhat of a good word there, permission, to be all you can be? It's not the entirety of the theme of blessing. But it's part of it, right? It's part of it. If someone says, well, would you give me your blessing to marry your daughter?

Right, right. Well, you want that blessing because what it's saying is that I'm for you, and I want it to go well for you. Isn't it something, Daniel, that we, every culture into ancient times and even today, there's something inside us that thinks it really does matter whether you're for me or against me? That there's something that we know that is mystically important and valuable about that invisible grace of knowing that you're for my well-being in this.

I think that people that don't have any basis of faith, nonetheless, when you love someone, you just want to say something to them. So you say, good luck. Well, what does that mean?

Good luck. It just means, well, you're saying, I hope it goes well with you. But there's something deep, I think, in our souls. When you love somebody, you want it to go well for them.

I've tried to explain blessing this way. Think of someone that you love, you really, really love, and you want so much for it to go well for them. My children are grown now. My daughter's just graduating from college.

Bennett, our son, is married and doing well. But you never stop as a parent just wanting the very best for your child. And if you ever had a moment, if you're a parent, if you ever had a moment where you just want something good for your child and you wish you could just somehow take it and just give it to them.

Have you ever known someone that was looking at their own life in a way that was destructive? Oh, you just wish you could give. The parents that I've counseled with whose daughters were struggling with eating disorders because of a poor image of themselves, and yet they're beautiful with their whole future in front of them, and the parent just yearning, wishing, I wish somehow I could just take and just by osmosis impart to you how I see you, who you really are, so that you could really see this. It is to bless someone is to want the best for them, but it then is to take and put into words in accord with the scripture and spoken in faith, under the leading of the Holy Spirit, an actual impartational value, a promise, a release of life that comes in. The Bible says that life and death is in the tongue. And this is, Daniel, this is why it's so important, is that this is God's tool to us. This is what we can do to help change someone's life. And so it's an actual will for someone's life to be good.

And I think the world doesn't have anything more to say, except, well, good luck to you. But you know, we realize that if someone will just give us their well wishes, that means something to us. I don't think people realize how much in our everyday language it's in there, even when we say goodbye. I don't think people realize that's actually short from the older English that was God be with you. And if you say it fast enough, God be with you, God be with you, God be with you, God be with you, goodbye is what it became. And we want that, you know, when in cultures they say shalom, that's your goodbye or your hello.

It is to say, may you have shalom. Well, there is blessing and curse in this world. And I think most people listening right now, regardless of how much you know or believe about the power of blessing, you know words make a difference, and the intent of hearts make a difference. And that's why I wrote this book, because I believe this is God's grace at work through our words that can change lives.

Well, that brings me to this next question. And obviously, this ministry, I think, primarily focused, we're primarily talking to believers, we're talking to those who have experienced the life-changing power of God through Christ Jesus. But has God used the principle of blessing among those who don't follow Him?

Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, I just would say to our listeners, when you think of people that, you know, don't know the Lord right now, have yet to come to the saving grace of God, absolutely you can bless their lives. And you start with this, God made every single person in His image.

Now that just, if you started with just that right there. And God came in the person of Christ to die for our sins. He came and gave Himself for us, which means that not only is every person made in the image of God, but every single person is worth the gift of Jesus Christ. It also is to say that God is absolutely for you. And when a person accepts Christ, they are not a child of God yet, so you can't issue forth all the blessings that are reserved for the children of God. But you can certainly speak blessing to people about their identity. And you can certainly speak blessing to people about all that God wants to do in their life. So, to a person who doesn't know God, it's an absolutely true statement to say God made you and God loved you. It's an absolutely true statement to say that you're really the pinnacle, the masterpiece of God's creation.

You've been fearfully and wonderfully made. It is absolutely true to say of that person that God has spared no expense in order to come and show you His love. It's absolutely true to say of that person that God has a wonderful plan for your life.

It's also true, Daniel, and this is where it becomes even more beautiful. Every good gift comes from God. And there's a thing we call common grace, which means that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. And just because a person is not a Christian doesn't mean that they don't have good things in their life that came from God.

So, I mean, I really believe that. Like, if someone's a gifted artist, where did that come from? It came from God. If someone is a loving person, even though they don't know Jesus yet, where's love come from? All love comes from God. So, when you affirm that, you're saying essentially, I see God in you. I see that you're a person who has a lot of love. And I just want to bless that and affirm that and say that love comes from God.

And so, in that sense, I see God at work in your life. That's true of a non-Christian. And I think maybe the best way you get somebody in the kingdom, bless them into the kingdom, right? We're not going to curse them into it. And is it true that a person who doesn't know Jesus is separated from God? And the Bible says, biblically, is still under the curse.

Yes, it is. But I think what we do is we can still affirm blessing to them. And it will make a huge difference in anyone's life.

And interestingly, Daniel, I think a person who's not a Christian and yet is practicing the principle of blessing, well, they're making a difference because they're doing it God's way, even if they don't know that they are. The book is The Power to Bless. It's available everywhere. It's release week. And we are so grateful that you're a part of our listening family today and encourage you to pick up the book wherever books are sold near you.

Or online through your favorite online book retailer. Certainly find out more at pastorallen.org. And Allen, thanks for your time again today as we celebrate release week. It's so exciting to me, Daniel, that this book has finally arrived. And I say to our listeners again, thank you for your partnership and all the ways that you help this message go forward.

And right now, what I'm asking is if you'll get this book, maybe get one for someone else, share it, give us an honest review on Amazon or other online outlets. And this will go far to help the message of blessing get out into the world. The devil's working overtime to spread curse. Let's do more than hell. Let's do the work of heaven and get blessing going in the world that needs it so much now. Thanks for your partnership. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.