Blessed to be Twice Fruitful [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. I was searching something about pandemic, and it just popped up. I couldn't believe what it said. It said, Is it normal to experience pandemic fatigue during the COVID-19 pandemic? Is it normal to be tired during the pandemic because you're tired of a pandemic? Yeah.

We're all tired. 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, The Power to Bless, taken from Pastor Alan's book of the same title, and 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 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. Are you ready for some good news? God doesn't pressure you to be fruitful. He blesses you to be fruitful, and we can do the same unto others. We're talking about the power to bless, to speak a positive vision and faith over others' lives, this great theme that runs all the way through the scriptures. And we come back today to this foundational blessing for 3700 years. 3700 years Jewish dads have been speaking this blessing on the Sabbath day over their kids. May God make you as Ephraim and Manasseh.

And today we're going to focus in on the part of this that has to do with what Ephraim means. This is a story in Genesis 48 in which Joseph has brought his two sons to his dying father Jacob so that Jacob could rouse himself and bless these boys. At verse three, Jacob said to Joseph, God Almighty appeared to me at loose in the land of Canaan and blessed me. I want to pause right here to say one of the things we've learned about Jacob is that Jacob struggled his whole life because he didn't feel blessed. So he's always trying to manipulate, always trying to strive, always trying to earn a blessing that God already had intended for him.

But at his deathbed, he finally gets it. And you see here, he understands he had been blessed and notice the nature of it. Verse four, and said to me, behold, I will make you fruitful and multiply you. And I'll make of you a company of peoples and will give this land to your offspring after you for an everlasting possession.

I'll make you fruitful. That's at the heart of the blessing that he had. Genesis 48 verse 19. After Joseph has brought these boys to him, Jacob did an unusual thing. He crossed his arms and he put the strong right arm, the right hand of blessing that should be for the firstborn. And instead he put it on the younger son's head, Ephraim. He had a younger grandson, Ephraim, got this stronger blessing.

And Joseph realized that this was violating protocol. So he tried gently to move his father's hands back to say, no, dad, this is the firstborn, Manasseh, put your hand here, the right hand here. But Jacob said, no, he knows what he's doing. Verse 19, the father, Jacob refused and said, I know my son, I know. He also shall become a people, speaking of Manasseh, he also shall be great. Nevertheless, his younger brother shall be greater than he, speaking of Ephraim. And his offspring shall become a multitude of nations.

He's speaking of the increase that he spoke over Ephraim. Now, if you have your Bible with you, go into the New Testament and John chapter 15 to hear these words of Jesus that help explain the nature of the Christian life is one of bearing fruit by abiding in him. John 15 verse five, Jesus said, I'm the vine and you're the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit for apart from me, you can do nothing. Verse eight, by this, my father is glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. We're talking about the name Ephraim today, which means twice fruitful and what it means to live a fruitful life.

So we're talking in many ways and a broader sense of in the very, very best sense of the word of succeeding. There was a middle school teacher and she had a class of young aspiring entrepreneurs and so she had arranged for all of them to have, I think, $10 and go. She said, go out and see if you could start a little business, maybe sell something, see if you could make some money off of this.

They came back three weeks later and a first little girl came up and she returned on the teacher's desk $29. She said, that's wonderful. So what did you do? She said, I sold t-shirts. She said, I bought some plain white t-shirts.

I tie-dyed them myself. I sold them. I reinvested the money back into some more t-shirts and kept doing this for several weeks. And that's how I made $29 that you said, well, that's wonderful. Another little girl came up and she had made $79 that you said, wow, how did you do that? She said, I sold informative magazines. She said, I sold enough that I was able to reinvest, buy more magazines.

And I stood out in front of a shopping center and I told people that this was to help enrich their lives. And people kept buying them and look, I made $79. The teacher said, that's wonderful. And then a little boy came up and opened up a big box and dumped out $2,738. And the teacher said, what is this?

What did you do? He said, I sold toothbrushes. She said, you sold toothbrushes and made all this money.

How did you do it? He said, well, I started out by giving people free ice cream. She said, and so then just because they wanted to make sure they didn't leave sugar on their teeth, they bought toothbrushes. He said, no. He said, I gave them the free ice cream and they all said to me, this tastes like dirt.

