Holy Vessels [Part 1]

Allen Wright, pastor, Bible teacher, and author of his latest book, The Power to Bless. The greatest secret I could ever share with you is that the pathway to victory is built upon you having an identity in Christ as a holy vessel of God.

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, Belonging to God, 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 Allen Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAllen.org or call 877-544-4860.

877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Allen Wright. Are you ready for some good news? You don't have to try to overcome your sin by being holy. You overcome your sin because you're holy. We are learning about what it means in the New Testament picture of the word to be holy. It means to be set apart to God. And we call our series Belonging because that's what it means really.

It means to be set apart. It means to belong to God and it changes everything in your thinking. We've been learning how this describes us therefore as Christians. We are the ones who are the saints, the holy ones.

We're the ones who have been washed. Our conscience is cleansed. We are ones who are the temple of the Holy Spirit and we are priests. This is how God views us. And today I want to show you another picture of holiness. You need not turn there but one verse in 2 Corinthians chapter 4. Verse 7, we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.

So we are jars of clay. We are like holy vessels. And in order to see this picture I want to turn you today to a story that you'll find in Daniel chapter 5 that gives a very powerful and gripping picture of Darius, I mean King Belshazzar rather, misusing the vessels that were sacred in Israel. And so I want to talk to you today about what it means to be a holy vessel.

We're in Daniel chapter 5 verse 1. King Belshazzar made a great feast for a thousand of his lords and drank wine in front of the thousand. Belshazzar when he tasted the wine commanded that the vessels of gold and of silver that Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem be brought. That the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines might drink from them. Then they brought in the golden vessels that had been taken out of the temple, the house of God in Jerusalem. And the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines drank from them.

They drank wine and praised the gods of gold and silver and bronze, iron, wood and stone. I chuckled to hear the story about a poor man who was nearing his death and was literally in his final hours at home and in his bed when he smelled the delicious aroma of his favorite treat, home baked chocolate chip cookies. And he could just smell it wafting down the hallway and into the bedroom. And he thought, what is this? My wife is in there cooking chocolate chip cookies.

How thoughtful. He pulled himself up with his last remaining effort. The last bit of strength he had, he pulled himself out of bed.

He staggered down the hallway holding onto the walls as he went. He peered around the corner of the kitchen and there on the countertop literally hundreds of beautiful chocolate chip cookies fresh and hot. He thought, have I arrived in heaven already? Or is this just my wife and her last gesture of love to me?

Wanted to make sure that I had my very favorite. He threw himself forward into the kitchen, fell down in rumpled posture, reached his hand up and took hold of one of the delicious cookies and he was just bringing it towards his mouth. What was this?

The stinging sensation of a spatula slapping down on his hand. He looked up and his wife said, stay out of those, they're for the funeral. You don't think it's as funny as I did, but if you say the cookies are not for you, they're for the funeral, what you mean is they're wholly into the funeral. It's like my wife who pretty soon is going to start making chocolate chest pies.

She could win a contest on her chocolate chest pie and she always makes them at Christmas time and we have them at parties that we give and the same thing will happen. She's going to make these beautiful chocolate chest pies and have them set aside and I'm going to eat supper one night and I'm going to go over and say can I have a piece of this chocolate chest pie and she's going to say, stay out of that, it's for the party. It's wholly unto the party. You're not supposed to use it, it's supposed to be used by the people that we're going to show hospitality to and that's what it literally means to be holy. It means that you belong to God and you're not to be used for other purposes. So the vessels that were called holy, the chalices and goblets and trays and bowls and all of these things that were used in the temple, they were anointed and consecrated and they were declared to be holy which meant they were only to be used in the ministry of the priests in the temple and not to be used for anything else. So they were considered very holy in that sense. It's like my wife, she doesn't put different ingredients in the chocolate chest pie that is holy to the Christmas party.

It's the same ingredients but it only belongs to the Christmas party, not for other everyday use. Well it's not that there are different ingredients so to speak in the holy vessels, craftsmen also made beautiful vessels of gold and silver and bronze and wood that could be used for everyday usage but these were just to be used in the temple. And so on that kind of gruesome day when Belshazzar, this pagan ruler, takes those vessels that had been set apart in the temple and now been stolen by Nebuchadnezzar many years earlier, kept in the treasury of Babylon and he takes them and he brings them out and says let's drink wine out of them to our gods. Let me just ask this question, do those vessels that were the sacred vessels in Israel, those golden chalices and cups, did they cease to become holy because they were being misused?

No. In fact what is so offends our sensibilities and the reason we would say they desecrated them is because they are holy. What's awful about the story is that they are being used for a purpose contrary to their holiness. And I want to just suggest to you today that if you want more victory over sin in your life, if you want to continue to grow in your progress of becoming more and more like Christ and you want to know more and more what it means to live what you might call the victorious abundant Christian life, that other than prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit Himself, this is the greatest secret I could ever share with you. Is that the pathway to victory is built upon you having an identity in Christ as a holy vessel of God. So that as you face temptation, as you get up in the morning and you know you're in a spiritual battle every day, that what you're saying to yourself is your true identity in Christ is that you're holy unto the Lord. And I'm for the Lord and no other mundane usage, nothing else, no other spirit can use me, no other thing that's contrary to God is supposed to use me.

