Grace and Working Out Your Salvation [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. You got a lot of stuff that came with your salvation. It's not a curse for somebody to say, now work it out. It's a blessing. It's a blessing to take hold of what's already been provided.

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, Unspeakable Joy, 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. There's something now emotionally that has changed inside of the man that makes the work feel like work when once it didn't feel like work. Who's to say what's work and what's play? I remember when the kids were little and we'd go down to the beach and the thing that was like my assignment was, because toddlers love this, dig a big hole on the beach so big that it just starts filling in with water and they've got a big puddle to play in all day. And we go and we build that thing and sometimes we'd spend hours building a wall around the front of it shoveling for hours and hours just to try to keep the tide from overtaking it. I remember one year I was out there digging my bags getting sore and I thought, if I were at home and somebody were making me dig this hole, I'd be so grumbling and complaining every step of the way.

Why is it that digging a hole at the beach is kind of fun and digging a hole at home because you got to fix something around that is such a pain. I'm telling you something about the attitude that we have towards work, the emotional pain of it. It becomes a curse when you work in order to prove yourself in order to get blessing but if you work because you are blessed then that work is part of the blessing. Sue Bender years ago went and lived amongst a community of simple Amish people and she wrote a little book called Plain and Simple and she talked about what she learned about work from the simple Amish people. And here's something she wrote, caring for the land every day is my way to be close to God.

His land must be honored, she heard Eli say. And watching the Amish farm on farm their land, Bender learned, quote, their intention is to make things grow and do work that's useful. I couldn't say exactly what the difference is but I felt a difference. They work to work. Their work time isn't spent in order to do something else, to have free time on weekends, go to a restaurant, or save for a vacation in retirement.

They do not expect to find satisfaction in that vague something out there but in the daily mastery of whatever they're doing. So I think in the first place, probably the reason we misread this text is that we've made work into a bad word and it's not. It's wonderful to be able to work with God.

It really is. And then people confuse I think this passage because they hear in their mind work for your salvation with fear and trembling. But this distinctly does not say to work for or to work at or to work up your salvation. It's not to work for it, it's not to work at it, and it's not to work it up. So what then does it mean?

I think it means this in the first place. Let me give you three pieces of good news about the way to see this text. First one is this, work out of your salvation. The blessing of being able to work with God is done from the foundation out of the foundation of knowing that you're saved.

Beloved, every single bit of energy in the Christian life by God's design is meant to come not from your worry but from your assurance. It's amazing that Christians can see this completely differently, preach it completely differently, and I can't think of anything more important to say about the power of the Gospel except to say this, that when you have an assurance of a foundational sense of I am certain that I am accepted in the beloved, that's the place from which you do your work. Salvation is this big concept and it includes your healing, includes deliverance, includes the hope of the Gospel, includes the fruit of the Spirit, it includes your life together in the community, the koinonia, includes all of this. And salvation is something that you have an assurance of as it regards your past, your present, and your future. Any of you there in our community groups that do sermon-based guides, you'll see the question this week that's built on a little teaching in there about how our salvation has this sense, it covers our past because Christ paid the penalty for all our sin. But salvation is also for the present because it is power for us to overcome our sin. But it is also for the future because in the future you'll be saved from the presence of sin. So it's comprehensive, the penalty of our sin paid for in the Gospel, the power of sin broken by the power of the Gospel, and in heaven one day the presence of sin gone. All this is the foundation of your salvation out of which you work. And when you work out of an assurance it is completely different.

Let me see if I give it an analogy to explain. We have moved to a new house and in the process we're selling our old house, the house we raised our kids. I've talked about it several times in recent months how much work there was to be done to get this house ready, especially in the attic. It was crammed full of stuff a year and a half of taking stuff out of the attic.

The beauty of an empty attic. So when we got our house, get it ready for the market, get ready to show our house, get ready, but there was a kind of work that we would do and I'm motivated to do that work. Why? Because the hope of selling the house.

Why? You're cleaning up, you're getting things looking better, you're clearing out stuff, you're doing and the whole time it's hard work, but you got a motivation for it because you believe you have hope we're going to sell this house. Now if you had no hope that anybody would ever buy your house, you wouldn't do anything.

Why would I do this? Nobody's going to buy it anyway, you see. That's what hopelessness does. Hope energizes work, but there's something even stronger than that that can really energize you and that is we sold the house and then we got to get everything out of the house because we sold the house.

It's a done deal. We got to get out because if we don't get out then the people can't take it. If people can't take it then we don't get paid and so it's done. So you got an even greater motivation to get out because the house is sold, you see. So I'm saying that these motivations are at work in the Christian life. The hope that things are going to get better. That's what we have as Christians. Even you walk through the greatest adversity of your life, you have this assurance that there is a hope of your salvation, but you also have this faith. It's an assurance of the things that are hoped for and you just live in this confidence. God said it. It's happening.

