Man On Fire [Part 1]

Allen Wright, pastor, Bible teacher, and author of his latest book, The Power to Bless. And this is a story about the power of God on display to prove that He's God. But I want to show you today beautifully that, like all of Scripture, in the end it points us to the Gospel, for it's also a story about the nature and power of the Gospel.

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, Miracle Man, as presented at Rinaldo Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I'd like 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.

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

Here's Allen Wright. Are you ready for some good news? There's one true living God, and He does not hesitate to prove it. God never intended to leave us guessing as to who the true God is. In fact, when you become a Christian, the very first work of the Holy Spirit is to start whispering to you, spirit to spirit, you're a child of God. A miracle has taken place. God's a supernatural God. He does miraculous things. And when you move from having mental assent to Christian truths to having the experience of God's grace, so many things change. And today we're going to continue our series about this miracle man Elijah whose life in so many ways points us to the true miracle man Jesus. And see one of the great miracle stories of the Bible that is displaying God's power but also displaying the gospel. One of my favorite stories, 1 Kings chapter 18. And I want to just start by reading a few verses in the heart of the story. But then throughout the sermon, we're going to go back and we're going to look at the whole story. Now let's just start with this at 1 Kings chapter 18 verse 21. Elijah came near to all the people and said, How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him. But if Baal, then follow him. And the people did not answer him a word. Then Elijah said to the people, I, even I, only am left a prophet of the Lord.

But Baal's prophets are 450 men. Let two bulls be given to us and let them choose one bull for themselves and cut it in pieces and lay it on the wood and put no fire to it. And I'll prepare the other bull and lay it on the wood and put no fire to it. You call upon the name of your God and I will call upon the name of the Lord. And the God who answers by fire, he is God.

And the people answered it is well spoken. Well it's been a good week for college basketball. Anybody watching any college basketball this week?

Been a good week for basketball. Some of you thought I was talking about Carolina beating Duke. Some of you thought I was talking about Carolina beating State. Maybe you thought I was talking about my Baylor Bears beat Kansas. They'd lost 11 times straight to Kansas and finally this week they beat Kansas.

Beat them handily. Maybe you thought I was talking about, no I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about different basketball contests this week. Pastor Chris and I were at the Y on some business and you know Pastor Chris, he played basketball his whole life, scholarship to college for basketball, blah, blah, blah. And we're walking through the gym you know in our street clothes and pull out a basketball and I'm like, you know, how about a little game of pig?

And he's like, yeah sure. So anyway, if you're not familiar with it, pig is a shooting game. It pretty much is just a game to figure out who the best basketball player is. And so anyway, I made some shots. He's trying all these three pointers coming up short. He was coming up a little short and it got to be PI to PI.

And he's like this is going to be it right here. He takes the three pointer and bricks it off the front of the rim. I made my next shot. He missed it. I beat Pastor Chris at basketball.

I don't know where he is ducking his tail right now somewhere in this building. But this showdown, this contest at Mount Carmel, it really wasn't a contest at all, was it? This was no Duke Carolina game where Duke is just throwing the ball into Marvin Bagley with a two-footer every time until finally we start trying. This is not a back and forth who's going to win this game. This is a no contest contest. If this was a basketball game, it's going to be 100 to nothing.

If it's a tennis match, it's going to be 6060. This is a story about something that looks like it's setting itself up as a competition, but in the end you realize there was no real contest that was there. It is really a story about identifying who the real God is.

And I'm just going to assert this, God is not hesitant to identify himself as the one true God. It reminds me a little bit more instead of a basketball game, it reminds me of, some of you are old enough to remember the hit game show of the 70s called To Tell the Truth. Three people would come in all purporting to be the same person. Hi, my name is Sam Smith. Hi, my name is Sam Smith. Hi, my name is Sam Smith. And then a group of panelists would ask them questions and they would try to figure out which one was the real Sam Smith based on their answers and who were the imposters and they would make their guess. And then at the end of the show, the MC would famously ask, would the real Sam Smith please stand up? And then all this drama, you know, he'd stand up.

This is what this reminds me of. This is, will the real God please stand up? Will you show yourself to be God? And this is a story about the power of God on display to prove that he's God.

And I want to show you today beautifully that like all of scripture in the end, it points us to the gospel for it's also a story about the nature and power of the gospel. Pete Gregg is a pastor in Britain. He started years ago a movement that, he didn't know he was starting a movement. His church just started praying around the clock and out of this emerged something called 24-7, a movement of prayer that now I think over a million people around the world have been in some way connected to this vision of just having the people of God pray more and what happened was at his church in Britain, they started praying around the clock and things started happening. God started doing some wonderful things in their midst, most notably and dramatically, sometime early on in this new prayer movement, a little boy was healed miraculously of leukemia. And it was a very dramatic thing in the life of the church and the pastor was so elated that Pastor Gregg came to his church leaders and he said, You know what this means?