And when you have that identity you just begin to think differently about everything you do. I remember a man who was having an ongoing struggle in his life with some temptation and one time as he was about to enter into that temptation he said he heard literally the Lord just spoke to him and just gave him this one sentence and it utterly completely changed his life. The Lord just said, I made you for more than that. I just want you to know that the voice of the Lord, that's the way He comes. Is that He is reminding you of who you are in Christ even if you're at your worst you are holy unto the Lord. What I'm going to say to you today is that whether those vessels, those golden cups that were being used in the service of the Lord in the temple before Nebuchadnezzar sacked it and raised that temple and destroyed it and stole all the gold or whether they're being used by the pagan ruler Belshazzar in a pagan drunken feast, they're still holy to the Lord. And the more you see that the more it's going to just absolutely change your life.

That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Imagine for 99 days in a row someone tells you, I love you, I'll never forsake you. Wouldn't you feel cherished? But what would happen if on the hundredth day that same person said, I'm not sure you're good enough for me. If you don't measure up, I don't think I'll love you anymore.

Wouldn't that one day contaminate the meaning of the other 99 days? Wouldn't one percent of conditional love poison the other 99 percent? Well, just one percent of law is enough to spoil grace. The tiniest bit of law can introduce an unlimited capacity for fear. What if I don't measure up?

When might I be rejected? The Judaizers infiltrated the Galatian church. The apostle Paul was outraged and wrote a letter that describes the essence of the gospel of grace and why it must not be mixed with any form of law. Alan Wright's 12 message audio series trumpets the power of the gospel in order to set you free and empower you with pure grace. It's called Galatians and that's the gospel.

Discover the purity and power of the grace of God. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. 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 me just start by again saying there are some really deep misconceptions about what holiness is that people, even Christians, tend to think that holiness is something that has to do with what you do. And what I've been trying to make this point is that holiness is not about what you do. It is about who you are and therefore it's about what God has done for you. And I really believe this so passionately that everything in your life will change. You realize that you didn't, listen, you didn't find God, He found you.

And you don't change yourself, God changes you. I checked with this week to see a story of a drunk man who was stumbling along outside and he came down to the riverside and lo and behold there was a church that was doing a Sunday afternoon baptismal service down at the river. And the drunk man came up and wandered right up to the minister and the minister looked at him and said, Well my good man, are you looking to find Jesus? And he said, Yes I am. And he said, Well come right here in the water. And so he took the man and put him down under the water and brought him back up and he said, Brother, did you find Jesus?

And the drunk man said, No. And so the minister took him and put him under the water a second time. Kept him down a little longer this time.

Brought him back up. And he said, Did you find Jesus? And the drunk man said, No. So he put him down a third time and this time he kept him under the water like 30 seconds.

And don't worry, we're not going to do that to you today. And he brought him back up. And he said, My good man, did you find Jesus?

And he's getting his breath, poor drunk guy. He goes, No, no, no, I didn't. And he said, Are you sure this is where he fell in? He said, You don't become holy because you get dunked under water. You get baptized to symbolize that you are holy. They would take those golden vessels and they would anoint them with oil as an act of consecration. That didn't make them holy. What made them holy was that they had been set apart unto God. And then they were consecrated, they were anointed to symbolize that fact. And that's what's happened in your life and in mine and everybody who is in Christ. I think there are so many misconceptions of what holiness is and what it looks like.

It is not about these external things. I remember growing up in the formal church that I grew up in, it was very quiet and there was a lot of kneeling, a lot of standing. And the main thing that I remember as a kid was thinking about church as a place where you need to be quiet. People whisper, church, church. You come into church on Sunday morning and if somebody started talking a little bit, you know, they're desecrating this place. I thought, Well, holiness must mean that you should be quiet. Well, there is a time in which God's voice is a still small voice, right? But then the more I grew up, the Scripture also filled up with stuff like, Shout to the Lord all the earth. Worship Him with symbols.

Who's to say? Is quiet or being loud holy? Well, it's neither one. That's not what holiness is about. I remember for much of my Christian life thinking that being serious was more holy than being joyful. That's the way I thought, you know, I saw ministers, I go to church and it was quiet and everything was very, very serious.

And the ministers, their tone of voice was very serious. And then the more I grew, I realized that, you know, the Holy Spirit is called the oil of gladness. That the fruit of the Spirit is love and joy. In other words, the more of the Holy Spirit you have, probably the more joy you're going to have.

I realized that there's a time for weeping, there's a time for laughing. I realized that rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice means to have joy and then have joy again. So who's to say what's more holy?

Is it being serious or being joyful? I used to think that holy meant more formal rather than informal. Now there's a thing for, you know, showing respect in the way that we behave and our demeanor and so forth, but because a guy puts on a clerical collar or puts on a black robe or something, does that make that person holy? Of course not. Things get formal and so forth, does that really make it more holy? Is it more holy to speak in King James English than it is to speak southern?