I got to get it going, right? See we don't work therefore as people who are worried. We work as people who are hopeful and there's all the difference in the world. Work out of your salvation. Regard the gospel. Meditate on the gospel. Think of your salvation. Think of what God has done for you. Think of the hope of glory.

Think of all the things that God has assured you of. Let your faith grow and this beloved energizes our work with Jesus. Okay, secondly, I think it's saying work out in your salvation and he's saying there's value to a workout. Yeah, a workout. Some of us don't remember what a workout is.

A workout is where you put what you have to hard use and in so doing there's a benefit that comes back to you. That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Have you ever thought that joy is a delight reserved for those who have no problems or have you ever assumed that some people are just born with a joyful personality? If so, get ready for some good news. Joy is a fruit of the spirit available to all in Christ no matter the circumstances of life. Though Paul was in jail when he wrote his epistle to the Philippians, he spoke of joy 16 times. No matter what you're going through, you too can discover the secret to unspeakable joy as Pastor Alan Wright leads you through a life-building exploration of Philippians. When you make a gift to Sharing the Light Ministries today, we'll send you the new CD album, The Secret of Unspeakable Joy, as our way of saying thank you for your partnership. Your gifts are the only way we're able to continue broadcasting the message of grace all over the nation. Happiness may rise and fall with happenstance, but joy is ever present in the spirit.

So become a partner today and discover joy like never before. 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. We had a chance to be up in the mountains over the Fourth of July for several days, and I love up in Montreat to hike up Lookout Mountain. Been doing it for decades, and it's kind of my measure of can I still do it? And it's not like you got to be a mountain climber. It's mainly a steep path, some places they've even built in the stairs for you.

One little place where you got a little rock you got to climb up. It's not that it's hard mountain climbing. It's just a long way up, and it challenges my cardiovascular system and my legs and everything else.

And so I did it three times that week. And I said to the kids after I said, every time that I'm going up this mountain, I can't believe how hard it is. And every time I'm coming back down, I can't believe how that wasn't that hard. And it's just so funny how human nature is that there is something about stretching, something about working, even the human body. There's something about when you work out and the endorphins get released and you feel better. And there is something about the momentary tearing down of muscles that builds the muscles up. That's just that's the way he made the body.

And I'm telling you it's the way he does things in the spirit too. There's something good about stretching. There's something good about having a workout. There's something good about testing your faith. There's something good about having to persevere through a difficult thing.

There's something good about you having to be humbled in a situation where you think you should have been exalted, but instead you were humbled and you had to take the back seat rather than the front seat. And you had to go through something that you didn't want to go through and all through it, your faith is being refined. There's something good about a workout. So work out of the assurance of your salvation. Work out in your salvation. And here, and this is the most important thing, is work it out from your salvation.

By that I mean work out the treasures that are there in your salvation. Let me give you two images for this. This word for working out in the Greek, two very important images to understand this. The first one is it's often used to describe someone who's working a field. So imagine that you're a peasant and you have no resources, no land, no land, and the king one day arrives and gives you a parcel of valuable property. And it's fertile ground where there's ample rain, a nearby lake from which you can irrigate if you want to, and all of a sudden you're a landowner. What do you do? Do you say, well I'm so thankful I got that land, now I'm just going to sit here.

Of course not. You were a peasant and now you had no land to work, and now you got land you can work. So what do you do? You take whatever you have, you buy the seed, you till the ground, you care for the soil, you sow the seed. You don't sit around and say I'm just going to hold on to everything. No, you let go of the seed, you get to work, you get out in the field, you pull the weeds, you watch over it during the dry times, you find a way to irrigate some water, you fight off the pests and any thieves that would come because it's your land and you want to work it because there is value in this field. And you can bring the value out or you can let the value lie fallow.

But you want to bring it out, right? So the image is a working out a field, working out the produce out of a field, digging it up and working it out. That's what the kingdom of God is to us. That's what our inheritance is like to us.

It's like you've been entrusted with this field and it's a delight and it's a pleasure to make something of it. Here's an even better image that we see in several we see in several references around the time the Bible was written. We see several references in ancient Greek in which this word for work out was used to describe the workers in an ore mine. I love that. So here's the best image of all.

Work out the precious gold out of the gold mine. That's what I think it means. It's like workers go into the gold mine, the gold is there, but there's some digging, chiseling, scraping, bringing, hauling, getting it in order to appropriate the gold that's already there, right? Your salvation is provided for you in Christ. And you have been given every spiritual blessing in Christ.

And you have been made a citizen of a new kingdom wherein you are the head, not the tail. You have been given spiritual privilege and place so much that you're seated in the heavenlies with Christ, Paul says. So much so that you're a conqueror and that you can do all things through him who gives you strength.

That even in your weakest moments, his strength can be perfected. You have been given the Holy Spirit through whom and by whom there's the fruit of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control in your life. You have been given spiritual gifts, beloved, every single person in the body of Christ. You've been given gifts. Some of you teach, some of you serve, some of you give, some of you prophesy, some of you heal, but whatever it might be that God has given to you, it's a gift that he has deposited from on high down into your spirit, into your life. And he has made you for community.

He has put you into a different kind of relationship than any other kind of relationship in the world. We have an opportunity to relate to one another as one body connected by the organic living presence of the Holy Spirit for your living stones connected together in this holy tabernacle for you have been made the inhabitation of the most high God himself. I'm telling you, you've got an inheritance that's so big, so huge, so marvelous, so wonderful, so extravagant that no one can conceive of it. He is able to do exceedingly, abundantly, above and beyond anything you might ever ask or imagine. Our God is a great God.

He's a big God and he's made you in his own image, crowned you with glory and honor and given you a destiny in this world. Get into the gold mine and dig it out. There's gold.

There's gold. If you found that there was a gold mine in your backyard, you'd stop doing everything else and get out there and scrap and dig and hire people and get wheelbars and start appropriating what you have. Work out your gold mine. Work it. Work it.

Work it. Because it's yours. It's yours.

It's yours. And the whole world needs it. It's not just for you. It's not just for the community of Christ.

It's for the whole world. Oh, this world needs it. My father-in-law, Graham, got a new car this week. That's fun. I like looking at cars and, you know, whenever I do get a car, I look at it for six months trying to figure out the right way.

You know, I just kind of like all that. And so he's got a new car. And I'm jealous for the gadgetry in the new cars because, you know, it's so much better now, this stuff. So I'm as if I'm an expert in technology. If Pastor Chris Lawson were here right now, he would start laughing in my face because he laughs at my lack of technology. But at least I have this same kind of car that my father-in-law now has. So I know how some of the things work. And I'm in there getting out trying to help him see how the things work.

So we started with, I said, oh, I said, granddaddy, I said, you got to, this is, you're going to enjoy this. It's got Bluetooth connection for your phone. He said, what kind of tooth? It's a Bluetooth. And that is not a dental term.

It is a some sort of wireless connection that it makes. And so, I mean, you're showing here's how you do it. And so we went and sat in the car and Abby was inside trying to pack for the mission trip this week. We said, we might need to call you. We're experimenting a little bit. Push this button.

Call Abby. Hello? Y'all again? Okay.

Bye. We'll call you. We did like 10 times. So now you might get a call from Graham Lynch on the Bluetooth connection. And we got the cruise control working. Next, we're going to move on to using the steering wheel controls for the Bluetooth connection and talking on the phone.

And then when we get to the graduate class, there is an app that you can connect your phone, your iPhone to the screen via Bluetooth for a navigation app that then you can use your phone and it will connect to the screen. So we got that to figure out. We got a lot of work to do just to use the stuff that came with the car. Do you see what I'm saying? You got a lot of stuff that came with your salvation. It's not a curse for somebody to say, now, work it out. It's a blessing. It's a blessing to take hold of what's already been provided. And that's the gospel.

Alan Wright. And I have a sense that we had some light bulb moments just there. It's today's teaching grace and working out your salvation. The series Unspeakable Joy and Alan is back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life.

And a final word. The apostle Paul did, though he wrote his epistle to the Philippians while imprisoned, he spoke of joy 16 times. Alan Wright's newest CD album, The Secret of Unspeakable Joy, takes you chapter by chapter through Paul's explanation of the secret of joy in Philippians. When you make a gift today to Sharing the Light, we'll be delighted to send you the new CD album as our way of saying thanks for your partnership.

Become a partner today and discover the secrets of unspeakable joy. 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. Alan, so how did you come up with that idea there of relating this work out your salvation to the owner's manual of a car? Yeah. Well, it's interesting.

And I preached this message that we're airing today some time ago. My father-in-law got in a new car and I was trying to look in the manual with him to learn how to use it. And then recently, just here in the last couple of weeks, my mom's gotten a new car and I'm going through the same process again. And who amongst us can't identify with this that we have got modern day gadgets that we're using about 10% of it. And if you could find a way to work out of it a lot more, that would be a big blessing. Just if you could imagine there's stuff on your own car or your own iPhone or whatever that you don't know how to work, how much more so in things of the Spirit. And I think this is what Paul is talking about. You've been given such a great salvation.

Now spend your life discovering how it all works. 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 that will help you with your 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 supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.