And I said, it is dirt. You want to buy a toothbrush? Everybody in this world in one way or another is trying to find a way to sort of get ahead.

And if you feel like that you just got to do it in any way possible to make it happen, then you'll start cutting corners and you'll succumb to the feeling of pressure. I got such a chuckle out of reading this. We could joke about a man who called 911. He said, my friend is bleeding very badly. I'm really afraid.

What should I do? And the operator said calmly, well, a bad hemorrhage like this could lead to death. So the first thing you need to do is apply pressure. So the man hung up the phone and he said to his friend, listen, stop bleeding right now or else you could die.

Yeah, no pressure. Just stop bleeding. See what pressure does is it just makes someone uptight about what they are supposed to be able to do and it ends up just exhausting them. One thing that happens to me, I think throughout a lot of my Christian life was I hear a preacher gets up, start talking about being more fruitful and I'm like, oh no, here we go again. I'm not doing enough. That's the message. You're never doing enough. You're not serving enough. You're not giving enough. You're not bearing enough fruit. You're not witnessing enough.

You're not doing enough. And it just make everybody tired. I was Googling something this week about pandemic. You know how when you Google and it comes up and it drops a couple of questions right there that are like, these must be the most commonly asked questions related to your search. And I was searching something about pandemic and it just popped up.

I couldn't believe what it said. Is it normal to experience pandemic fatigue during the COVID-19 pandemic? Is it normal to be tired during the pandemic because you're tired of a pandemic? Yeah, we're all tired and it can feel wearisome if on top of all of the weariness of life, somebody says, hey, and you need to be more fruitful. So we come to this part of what it means to be blessed of the name Ephraim. In Hebrew, there is a dual form of nouns. So like we have singular and plural, like you and y'all. In Hebrew, there's singular and plural, but there's also this dual form or to speak of two of something. And it always ends with ayim.

One day is yom, yom, but two days is yom ayim. And so Ephraim, Ephraim means fruit from the root of Ephra and ayim, meaning two. So it means doubly fruitful. And so when you see the name Ephraim or you speak this as Jewish dads have over their kids, may you be like Ephraim, you're saying, may you be very fruitful, twice as fruitful as maybe you ever imagined.

And twice as fruitful as you ever could be by your own power. I want to talk to you about that today. And then we're going to, after laying out the depth of theology for this, we're going to just talk some in real practical terms about what's the difference between pressuring somebody and blessing somebody so that we could understand how we can better help people live fruitful lives.

That's Alan Wright. And we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Need some inspiration and practical help to bless those you love? In conjunction with the exciting release of Pastor Alan's new book, The Power to Bless, we put together some tools to get you started on the journey of speaking life and empowering the people you love. The toolkit includes an audio message of Pastor Alan's recent sermon on the mysterious blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh, the gateway to understanding the power of all blessing. Also included in the kit is a booklet with a list of scriptures that can be spoken directly as blessings. The blessing scriptures are categorized so you can easily access them for specific situations. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries this month, we'll happily send you the Power to Bless toolkit as our way of saying thanks for your partnership.

The resources are available for immediate digital download or available in CD and booklet. Partner with us and be inspired and equipped to bless someone's life today. 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.

Now these are the final days this offer is being made available to you this month. 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. Let's start with this.

There is a fine line between idolizing success and pretending that success doesn't even matter. I've been part of for a long time of a men's fellowship in town called a chapter of a national organization, New Canaan Society. And part of what we do every week is we let guys tell their stories. And I just love hearing the honest testimonies of guys get up and one of the values we have at New Canaan is honesty.

And so people will tell their stories honestly. And I would just say as I look back over many, many years of hearing guys tell their stories, that there's one theme that seems to come up. A theme of regret or disappointment of what they would do differently in their life. And the theme is that there's a guy who gets really involved in his business, really involved in his work, and in a sense makes an idol out of success and spends so much time building up a successful business, maybe becoming wealthy, maybe becoming, starting a bunch of other businesses, whatever it might be, to the point that it neglects his other relationships.