And they're like, What? He said, This means Christianity is true. Pastor, you're the minister, you're supposed to already believe that it's true. But you know what he was saying was, I believe these things but now I'm just like, Oh, I just believe these things because I see God is at work here. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. 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. For everything you give this month, you'll not only receive the bestselling 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.

Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. Albert Einstein, who would tell of an agnostic uncle that he had who nonetheless went to synagogue. And somebody had come to this, the only guy in Einstein's family that went to synagogue, and they came to this uncle and said, but you're an agnostic. You don't believe in God.

Why do you go to synagogue? And he said, ah, but you never know. It just seems like a lot of Christians that I've known over the years, they're kind of like that. I feel like almost like, you know, I don't know if I really believe all this stuff, but you never know.

I better go to church. But what happens in your life when you see God's grace up close when you experience the miraculous? It changes everything.

It changes everything. You know, some people in our Western intellectual culture, you know, so rational. Everything's logical.

Everything's scientific. We can get this sort of arrogance about us, like we just know better than everybody else. And we've got so much more education than everybody else, so we know these miracles. They don't really exist.

That's for the less intelligent, sophisticated, less sophisticated people. Philosopher and wit, brilliant man G.K. Chesterton wrote in his classic orthodoxy addressing this saying, My belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all. I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there's a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other, he writes, an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. You see what he's saying? He's saying somehow we've got this idea that the people that don't believe in miracles are the ones that are quite scientific about everything, and they're very logical, but the other people are not. But he continues, he says, the fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them rightly or wrongly because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them rightly or wrongly because they have a doctrine against them. He says the open obvious democratic thing is to believe an old apple woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple woman when she bears testimony to a murderer.

What's he saying? He's saying find the least educated, least sophisticated person, and it's amazing how our world might believe what this person had to say about something like, oh, I witnessed a crime, but then not believe if she said she saw a miracle. He sums all this up in a funny way by saying, pointing out the circular reasoning we can get into, and he says Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it, and the sailors are only stupid because they say they've seen Iceland. We must forever dismiss the idea that the intelligent people, you know, these are the ones that are agnostic and atheist and don't believe in miracles, and it's the, you know, intelligent people, the rationalists, these are the ones that don't believe it, but the unintelligent, they're the ones that are gullible and they believe all that.

Bad reasoning doesn't add up. But it's funny when an intellectual, you know, really educated person who doesn't believe, then encounters God in a miraculous way, you know, change everything. I was always drawn to the testimony of a man named Jack Deere. It's part of the way that I got to know him and he became, you know, a visitor to our church and taught here a number of times, and Jack's a friend and a mentor, but in his well-known book Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, he tells his testimony of how he came to believe in miracles. He was a PhD professor at a seminary in Texas, and he didn't believe in miracles, believed the gifts of the Spirit had ceased, and he taught that to his students. He also was pastoring a Bible church, and he wanted to invite a Christian hero of his, Dr. John White, a brilliant psychiatrist and author, to come and speak and do some lectures at Jack Deere's church. And he was so excited, John White had agreed to come. And so Jack was talking to John, he said, well, what are you going to teach about? He was going to do four lectures. And John said, well, Dr. White said, I am currently writing a book on the subject, so I'd like to teach about the kingdom of God. And Jack said, well, that's great, we'd love to learn about the kingdom of God. And he said, what, Dr. White, is going to be your content of your lectures? And Dr. White said, well, the first lecture I'd like to give is on Christ's authority over temptation. And Jack said, that's important, that's good, that sounds great. And secondly, he said, the second lecture, I'd like to be about Christ's authority over sin.

Jack said, that's excellent, because we need to get more victory over sin. He said, what's the third one about? And Dr. White said, the third one would be about Christ's authority over demons.

And Jack said, well, okay, okay, I mean, we do believe in heaven and hell and spiritual reality, so, okay, that's good, what's the fourth one about? And then Dr. White said, the fourth one, I want to talk about Christ's healing power over disease, his authority over disease. And Jack said, did you say disease? Dr. White said, yeah. He said, this is the way Jack puts it, you're not talking about healing, are you? He said, yeah, I'm very much talking about healing. And Jack Deere said, healing, healing, well, we know that that died out in the first century, and we've got the Bible now, but we don't have all that, you know, kind of miracles, and he started arguing with Dr. White about this. He said, for example, he said, in the Bible, Jack Deere said, he said, all the miracles of healing, they happen instantaneously, and everybody who ever received prayer got instantly healed, and all the same sin, that's not what we see today, and so how do you... And calmly, John White said, well, do you think that every single person that was prayed for, it's recorded in the Bible? And Jack said, no. He realized he was making an argument from silence, a classic mistake in interpreting scriptures, and they started having this little debate, and everything that Jack had to say, he started realizing he didn't have much basis for it. And so finally, he did, you know, here's this intellectual Ph.D.

