God Will Finish His Good Work [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

We can say with Jesus with regard to our salvation that the work, the effort, the righteous deeds that were necessary, the sacrifice, all of that is finished. 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. Are you ready for some good news? God has done a marvelous work in you and he's not finished.

It's going to get better. We just started a series in Philippians, introduced it last time, and today we're in Philippians chapter 1. Just three little verses, verses 3 through 6. But I'm really going to zero in on just verse 6, one of my favorite verses in all the Bible. Philippians is chapter 1, verse 3. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy.

There's that joy theme. Because of your partnership, the word is koinonia, it's the word for fellowship, it's the word for intimate connection, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And then verse 6. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

The good news there is twofold. The first is to say that because God's not finished, things can get better. But it's also to say that the process that is going on in you started with God and is being sustained by God and will be finished by God. One of the things that happened to me early on in my Christian life was somehow I got the idea that I was saved by grace, but then the rest of it was sort of up to me. You know, like if I was going to really grow in Christ, that that had much more to do with what I was doing than what God was doing. I knew that the cross of Jesus Christ was the means through which I was saved, but I thought, how do you grow up as a Christian?

And I just thought, you know, that's through my disciplines, that's through all my effort. Now, God really does care about your participation in the process of Christian growth, but what I want to show you today is that the same grace that saves you sanctifies you. The same grace that forgave you also grows you up. And if you really want to grow in the Lord, that at some point you want to really discover this secret of the power of the gospel, not just unto your initial salvation, but also unto your growth in Christ. Because every single person on the sound of my voice, you're here or you wouldn't be listening except if you want to grow. And all of us want to grow, but how is it that we really grow?

What is the process and why is it that we grow best by the grace of God rather than human effort? And that's what I want to talk to you about today. And let's start with this. One of the biggest problems in life is that so much is unfinished. You know, anybody's ever been a parent, you know this. I mean, until you're in heaven or your child's safely in heaven, you're always parenting. Just when you think you're done, you're not done. In fact, any relationships like that, right?

Wouldn't it just be nice to have a marriage? It's like, you know, we had a wonderful talk last week and that was great. We're close now. If you had a wonderful talk last week and you hadn't talked since, it's not wonderful in your house. I can tell you that right now.

Wouldn't it be great just to go to school one day and say, I went to school today. Man, I learned it. Well, that's finished.

No, it's not. Or go to your job. I mean, there are not many days that you come home and you say, well, that's finished. Some days if you come home and say it's finished, it wasn't a good day. And you get back up, there's more to be done and life's like that. Wouldn't it be great to just clean the house and say, the house is clean. That's finished. My wife's been out of town and I've been around and I'm telling you, it's not finished. We've moved and I tell you, have you ever moved yourselves before? Yeah. We hired some people to move the heavy stuff, but all the little stuff. You say, well, the little stuff's easy.

Are you kidding me? My house had an attic in it that ran the whole length of the house. A walk-up attic is big enough you could stand up in it unless you got over to the side where the rafters are sloped and there if you stand up, you hit your head.

And I'm familiar with that process. I'm just going to tell you, when you're up there and you've been moving heavy boxes and 110 degrees in the attic and you forget that you're in the shallow part of it and you stand up and hit your head, you will find out if you have a Christian vocabulary or not. We had so much stuff in this attic. It was such a big attic that we always said to ourselves, listen, what are we going to do with that? I don't know, put it in the attic. Because you always had room in the attic.

Well, after a while, I started noticing that my wife, she had a policy. She wouldn't go in the attic. She'd just throw things onto the stairs of the attic. And so then something would need to go to the attic and she's like, honey, could you take this up to the attic, which is the most dreaded chore imaginable. And I started carrying something heavy up to the attic, open up the door. I couldn't walk up the steps because there's stuff all on the steps that are supposed to go into the attic. And this has been the way it's been for 16 years. And I realized that the people who buy our house do not want our stuff still in the attic. It's got to come out. And so it started a year and a half ago.

I got my son there in the summer, two summers ago. I said, help me, let's get this stuff out of the attic. We made a small dent. At least you could see light. At least you could move around a little bit.

And then at this summer, I attacked it for real. And finally in the third phase where I'm like, we're for real about this, we're selling our house. We got to get everything out of here. I hired some young guys from the church to come and help me just move stuff. Bless their hearts walking up and down those steps.

I just stand up the attic and hand them things. And finally it became the longer you do this, the more you throw away. And so finally these young men are up there adding, Pastor Alan, does this get thrown away? Yes. Does this get thrown away?

Yes. I'm not even turning around to look at it anymore. Finally, one day he looked at me and said, Pastor Alan, he said, do you want to throw this away? I didn't even look at it. I said, unless it's a solid gold brick, the answer is yes, throw it away.

You don't even care after a while. And I thought I had the entire house empty of everything. I walked around. I said goodbye to the house.