And it's cost him a lot of pain, sometimes cost him a marriage or relationship with kids and led to other destructive things. Over and over, you know, I hear those stories because there's just a great pressure on people in the world today, and maybe men and women experience it a little bit differently, but it's a pressure to be successful. And whether you're a businessman or perhaps you're in a career as a lady and you're feeling pressure to keep advancing, or maybe you're parenting and you're at home with the kids a lot, and you can start feeling the pressure to have the perfect kids. So pressure is a bad thing. It's an anxiety-producing thing, and part of it is like, we don't want that anymore.

But the other side of this is that it's not right, on the other hand, to just think that we're supposed to just never win at anything. Part of this got preached into me from my youth because the great evangelical preacher of my youth, Roy Putnam, he was victorious, and I was drawn to that. I was drawn to the message of the gospel that's victorious.

He wrote a book on Ephesians called In It to Win It. I love, I always love that. I'm in it to win it. I've got a kind of competitive nature, and I've had to kind of deal with that off and on over the years. When our son Bennett was little, I wound up in and up coaching him. I wound up in and up coaching his soccer team. There for a while, Dan Anthony, the elder in our church, he was coaching, and then I helped him a little bit. They were pretty good back there when Dan was doing it. By the time that I had the team, though, I don't know, we'd lost some of our key players, and we just weren't very good, and we were losing most all the games.

It was part of the more laid-back league in town, the Optimist League, where there's not a lot of pressure on it in the first place. I remember the guy at the time that was heading it up, and he got all the coaches together for training, and he said, listen, he said, your kids, there's two things they want to do. They want to kick the ball, and they want to eat a snack.

He said, so here's what we do in the Optimist Soccer League. We make sure every kid gets a chance to kick the ball, and every kid gets to eat a snack. And so it was required that every kid get to play at least half the game, and you always had to have a snack.

He was a pretty funny guy. He said, also, when your practice is, I want you to employ the dead man's rule. We said, what's the dead man's rule?

He said, that means that you can't do anything at practice, ask your kids to do something that a dead man could do, and that includes just sitting still and listening to you talk. So they want to kick the ball and have a snack. And so we aimed to just have fun with this, but we just kept losing week after week.

I mean, I think maybe the first season, I'm not sure if we won a game or not. And every week, we'd be leaving the house. Bennett and I, I'm walking out. I got my little whiteboard that I draw stuff on, and I've got practice soccer balls, and again, Bennett and we're going out. And every week, my wife, she'd say, she said, now listen, Bennett, just go out there and have a good time. Remember, it's not so much whether you win or lose, but just that you're having a good time doing this. And we're like, okay, all right.

Anyway, I mean, it got to be, it was just regular. As we got ready, she'd take, now remember, and we're like, we know, you know, I know, mom, it doesn't matter whether I win or lose, you know. And it did look like every week, and she meant so well with it. And she also, she was aware that we were losing most of the time, and so she didn't want to have a disappointed son coming home.

But finally, I got with Anne, I said, honey, I said, would you mind not saying that anymore? Because I honestly, I'd like to win sometimes. And I said, and the other thing is, I'm trying to help teach these boys some life lessons. And one day they're going to probably grow up and have a job, and it's going to, it's going to be a little bit competitive part.

You know, I mean, I said, I think there may be a kid on the team. He grows up and, and he's, he's, he's in a sales job and he comes home and he's just lost a $20,000 a year commission. And he says to his wife, he said, honey, I got bad news. I just lost one of my biggest clients.

And I don't think I did a good job on the presentation. And they're going to go with somebody else. And his wife's probably not going to say, well, honey, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, just did you have fun?

It's probably not going to be the case. It might be one of these boys might be a surgeon one day and comes home and says, I lost a patient today. And his wife's not going to say, well, but did you have fun? No, sometimes it matters whether you win or lose, doesn't it? And Jacob didn't lay his hands on these two grandsons and say, I just bless you to have fun in life.

And always remember, it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. That's not what he said, is it? He blessed the fruitfulness of their lives and Jacob himself had had the fruitfulness of his life be blessed.

