Foolproof Humility [Part 2]

Alan Wright, pastor, Bible teacher, and author of his latest book, The Power to Bless.

Part of the fruitfulness that emerges in the life of a person who's been blessed is that it comes out of a commitment and a work ethic in their life that was born out of seeing themselves as a valuable human being who has something to contribute. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. Hi, I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear today's discussion from the studio on our special Friday blessing broadcast with Pastor Alan, reading from an excerpt in his new book, The Power to Bless. And Pastor Alan, it's good to be with you again today.

Can't wait to jump in. We're gonna be looking a bit today at chapter six, right halfway through the book almost, and there is so much good stuff here. I can't wait to talk about some of the themes from this chapter. Before we jump into it though, I want to remind our friends, if you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, you can get our special resource right now, which actually is a bundle of the book, The Power to Bless, along with a digital video series that you'll receive and a study guide. And you can use this for home study, group study, and it can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. So as you listen to today's discussion, go deeper and we happy to send you today's special offer with your donation of any amount to Alan Wright Ministries. Contact us at PastorAlan.org, that's PastorAlan.org, or call 877-544-4860. Now more on all of this later in the program.

Right now, as we get started, I'll read the first line of chapter six. It's your words, Pastor Alan, I coached Bennett's childhood soccer team for years because no one else would do it. My first question is, I feel like most of my friends in America did not grow up knowing inherently how to play soccer. This is more of an acquired sport that we had learned as Americans as opposed to maybe baseball or football where it's just more like you're born into it.

Yeah. What was your story on this? Did you have to learn the finer points of coaching? Well, unfortunately, I actually played soccer in high school on a good high school team, and so I actually knew something about soccer, and for years Bennett was on a soccer team, and I didn't let anybody know that I had played soccer before because I just knew what would happen is like, you know something about soccer? You're gonna be the coach, you know? And so for years I hid the fact, and then we lost our coach, and I just didn't have the heart to hide it from people anymore that I actually had some soccer experience, and so I became the coach for a season.

I guess about three or four years or so coaching Bennett's soccer team, but it was fun. Well, it is a fun game, and I think fun is the key words we're diving into this particular topic here, and kind of the sentiments from your wife in this whole endeavor. So as we jump into the book and the discussion, and this particular section is blessed to be twice fruitful. So why this story, and what point are you making? Well, it was a funny, it's a funny thing, you know, when you begin thinking about fruitfulness and success, which we want to talk about today.

The fact of the matter is that God does care about this. He wants us to have fruitful lives, and maybe it's not exactly the way that we might envision it sometimes, but at first when I was coaching the soccer team, our guys, we were thankfully, we were in the less competitive league, and so, you know, I remember the guy who was the head of the league, he got all the coaches together for a training, he said, now remember, talking about little kids playing soccer, so there's two things they want. He said, number one, they want to kick the ball, and number two, they want to eat a snack. He said, so the rules in the optimist soccer league are everybody gets to kick the ball, and everybody gets to eat a snack, and so everybody got to play, everybody gets a snack.