I cried in every room. I thought about all the children, how they'd grown up, everything going on. I looked down the backyard and I said, oh man, it's finished.

And I went over and I opened up a cabinet that I had forgotten about, and it was chock full of stuff. It just wasn't finished. So much of life is just, if something could just be finished, which is why it's so wonderful to think about Jesus breathing His last and saying, it is finished. Because at least we know this, the work that was necessary unto our salvation has been finished.

There are some things in this world that are finished. The work that is needed for you to be forgiven has already been accomplished. The tyranny of sickness and sin and death that ruled for all of those years of man's distance from God, that has been finished. The mastery of sin over our lives and the reign of the devil, it is finished.

Death be not proud because Jesus has conquered the grave. And we can say with Jesus with regard to our salvation that the work, the effort, the righteous deeds that were necessary, the sacrifice, all of that is finished. And here's what I think happens as a Christian, is that your salvation, that is we call justification, it is finished.

I accepted Christ, He paid the price. That saving work, the justification and the meditation on that finished work is what fuels my growth in the Christian life of that which is not finished. See, the other side of this is, although it's so frustrating to see how many things in life aren't finished, but there's also a good new side to this, isn't there? Because anything that's not finished can get better.

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. I was kind of a wannabe artist, and I used to do as a young person a lot of painting, mainly in the medium of acrylics. And I've laid down the brush for years now. I think partly because of my frustration over my last great work of art, which I had dubbed Horse in the Mist. I took inspiration from driving through a rural area and seeing this beautiful, beautiful horse, a majestic creature, out in a alone in a pasture in an early morning as the fog had, to use the poet's word, crept in on cat's feet and was just softly dancing around the hooves of this horse who was grazing out in this field, so beautiful. It was just glorious.

And I just had this idea. I would paint a picture, a landscape of his beautiful pasture and a horse out in the mist. And the pasture turned out all right. The sky was pretty good, but the horse was very eh. And I didn't like the horse, so I tried to fix the horse. And the more I worked on the horse, the worse the horse got, until eventually it was hardly looking like a horse at all. And so I put it away for a while, and I came back to it because sometimes when you do something like that, it looks a little better when you come back later. Well, it didn't.

And so I decided that the horse was beyond repair. So what I did was increased the mist. And I got away from it another few days. I thought, well, let's see how good it looks. I came back.

I said, it still looks terrible. So I just increased the mist some more. And I did this over a process of time until finally I think we need to relabel this painting. Just call it Fog in a Field. And now you kind of see a blurry figure behind the fog.

It could be Sasquatch or something back there. You just don't know. But I've declared that this painting is not finished because anything that's not finished can get better. Jesus finished His work on the cross on your behalf, but God is not finished with you. He who began a good work in you is going to bring it to its completion. There's a process that's going on in your life. And God didn't just wind you up as a Christian and say, now go.

Let's see how well you can do. He is the one who is at work bringing about an ever-increasing conformity in your life to Christ. If you feel stuck in your Christian growth, maybe it's because there's a revelation that needs to happen in your heart about how our growth actually takes place by the grace of God. And so in a growing sense of revelation over the last five years of my life, I have seen, and this has been so important to me, that really my sanctification, my ever-increasing conformity to Christ, my capacity to be a Christian, my capacity to sin less than I did last year, my capacity to love being with God in the spiritual disciplines of my life and the piety of my life and the servanthood of my life, the joy level of my life, my generosity of spirit and life, all of these things that are marks of Christian growth along the way, what I realize now that I wish I'd known early in my Christian life, this has actually been coming about not primarily by any effort of my own, but by something else that's happening by the power of the gospel working in my heart, and that's what I want to explain. We have a wrong notion that got into us early on somewhere that God helps those who help themselves. Not only is it not in the Bible, but the whole idea is contrary to the gospel because what it communicates is that somehow God is looking down to bless those that are showing that they're putting out this really good effort. But what I want to suggest to you is that in the same way that you had no capacity to call upon God before you knew him except that God somehow drew you and no one comes to the Father except the Spirit draws him, that somehow a light has to turn on or else you're left in your blindness and you didn't have the power to raise yourself from the dead, that in the same way you don't have power to sanctify yourself any more than you did to justify yourself.

And so it is that because that little seed thought gets in there, we start thinking that what it really is about is we get saved and then the rest of the time it's about what can we do to help God out in His mission. Years ago I was... Anne and I were babysitting. This was still living in Durham at the time. Our little nephew Jake and his little sister and our little boy was only just about two and Jake must have been three or four. And Jake got married a couple weekends ago and I had to... I had to refrain from telling this during the wedding itself but I just told her at the rehearsal dinner it had it on my mind.

I'll never forget this scene. We were babysitting on a Saturday and Catherine and Kevin were going out to eat and we had got the little kids and we were going to go play. We had some things we were going to do playing inside. It was one of those hot weekends like this weekend is just hot and steamy. And I said unfortunately I got to go out and mow the lawn before I can start playing with these kids. Anne will you watch them?