Finally, this is what it boils down to. He just looked at Dr. White, he said, well, have you ever seen anyone healed? And Dr. White said, yes, I have. And Jack said, okay, well, what's your most recent spectacular healing that you've seen? And Dr. White said, well, not long ago, he said, my wife and I were in Malaysia doing some teaching, and there was a boy there, and he had eczema from the really top of his head down, the sole of his feet, and it was so bad that he hadn't slept in 36 hours, and his skin was itching and oozing, and his parents hadn't slept in 36 hours, and my wife and I went and laid hands on him, and we prayed for him, and he instantly fell asleep.

And then 20 minutes later, the sores stopped oozing, and the next morning, his skin was just as good as new. He said, I don't know if you'd call that spectacular or not, but he said, I know it was God. Well, Jack just finally said, you know, whether the theology is right or not, you know, just come to our church, and so he came, and they began to experience God doing miracles, and saw things happen that it was amazing how with all of his intellect that he had convinced himself of one thing, he had a dogma against miracles, Jack did, but then when he experienced the grace of God in that very real way, it changed everything. It'll change so much in your life when you get a revelation that this God that we talk about and preach about and share with one another is not an idea, but a person who is active in history, in our lives. I watched again and wept again this week to see the YouTube of Delia Knox walking.

Delia Knox walking. I'm aware of this because it was a friend of mine, a pastor, Mark Wyatt, who took the video of the miracle. If you ever wanted to see a video of a miracle, then look at what Mark posted on YouTube.

A half million people have seen it, but 10 million should see it. Because Delia Knox in Christmas Day of 1987 was hit by a drunk driver, and her car flipped several times, and caused spinal damage, and she became a paraplegic, and she was in a wheelchair for 23 years until August of 2010 at a revival meeting in Alabama that my pastor friend Mark was helping to plan. Delia had been prayed for, obviously. She was a Christian. In fact, she had a Christian ministry from her wheelchair. She sang beautifully. She taught. She was married to a minister, and they had a ministry together. She'd been prayed for so much that they almost just grew weary of anybody praying for them.

You can imagine that. Somebody had been in a wheelchair for 23 years. And on this night, as you could see on the video, they started praying for her, and just all of a sudden, she started weeping because she had, for the first time in 23 years, some feeling in her legs. She said, feeling in her legs. Can you imagine that? And the whole thing went on about two hours, and Mark's posted it in like a 15-minute video, but after they continued to pray for her, and she was just weeping and praising the Lord and wondering what's happening, it was just this dramatic moment where she thrust herself up out of the chair and put weight onto her legs, and then she went back down in the chair, and the whole place is just exploding in praise and worship and prayer and faith, and then before you know it, she's back up on her feet, and with people holding her arms up, she's moving, and it's so cute because she's like a little child learning to walk, and she just at first thought she could just move her legs kind of real stiff-like, but then over time, she starts learning again how to bend her knees, and she starts bending them like a soldier marching or something, trying to just bend her legs and watching the look on her face, and within two hours, she was able to walk unassisted.

You might also want to look at the video that the local news team in her mother's hometown ran because she went home a week later to see her mother because her mother had obviously heard of the miracle, but hadn't seen her yet, and at her hometown, I can't remember if it was New Jersey or New York, just to show off a little bit, Delia put on high heels and walked up the steep steps of her mother's house, and hugged her mother. I just wonder if you're an unbeliever, what are you going to do with that? Alan Wright. A good question if we place a bookmark right here in this teaching called Man on Fire.

It's in the greater series right now on the radio called Miracle Man. Alan is back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and our final word today. 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 bestselling 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. Alan, that's a good conclusion there to that story as we put a bookmark here and more teaching to come. But in this moment, that's hope.

There's hope there. You know, I was talking, Daniel, not too long ago to a young woman. She was a teenager who had declared herself to be agnostic, I think was the word she used. But she was willing to, she'd grown up in a family of faith and she was willing to talk some. It was so interesting, by the end of the talk, you know, and I thought, you know, I could have just run circles around her theologically and pinned her in a corner, but what good was all that going to do? And I finally just said to her, I said, well, you know, I think it would need to happen for you to really have your faith come to life, you know, in Christ.

And she just kind of thought, she said, well, I think if I saw a miracle. And so I said, well, why don't we, instead of talking theology, let's talk about miracles. Would you be interested in hearing some of the ones I've seen with my own eyes? So it's part of the reason all throughout the Elijah series, we're telling some miracle stories.

I'm certainly telling one today about Delia Knox, but many, many more. And I think that in the end, part of what this says is, you know, it is a powerful thing when a believer or unbeliever gets up close next to the miraculous working of God. And so what a fitting and beautiful thing it is to look at these miracles in Elijah and Elijah's life and think about God's miracles on our own. Let's open our eyes and let's see miracles that are around us because it will build your faith. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.