So it wasn't the real serious league, but at first our team, we just weren't very good. I was trying my best to coach them to get some better skills going, and it's a little bit surely, it was a little bit of improvement, but every week we would be walking out on a Saturday morning, and my wife would say, now Bennett, remember, it's not whether you win or lose that matters, it's all about having fun, so you go out there and have fun, and then we go out there and we go lose, you know, and then we come back the next week, and we're walking out on Saturday morning, she said, remember Bennett, and finally he'd say, I know, mom, it's not whether you win or lose, it's just whether you have fun, we'll try to have fun today, and after about losing about five games in a row, I finally just came, I told my happy non-competitive wife, I said, sweetie, I do appreciate your positive words, I really do, and I know I can tend to be too competitive, but I said, could you please quit saying that, I mean, it does matter, at least a little bit, whether we win or lose, I do want to do some winning, and I said, furthermore, I said, I think that, you know, though males especially in our society tend to become over competitive, and people idolize success, I said, these boys are gonna have to grow up and live in a world of some competition, and if one of these grows up to be a corporate salesman, his boss probably wouldn't send them out saying, remember, it's not whether you make the sale or not, it's just about having fun, that's not what they're gonna hear, and if that salesman comes home dejected one day because he just lost his major account and didn't know he was gonna pay the bills, it wouldn't help if his wife said, well, as long as you had fun today, dear, you know, that's not the way it's gonna be, and so Ann heard me, she smiled, she understood, and over the years our team got better at kicking the ball, and our last season, actually, I think we went undefeated, and everybody realized the snacks always taste better when you win the game. So I bring all that up to say, Daniel, you know, it's a tricky thing to talk about success because in American culture we can make an idol out of success and whatever that means, but when Joseph had his second child in Egypt, he named him Ephraim, it is in Hebrew, should be pronounced Ephraim, and it means doubly fruitful, or twice fruitful, and part of that was, this is a second, second boy, but here's Joseph who was, experienced so much hardship as we've talked about, named his firstborn Manasseh, which means forgotten all my troubles, but the second born, he called Ephraim, it means, it means I'm a twice as fruitful, I think partly it's really prophetic, it means I'm twice as fruitful as I could ever imagine being, I'm so blessed by God, and so for 3,800 years Jewish dads have been following the command of Scripture to bless their boys saying, may God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh, and when you say that to someone, may God make you like Ephraim, it's a wonderful picture of what blessing does in general, and that is, it's blessing people for the fruitfulness of their lives, and that's a big part of what blessing does, it helps empower others to live fruitfully, in other words, in the simplest terms, blessing helps fuel our success. In The Power to Bless, and by the way we have talked about it a lot throughout this series on how practical it is, and by the time you make it even to the end of the book, you'll have even in the appendix, even I would call it worksheet style, fill in the blank to help you get started on crafting a blessing for someone, and to bless them into fruitfulness, really, I mean I think that's kind of part of our goal here, is to say, you know what, it's a godly thing to want to be fruitful, and to be successful, and God certainly has that plan for your life, so blessing someone to be fruitful is what we can learn from this application here. You know God in the beginning, he blessed Adam and Eve, and then he said be fruitful and multiply, so blessing is pictured as a mystical grace at work that's helping foster someone's fruitfulness, and he said in Deuteronomy, he'll love you, he'll bless you, and multiply you, he'll bless the fruit of your womb, the fruit of the ground, you know when he sent the people into the promised land, he intended them to win every battle, Jesus wanted his disciples to be fruitful, he said in John 15 8, by this my father's glorified that you bear much fruit, so when he tells one of his most important parables, it's about a man, a wealthy man leaves his servant various amounts of treasure, talents, and he really like comes back and commends the servants who invested their talents for a fruitful return, so it's important that we accept the fact that there's something beautiful and good about about bearing fruit, and certainly that includes the fruit of the Spirit, love and joy and peace and patience and kindness, and so what I think happens is that when we bless, we are speaking a positive vision over someone's life, affirming them, giving them a sense of deep acceptance that is in our own heart of love and in Christ, and what happens is when people are blessed, they begin to to bless other people, and and that's where real fruitfulness you know begins to come from, is that we feel so blessed ourselves that we can't help but be a blessing to someone else. Yeah, a friend of mine says you know he's heard the quote that it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're sincere about it, and he says well if you're wrong then I guess you're sincerely wrong, but I guess and maybe it does feel a little strange because I think some of us in the Christian faith grew up thinking that you shouldn't care too much about results, that it's just about your you you're either your commitment to God, your obedience to God, or something along those lines, but in the book here you do talk about that even you fell into that right, falling to believe that results shouldn't matter so much. You know results aren't ultimate, but it's important to God that we live fruitful lives, we're made for that. So let's just talk about a fruit of kindness for example.

The people that I love and know include my own children and others, I'd like for them to be more kind. That's a fruit for the spirit, that's a that's a wonderful thing. Well how does that happen? Well it's interesting researchers A.M. Eisen and P.F. Levine conducted a famous study back in 1972, it was all about observing the potential altruism of people who had just stepped out of a phone booth. You know remember that ancient clear box that a device in there for calling people. So what they did was they set it up such at all on the sidewalk, a seemingly random passer-by would drop some papers just as a person stepped out of the phone booth. And the question of the study was how many people after making a phone call and stepping out of a phone booth would stoop down and help a lady pick up fumbled papers on the sidewalk? That was the question. And Daniel the researchers were shocked to discover a dismal 4% of people helped.

I mean almost nobody would help. But the researchers did discover that something happened almost a hundred percent of the time and that is that the person in the phone booth after their phone call would reach their finger into the coin return to see if there was an extra coin down in the coin return. They found almost a hundred percent of people did that.

So they did something interesting. They said what will happen, would it change anything if a person finds a coin, a dime, down in the coin return and then they step out of the phone booth. Will there be a difference in how many, what percentage of those people would help a lady pick up her papers off the sidewalk?

It was shocking. Remember, stepping out, not finding a coin, 4% of people would help the lady and they found it on average of the people who had found a dime in the coin return, 87% of those who had found the dime would stoop down and help the lady pick up her fumbled papers. So people were 22 times more likely to help someone else if they'd found a dime. Which raises the question, if people are 22 times nicer when they find 10 cents in a phone booth, what manner of radical love might fill their hearts if they discover themselves blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ? You know, you think in the Bible, you think of people that Jesus blessed and think of like Zacchaeus who was a despised tax collector and selfish and the tax collectors were all cheats, they were all liars and cheats and despised by their fellow Jews and Jesus just blessed them.

Zacchaeus, you know, he said, you're the kind of person I'd like to get to know and like to be with, I'd like to go spend the day with you and he did. And Jesus gave Zacchaeus no law, no ultimatum, just blessed him and Zacchaeus spontaneously decided to give half his wealth to the poor. See, people don't become more loving and kind and generous when we tell them they ought to be better Christians. People become more loving kind and generous when we bless them. And blessed people therefore end up blessing people and blessed people are just way more fruitful than stressed people. It's a principle. It's coming from the book The Power to Bless written by Pastor Alan Wright and there is so much good information here that is so practical that you can start today, tomorrow, applying to those around you, those you love, finding a blessing for your own life and then kind of with a story of the people in the phone booth, pay it forward and that's a great thing.

So on this last note here where you're talking about being fruitful and maybe not living in a sense out of anxiety and stress but being free and fruitful, there is a personal story involving your son who is quite the golfer and a gift of a putter. Oh, I love the story. You know, it's one that I've tell in sermons and such and it's in the book but it's a perfect illustration of this that I think sometimes we get duped into believing that we ought to withhold the blessing from people, we ought to withhold our affirmation because then they'll try harder. Yeah.

They'll do better. In other words, we believe the exact opposite of the biblical message of blessing. We tend to believe that people will be more fruitful if we withhold our blessing and I just so want to expose how wrong that thinking is and here's a great story that illustrates. So when Bennett was little, he loved to play golf, he's a good little golfer and he needed a new putter. He knew exactly the putter he wanted and putters are costly.

Well, our friend Bob Roach has been a dear friend and he wanted to bless, he wanted to invest in Bennett's golf. He said, Bennett, I want to get you that putter and Bennett was just all that so excited. He said, so I'm gonna take you to the golf store, Bob said, and you just have to prove the putter works for you, of course. I want to see you make some six footers on the store's, you know, putting green there but you go in there, you make eight out of ten, I'm gonna get you that putter, you know. So we laughed about it and we went down to Golf Galaxy and they found the exact putter and Bennett's putting around with it.

Bob says, all right, let me make sure it works. Let me see you make some on the little AstroTurf putting green in the Golf Galaxy. Well, Bennett put some six footers down there.

There's no break, it's all flat putt and Bennett's a good little putter. Well, he's making almost all of them. He's not even thinking about it, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Oh, a couple of them might have lipped out. Well, all of a sudden, Bob goes, okay, wait right there. He says, by my count, you're now seven out of nine and I remember I said, you got to make eight out of ten or else.

And all of a sudden, Bennett looked at him like, you're kidding. I thought it was just a joke. I didn't know there actually was a stipulation here. I didn't know there was a law.

I didn't know there was a requirement. And Bob's looking at him real serious, like he's got to make this putter or else he doesn't get the putter. So Bennett, I mean this just shows, this is what I'm saying, this is what happens when you think that you're gonna help somebody by heaping the pressure on them. Bennett stepped away from the ball, you know, he's been out there just rolling with me, I don't know how you think about it, and acts like he's reading the putt, you know, trying to see is there any break here, any slope. And then he comes back, he nervously crouches over the putt, stands there for a long time thinking about it all. Finally, he makes the all-important putt and just yanks it left of the hole, missed the hole by a mile. So he'd made seven putts without even thinking about it, and now this one putt that he had to make, he missed it terribly.

Well, it just proves, doesn't it, that anxiety always leads towards a lack of fruitfulness in our lives. There's a reason they like to, you know, we say ice the kicker before the big kick that might win the game. They call timeout, they want them to think about it, they want them to get nervous.

The guy getting ready to shoot the free throws at the free throw line at a basketball game, they'll call a timeout, they just want them to think about it. Because really what law does is says you got to be able to do this or else you won't be blessed. When blessing just does the opposite, blessing is saying you are being affirmed and accepted and loved, and because of that security, therefore you can excel. Well, thankfully Bob was just joking about the putter, and he got that putter for Bennett anyway, and when I talked to him, he said we probably ought to name that putter Grace, and he had a tournament I think that following week and had one of his best showings.

Heather putted really well with it. Don't withhold blessing and think that that is gonna motivate people to actually be more successful. It sabotages our success when we get uptight, and when people withhold the blessing, then we become anxious. God's plan, just like he did with Adam and Eve, he blessed them and then he said, okay now you're blessed, you know who you are, you know you're loved and accepted, go be fruitful and multiply. So withholding the blessing seems to choke our productivity.

Exactly. Yeah, but in the book here you say, and it becomes in the opposite, blessed people work harder than those that are searching for blessing, and you actually saw that play out as well in your own family. You know, it's interesting, I always laugh about, you know, both my kids were really good students, and they were quite self-motivated. You know, honestly, I know parents drool when I say this, and I almost hesitate to say it, but you know, never once did I have to, you know, get on them about studying.

I was never having to crack the whip and say, now get in those books, you know. They were just, they were just always studying. They had a real strong work ethic about that, and I almost just sort of wondered about it because it was kind of funny because, you know, we homeschooled our kids for a variety of reasons, and so we had some freedom, but you know, the kids were taking real serious courses, and by the time Bennett's in high school he's taking AP classes and all this stuff.

Sometimes they'd be like, Bennett, it's a beautiful day, let's go play some golf. You'd be like, no, dad, I got to do some AP physics. I'm kind of joking, listen, we homeschool, I'm the principal, let's blow it off, and he's like, no, I got to do the work, dad.

It was almost like reversal, right? He was like, yeah, and where do you get that from? And I remember one time when Bennett was a teenager, and I just finally asked him, I said, Bennett, I love your work ethic for studying, and you always do well. I said, you know, how does that work for you?

Because I never have pressured you, not once have I had to say, hey, you ought to be doing more. And he said, you know, it's really not that complicated. He said, I got that somewhere along the way, I got the idea that I'm an A student. So if I'm an A student, then I feel like I need to study, and I'll do whatever it takes to make an A, because that's kind of who I am.

You see what he's saying there? He's saying that you get an identity, and then you live out of that identity. So you're far better off to convince your child through the power of blessing that you have a good mind, and that you're a good student, than you are to simply use all your energy trying to badger them to study more. Once you develop an identity, you live out of that identity. I think that's part of what fuels fruitfulness and success in our lives, is blessing helps shape an identity. You bless someone, and they see themselves as a person that's designed for fruitfulness. They see themselves as a person who has something important to contribute, and they're gonna live out of that. If you, if they receive the opposite message, if they receive curse, like your life doesn't matter, why would that person ever want to apply themselves? So part of the fruitfulness that emerges in our, in the life of a person who's been blessed, is that it comes out of a commitment and a work ethic in their life that was born out of seeing themselves as a valuable, a valuable human being who has something to contribute. Ever feel like something's holding you back, as if you lack an important key that could change everything?

Is there someone you love who seems stuck? You'd like to help them, but how? What's missing? Blessing. We all need a positive, faith-filled vision spoken over our lives. You can learn how to embrace the biblical practice of blessing through Pastor Alan Wright's new book, The Power to Bless, which quickly became an Amazon number one bestseller after its recent release. Until now, the hardcover book has only been available through retail sales, but this month, Alan Wright Ministries wants to send you the book as our thank you for your donation. When you give this month, you'll not only receive the best-selling book, but you'll also receive a free five-session video course in which Pastor Alan teaches how to bless and covers content not found in the book.

The video course includes a detailed study guide perfect for personal growth or small group discussion. Make your gift today and discover the power to bless. Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org.

So the bumper sticker is in error. Yeah, you're saved. Yeah, God loves you. Don't let it go to your head. Let it go to your head. Let it go to your heart.

Let it go to everything within you. Yeah, we say don't let it go to your head, meaning, oh, don't get prideful and puffed up about it. And a lot of people just end up withholding even compliments from other people, thinking it's gonna puff them up.

There's a huge difference between talking to someone in a way that makes them feel self-absorbed versus talking to someone that makes them become deep have a deep sense of self-worth. So we're instilling self-worth. We're not creating selfish people. We're creating people that understand their lives in the context of God's good plan that you have been created by God with good works for you to do. From the very foundation of the earth, there are good works that God's already prepared for you to do. He's blessed you to be fruitful. So we might as well agree with God and bless one another for fruitful lives. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.