Of course not. It's so interesting after being on a mission trip to Salt Lake City and learning more about Mormonism, to realize that the Book of Mormon, which was claimed at Joseph Smith around 1830, saw these golden tablets that had been buried for a long time and then translated these Egyptian hieroglyphics into the Book of Mormon. And it's become a worldwide belief system and all over the world of many people, the Book of Mormon. And what was interesting to me to start with as somebody that loves language is that the Book of Mormon is written in King James English, which is very puzzling to me because Joseph Smith was in 1830 in New England of the United States. They didn't speak King James English. So why in the world was it translated directly supposedly word for word straight from God and put into King James English? And what's interesting, and again I'm not mocking, I'm not trying to mock someone's system of belief, I'm just exposing this, that what's interesting is that sometimes the King James is not proper King James. You do understand that King James English is the way that they spoke in 1611 when the King James translation was developed. That was the everyday language. But some people think that it's more holy. Well if it's the Bible that you grew up with and you're accustomed to it and you've memorized a lot of King James and there's some very beautiful things about it, well that's fine. But just to understand that that was the language they spoke in 1611, that's not the way we speak today in America.

And it wasn't the way that they spoke in 1830 in New York when Joseph Smith was translating supposedly these golden plates. So for example, in King James English the first person, I mean the second person singular when you say you is thou. Thou. But there's a second, the second person plural, there's a word for that and that's ye.

Yeah. So like we've got it, we've got singular is you and the plural is y'all. So ye is the same thing as y'all.

And I wouldn't say and would you give me a piece of chocolate chest pie and then turn around and also say because y'all ought to give it to me when she's the only one standing there. That would be a misuse of the language, right? But it's just interesting in the Book of Mormon, in the original Book of Mormon, sometimes the thou and the ye weren't used right. It's written like somebody that had grown up hearing a lot of King James English in church and reading the Bible in King James and then wrote all this down. Anyway, I could go into a long thing about saying it but the whole point of this is, of course the Mormons would say differently, but what I would say is the reason it was put into King James English is because people thought that was holier.

It sounds religious. These aren't the things that make you holy. It's so important to understand this or else we'll go around trying to spend our energy trying to be holy instead of recognizing that we are holy in Christ.

And when you recognize yourself as holy then you see yourself as a holy vessel. I'll just go to the story about Daniel and let me just say it should have been an emperor named Nabonidus that was, should have been on the throne, should have been the king Nabonidus, because the Persian army had been pressing in and they had suffered a massive defeat, the Babylonians had, and basically Nabonidus was afraid and he had fled. And so he had left Belshazzar on the throne and this scene has taken place 539 B.C. Belshazzar comes from the name Baal or Bel and it's referring to this pagan deity saying may Bel protect the king.

So he's pagan all the way through. It wasn't uncommon that a king would throw a huge, huge party like this. We have historical records of Persian kings throwing parties for as many as 15,000 people. Alexander the Great throwing a party for 10,000 noblemen. What's fascinating is that we have actual history that shows that on the night that Babylon fell to the Persians, we know that very night was October 12th, 539 B.C. because Herodotus and another Greek historian Xenophon testified, they wrote down that there was a huge banquet that was going on the night that the Persians sacked Babylon.

Allen Wright. And for history buffs, you've got our attention now and you'll want to come back for the conclusion of this for more on the next installment of Holy Vessels in our teaching belonging to God. It's our teaching today and Allen is back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life in our final word. Imagine for 99 days in a row, someone tells you, I love you, I'll never forsake you. Wouldn't you feel cherished? But what would happen if on the hundredth day that same person said, I'm not sure you're good enough for me. If you don't measure up, I don't think I'll love you anymore.

Wouldn't that one day contaminate the meaning of the other 99 days? Wouldn't one percent of conditional love poison the other 99 percent? Well, just one percent of law is enough to spoil grace. The tiniest bit of law can introduce an unlimited capacity for fear. What if I don't measure up?

When might I be rejected? When the Judaizers infiltrated the Galatian church, the Apostle Paul was outraged and wrote a letter that describes the essence of the gospel of grace and why it must not be mixed with any form of law. Allen Wright's 12 message audio series trumpets the power of the gospel in order to set you free and empower you with pure grace. It's called Galatians and that's the gospel. Discover the purity and power of the grace of God. When you make your gift to Allen Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. 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, pastorallen.org. Allen, in this series, we've said it a lot. Holiness is not what you think. What is today's takeaway?

Yeah. In this sort of gruesome story for anybody that loves God, to think of this pagan king drinking and getting drunk using the sacred vessels that were taken from the temple in Jerusalem when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem. And you think about this scene, sort of this vile party and this is the scene where the famous handwriting on walls is going to be emerging. And you think about those vessels and what is so objectionable about it to our spirit is that those vessels were made for something else. They were made for the service of God in the temple and now they're being used to get drunk and salute the pagan deities of Babylon.

Well, the fact that that's offensive is proving one thing. Those vessels are still holy, even though they're being used for the wrong thing. If we didn't see them as holy, we wouldn't even be offended by it. And I think this is why the more you can see your life, your body, your whole being as a holy vessel, then it starts becoming objectionable to you. Think of it being misused. That's what today is all about. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.