She said yes. I go out and mow the lawn. Dreaded chores. Sweat trickling down the brow.

Yellow jackets nipping at the ankles. Just want to get it done. And I'm out there. I'm taking a few swaths through the yard and all of a sudden I look over and there's little three or four-year-old Jake and he's standing on the sidewalk waving his arms. I cut off lawnmower.

That's already slowing me down. And I go over and I said what is it Jake? What? And he said I'd like to help you mow the lawn Uncle Allen. And I said no Jake. I said Jake it's hot out here and this is hard and this isn't for little boys. I said I'll be done in a minute. You go back inside.

They're playing in there. I'm going to be back in there playing. And I started the lawnmower up and I kept cutting the grass and I could hear over the hum of the lawnmower I could hear a despairing sound. And I turned around and there was Jake just a puddle of tears just crying his eyes out and just just wailing loud enough for me to hear him. I cut the lawnmower off. I went over and I said Jake what is he said I just want to help you mow the lawn Uncle Allen. I just want to help you mow the lawn. And I just broke his heart that I would not let him help me mow the lawn. And so I was like no you know we're babysitting here and the number one responsibility of the babysitter is to return the child alive and unnamed.

You are not going to help me. Later I realized that sometimes Kevin, Jake's dad, sometimes would mow the lawn and put Jake in a backpack on his back so that Jake could just kind of be hovering over while they're mowing. And that every now and then, now they don't tell child social services, but he pushed the mower and let Jake walk right in front of him and hold the little lower part of the handles of the mower and just kind of walk along with him to help him mow the lawn. Help! See this is the way toddlers help us.

Right? Just like your toddler might help you with chores around the house you know or help you wash the car or something and you're just sitting there please don't scratch this car up right now. You know because the fact of the matter is that when a little toddler wants to help daddy it's not really helping daddy it's actually just partnering and the blessing goes to the child. Let me just say this, you don't have to help God you get to. Can I just be clear about this? God is God all by Himself. And I don't mean to bust anybody's bubble but He, listen be clear, He loves you deeply and profoundly but He is not impressed by you. I used to think we were monsters early early on in my Christian life and thankfully the ministries I came along in put a big emphasis on having a daily quiet time spending some time in the Word some time in the prayer every day it's a really important spiritual discipline very important thing to do and I got brought up in that and the problem was that I had a hard time doing it. So we try to hold each other accountable you know we'd say brother how you doing how's your quiet time going well I you know I only had two this week one of them wasn't any good the other was pretty good you know we talk like that to each other and try to hold each other about our quiet times and um and you got to watch out because pretty soon what is meant to be a delightful time with the Lord becomes just a little law for you and it's not really that life-giving but I can remember having this thought you know like one week somebody said how's your quiet going I said man I tell you I had five quiet times in a row this was week every morning with the Lord you know and that's great you know and I can remember just thinking not not like a Pharisee not like not like a prideful you know puffed up feeling but I can remember having this feeling like um you know that's that puts me kind of in a new place you know with with God I mean a little bit like you know God's probably pretty pretty proud of that but y'all can you just think about how silly is that I mean really is this is this the situation that God's sitting up there in heaven and and I have my fifth quiet time in a row that week you know Monday through Friday and uh and is God really up there Gabriel Gabriel come over here Abraham Moses y'all come over here you just got to see this look down there look down there North Carolina that black that that young man he just had five quiet times in a row that is something else don't y'all think that's awesome man I can't believe that that's amazing what could we do to bless him today look at that that is just awesome here are three principles that I think are gospel principles that help explain why it is better that God is doing the work not only of justification but sanctification not only of forgiving you but also increasingly growing you up even as you participate with him Alan Wright today's good news God will finish his good work and we've got more on this teaching in our next broadcast and more from Alan in the studio here in just a moment in the series on speakable joy stay with us CS Lewis said no soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it in other words joy isn't an elusive dream reserved for a select few who have no problems or for those who were born with a joyful disposition actually joy is a fruit of the spirit available to all in Christ no matter what you're facing you can have the joy of the Lord in the midst of it the Apostle Paul did though he wrote his epistle to the Philippians while in prison 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 pastor alan.org Alan I'm reminded of the scripture that that which he begins he will complete and there is there's a fact you can hang your hat on it if he started he's going to finish it God is a finisher and that's really what this message is all about God has done a marvelous thing in you but he is in you but he isn't finished yet and it's going to get better you know that's the marvelous thing that we have to say both in this world and in our expectancy of the world that is to come Christians are the only people on the face of the earth they can really say this it's going to get better yeah no matter what what you're in even if it's very good it's going to get better God finishes things and that's what we're learning about thanks for listening today visit us online at pastor alan.org or call 877-544-4860 that's 877-544-4860 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 delivered right to your email inbox free find out more about these and other resources at pastor alan.org that's pastor alan.org today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries