From Now On [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. Whatever has been done against you and whatever offenses that you have suffered, God wants you to live as if you had not experienced it, except for what you learned from it. He wants you to live from this moment on.

Life's not cumulative when it comes to the grace of God. Instead, it's new every morning. Wow. 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 From Now On, as presented at Reynolda 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's a flip style desk devotional for your kitchen counter or your desktop that's filled with blessing for every day of the month. This 30-day flip style calendar comes from Pastor Alan's latest book, The Power to Bless, and it's yours free for your donation this month as our thank you gift to Alan Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer, truly a unique item. Contact us at PastorAlan.org, that's PastorAlan.org, or you can call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Now, more on this later in the program, but right now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here's Alan Wright. What you just see here, what happened in this particular scene where he refused his master's wife. In verse 8 of Genesis 39, verse 8, he refused and said to his master's wife, behold, because of me, my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he's put everything that he has in my charge. And he is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except you because you're his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?

I want you to see this because I remember realizing, reading this years ago, the capacity to resist temptation is not built on great self-will, but on great self-worth. What Joseph was saying is that God has blessed me in this household as a slave. How can I do such a thing and dishonor God and dishonor my master? Because you would expect that Joseph would be able to rationalize and say, well, I'm a slave. I'm never even better in this.

I might as well give in to any pleasure that comes along. That's not the way he thought. And when his brothers came back to him, look at the mind, this healed whole mind of Joseph. Genesis 45, verse five, when he was reunited with his brothers through providential story, that's amazing. And verse five, and now do not be distressed, Joseph said, or angry with yourselves. He said to the brothers, because you sold me here for God sent me before you to preserve life. And then verse 15, and he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them.

And after that, his brothers talked with him. And then at Genesis 50, famously at verse 20, as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. So do not fear. I will provide for you and your little ones. Thus he comforted them and he spoke kindly to them.

Wow. So Joseph has this grace working in his life where he does not have a brain that's wired towards seeing the troubles of his past. And then in the midst of having been promoted in Egypt and seeing God's hand at work, Joseph is married and he has his firstborn son and he names him Manasseh, because it means forgotten my troubles. God has made me to forget all of my trauma. And instead I'm focused on the blessing that's here today. And that's why I'm blessing you that you may be as Manasseh. And you could live your life like that.

And you can. You can live from now on. The secret of living from now on, let me give you three. We'll be elaborating on these in future weeks, but I think that it begins with a new belief. And that is that you can approach life as new each day instead of cumulative. This is exceedingly important for all emotional healing, for your energy moving forward, for the sense of hope and expectancy to take God at his word. When he says things like I've given you a hope and a future to believe that the old is gone, the new has come to accept the promises of God's word. That his mercy is new every morning to believe what Jesus says about being mindful of the blessings of the day and be not anxious about tomorrow. All of this hinges on how do you view your life? So many times I counsel and pray with someone who is exhausted on a particular part of their journey, maybe seeking to see improvements in their marriage relationship or maybe seeking to move closer to what they believe is their vocational destiny, maybe trying to grow and advance in their victory over a besetting sin, whatever it might be, progress. And as I am there counseling and praying, what I see is maybe I've been counseling and praying with them and I've known over a period of a year or two or more where they were and where they are now. And I'm sitting looking at going where you were and where you are now, you've moved down the road, you've progressed. But because there have been setbacks along the way and valleys along the way, and now they're facing another disappointment, it feels as though they're just worn out.

And if you can live your life in such a way that you realize from now on is where I'm living and what has happened before is not something that has accumulated a score against me, then you're free and you're energized. So I played primarily two sports in my life, golf and tennis, played tennis all my life growing up and golf and tennis in terms of scoring just couldn't be any more different because in golf the score is cumulative. This is the thing that is so wretched about golf is that if you come out on the first hole and you make a 10 on a par four, you're already six over par. And if you're trying to shoot par, you're going to have to be working your way to make six birdies to get back to where you started.

You can't say, well, I may have had a bad hole then, but let me wipe the score clean and start a fresh on hole number two. You can say, well, you can say, well, we got the back nine and the front nine. You start on the front nine, you play the back nine, but you say, well, it's a new nine. Well, it's not really a new nine. Your score is accumulating every step of the way.

And so you're adding them all up. And that's why in golf is so frustrating to have a bad hole because you're like, oh, I feel like I've ruined my round. And in some ways you kind of have, because it's hard to fight your way back in. Tennis isn't that way. And tennis is the great thing about tennis is tennis. You play a game and you might play terrible. You might be serving a double fault every point and lose the game. But once that game's over, that game is over and you start a new game.

And what you did in the other game, it doesn't hurt you because that game's over. It doesn't, it doesn't add up into the next game. And here's the thing that's even more wonderful is that you play a number of sets. It's either two out of three sets or three out of five sets. And if you're playing, whoever wins the first two out of three sets, somebody's got to win two out of the three. If you lose the first set, the match is not over and that set's over. And now you're starting a fresh set and you can win the next set and the next set and you win the match. And once you win the match, it doesn't matter whether you lost the other set. And I think that what God's trying to say is that life that life with Jesus Christ is much more like tennis and not like golf.

It's not cumulative. It's the things that your past are not held against you. And what's so sweet about the gospel is that our forgiveness is so full that whatever has happened in the past, God wants you to completely let go of it. Whatever sin that you've had in your life, whatever mistakes you made yesterday, whatever mistakes, whatever sin you had in your life yesterday, God doesn't want you preoccupied with that one bit, but instead to live from now on. And what it means also is whatever has been done against you and whatever offenses that you have suffered, God wants you to live as if you had not experienced it except for what you learned from it. He wants you to live from this moment on.

Life's not cumulative when it comes to the grace of God. Instead, it's new every morning. Wow. It's like you get up every day and say, well, okay, that's a new set. It's a new game. It's a new day.

It's a new moment from now on. The Beautiful Spiral Bound Devotional offers 28 days of inspiration utilizing some of the most moving excerpts from the new book. Use it day by day for four weeks so you'll keep the promises and assurance of God's blessing right in front of you. As Paul wrote to the Philippians, whatever is true, noble, right, and pure, think on these things. So make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today and we'll send you the inspirational flip style devotional as our thank you for your partnership.

Each spiral bound devotional comes with a convenient easel style stand so you can keep the day's inspiration in front of you and fill your heart with God's blessing. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan 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 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. And what this means also is that we need a new ministry that I think that every Christian needs, and that is to awaken to God's presence in every memory, in every memory. There's an approach to ministry that's been called the Emmanuel approach, which is to focus on God's presence with us at every moment. And it's one of the ways in which we minister and the ministry we call healing and hope where you can make an appointment and sit down with a ministry couple for an hour or so and and experience a deep, much deeper type of ministry than we're able to do just after church on Sunday.

We're obviously with COVID, we're a little reduced in how much we're able to schedule those right now, but it's always available to you. And one of the things that often happens with these ministries is just the ministry recipient just be invited to become more attuned to the presence of God now and in the past. And you just got to understand there's something, it's a mystery that we can't explain, but God is outside of time. We don't understand eternity, but eternity is not like a long period of time. Eternity is different. And so I think that God is already in your future. And I think God is in your past at whatever moment. This is why God can still minister even in the midst of something that we experience as our past.

And this is very hard. I don't mean to get too complicated with this, but it's very hard to wrap your mind around this. But as Kirk Thompson has said in his book, The Anatomy of the Soul, the mind in a real sense, your brain does not have a past and a future, but just this moment.

And what it's doing is your brain is remembering past events, but it's remembering those in this moment. And so what happens is I was talking earlier in that simple illustration of a two-year old who spilled the milk, and then with that associated shame. That shame can be healed because the fact of the matter is that God was right there with the two-year-old. And God wasn't shaming a two-year-old for spilling the milk. Jesus was right there, loving the two-year-old, but the two-year-old wasn't aware of it. So what if you could have a ministry encounter where in an anointed environment you're able in the Spirit to go back and see God where you hadn't seen Him before and hear from the Lord? I was talking to some of our ministry team members once, and we keep confidential all of the ministry encounters, so I don't know any specifics, but this has happened more than one occasion where someone receiving ministry had experienced rejection earlier in their life, and had in some way interpreted that as God wasn't with me. But in the ministry session, saw God there in the midst, saw Jesus there actually loving, and as one person put it, found out through a revelation of the Lord that actually the rejection and the distancing they were experiencing in that relationship, they realized God was there protecting the child from further harm by the disconnect. So you can have your, I'm saying is you can have your memories healed when you get the correct narrative associated with what you've actually experienced.

And that has to happen, because how you remember your past is determining how you're going to live in your future. And God wants you to be as Manasseh, as if you've forgotten the trouble part of it and you're remembering God in the midst of it. So we need a new belief, we need a new ministry, and we need a new focus.

Because what essentially Daniel Lubezki was saying is that he was paying attention to kindness. This is such a powerful biblical principle that if you cultivate the capacity to pay attention to every blessing, then that's what your mind is focused on, and that's what you magnify, and that's what you become good at seeing. And this is what God has told us over and over, forget not all his benefits. Remember, remember, remember, remember what the Lord has done for you. When you go through a hard time, God said, I want you to remember I was there with you and I delivered you out of Egypt with a powerful outstretched right arm. And when you come, he said, into a land and you live in houses that you did not build in a land that you did not acquire on your own and you're prospering, remember the Lord, who's the one who's given you the wealth. Remember, remember, remember, and do not forget all the benefits of the Lord, because every act of grace and kindness in your life is from the Lord and is a mark of his love and is the indicator of his inclination towards you and it becomes the framework of the thinking of the redeemed.

Daniel Lubezki said, every day I thought about that soldier's kindness, one little candle flickering in the dark, and yet that's what's remembered. The story of Joseph is interesting because he doesn't have these glaring flaws like other biblical characters that we see. It is maybe because God is really wanting to paint a portrait on the landscape of history to forecast the coming of the real Joseph.

It's so similar. The Bible says of Jesus that he came into his own and his own received him not. Like Joseph, Jesus was hated by his own brothers, not his biological brothers, but hated by those that should have loved him most, religious leaders, other Jews, but instead they hated him. Joseph had a multi-colored coat that his father had given him. Jesus didn't have a literal coat, but he had a mantle of authority. He had a mantle of anointing that was upon him. And the more that anointing showed, the more they hated him and wanted to strip it from him.

So much so that when he went to the cross, they were gambling for his tunic. They wanted to pull away from him. Jesus was abused. He was hated. He was assaulted.

He was sold for a few pieces of silver. And he went into the pit, put into a tomb. But there was a massive difference between Joseph and Jesus.

Joseph hadn't volunteered for it. With Joseph, it wasn't his father's will, but Jesus came by the set for purpose of God, for the redemption of the world, to suffer ridicule and hatred and death at the hands of those who should have loved him and died upon a cross so that anyone who's in Christ, anyone who's in Christ, would be completely forgiven so it's as though the past troubles are gone. And this gives the capacity supernaturally to any Christian to forgive those, not excuse them, not to pretend that evil doesn't happen, not to pretend that evil doesn't happen, but to forgive so that your life is not preoccupied by the harm that's been done to you. And that's what it means to live as Manasseh.

That's what it means to live from now on. I want to picture a gaunt, nearly dead 13-year-old boy at Dachau who is experiencing arguably the greatest atrocity in history at the hands of evil men. And he has a half of a rotten potato at his feet. And that's the story that he tells his boy.

And so his boy thinks about it every day and names his multi-billion-dollar company kind. How much more so we who are in Christ have the opportunity to think every day of our lives about our lives, about the gift of God in Jesus Christ, who was not half-rotten, thrown at our feet, but was sinless and perfect and of infinite worth. How much more we who are in Christ can come to realize we are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Him and given fresh grace every moment so we can live from now on. And that's the gospel. Alan Wright, today's good news message from now on. Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio sharing his parting good news thought for the day.

Stick with us. Wouldn't it be nice to set your mind on God's blessing instead of the curses of the world? This month's special offer from Alan Wright Ministries will help. Coinciding with the release of Pastor Alan's new book, The Power to Bless, we have created a flip-style devotional for your desk or kitchen counter. The beautiful spiral-bound devotional offers 28 days of inspiration utilizing some of the most moving excerpts from the new book. Use it day by day for four weeks so you'll keep the promises and assurance of God's blessing right in front of you. As Paul wrote to the Philippians, whatever is true, noble, right and pure, think on these things. So make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today and we'll send you the inspirational flip-style devotional as our thank you for your partnership.

Each spiral-bound devotional comes with a convenient easel-style stand so you can keep the day's inspiration in front of you and fill your heart with God's blessing. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan 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 Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Back here now with Pastor Alan and as we're also still excited about this new book, The Power to Bless, from now on in this series and this teaching is really what happens when the blessing comes, right? When the blessing is given and it's speaking that faith vision of what is to come. Part of The Power to Bless and what I talk about in the new book available now is that God wants you to live free from the binding, restricting associations that we make mentally with the traumas that we've experienced in life. And to live from now on means to be, yes, aware of and in no denial of the troubles of the past, but not restricted by those troubles in any way, but set free to live purposefully from now on. So just my blessing to leave with you today is that you can live from this moment forward and in a real sense to be like Manasseh, which whose name means forgotten all my troubles, that it be that the blessing of God today is so rich and strong in you that it makes you forget all the troubles because of everything good God has in front of you. That's my prayer and blessing for you as we go into this new year. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.