And so the answer to having peace in this world and not feeling pressure can't be to just simply pretend that success never matters. And as we look at who God is and I want to show you the theological foundation of fruitfulness, you'll realize that it's in God's heart and his own nature for that which is good and made by him as something good to be able to prosper, to flourish, to increase. Let's start back in Genesis chapter one at verse 11. God said, let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind on earth. And it was so the design of God is that there would be plants and they have branches and those branches will blossom, have leaves and stuff that blossom, right? And then from that fruit and inside the fruit is seed. And you could take the seed in that fruit, plant it, more trees grow, more fruit, more seed.

So it's a plan for exponential increase. And at verse 26, we see the pinnacle of God's creation. Genesis 1 26, God said, let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on earth. So God created man in his own image and the image of God, he created a male and female, he created him. And so he's made humanity in his own image, very much like God.

That's who we are. And then at verse 28, God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of heaven. So the nature of God is to create bringing order, form and beauty out of the chaos and then take that which he has created and bless it to identify how good it is to will its increase, to bless it with a positive vision for the future so that what he has made will increase.

And this is the way God has made everything in the world. There's seed, it's planted, it grows, it flourishes, it's fruitful. And this is the nature in which he made people to live fruitful lives. And what is compelling in the scripture when you realize is that God is relentless in his intent to bless humanity to be fruitful just as he originally said. So even after the fall of humanity and Adam and Eve sin and there's such brokenness in the world, you'll see throughout the scripture, God's still intent on increasing the place of his good people and his good intentions in the world. Genesis 8 22 is after the great flood and God promises, Genesis 8 22, while the earth remains, seed, time and harvest, there it is again. Cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease. And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

So do you see this? The thing that was spoken to Adam and Eve and then great sin comes in the world and there's a huge flood and God in a sense is starting over with this one man, Noah, and he blesses him and he says the same thing he did to Adam and Eve. Be fruitful, multiply the earth, he blesses him. Alan Wright, today's good news message blessed to be twice fruitful. It's from the series The Power to Bless, which is also the name of Pastor Alan's book. And Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio, sharing his parting good news thought for the day in just a moment. Need some inspiration and practical help to bless those you love in conjunction with the exciting release of Pastor Alan's new book, The Power to Bless?

We put together some tools to get you started on the journey of speaking life and empowering the people you love. The toolkit includes an audio message of Pastor Alan's recent sermon on the mysterious blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh, the gateway to understanding the power of all blessing. Also included in the kit is a booklet with a list of scriptures that can be spoken directly as blessings. The blessing scriptures are categorized so you can easily access them for specific situations. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries this month, we'll happily send you The Power to Bless toolkit as our way of saying thanks for your partnership.

The resources are available for immediate digital download or available in CD and booklet. Partner with us and be inspired and equipped to bless someone's life today. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.

Now these are the final days this offer is being made available to you this month. 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 now sitting with Pastor Alan in the studio and our parting good news thought for the day and we know from Genesis that God blessed them to be fruitful. What's this about being twice fruitful? That sounds even better. The name Ephraim means twice fruitful.

It's a beautiful name. Hebrew has not only singular and plural expressions of nouns but also the dual form. So like in the south we know to say you in the singular and y'all is the plural, right? We don't have a word that says two of you. But in Hebrew there is an expression for that. And any time you hear a word that ends in ayim, that means that's the dual form of it. So this is Ephraim, Ephraim, from fruit and double. It means double fruit or twice fruitful. So I think when you bless someone to be like Ephraim and Manasseh, part of that is you're blessing the fruitfulness of their life. Now part of this was Jacob had Ephraim in Egypt as the second born so part of it was just as simple as, hey, the Lord's made me fruitful again here, another son. But I think that there's just so much prophetic about the Ephraim and Manasseh blessing that this is partly God saying I want this name on people, twice fruitful. I want this on everybody, twice fruitful. Twice as fruitful as you would ever be by your own power. And I think ultimately prophetically twice as fruitful meaning you were fruitful because he made you but you're also fruitful because he fills you with the Holy Spirit and you're redeemed of him. So to bless someone is to envision their life being fruitful. That's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.