Daily Blessing Compilation #16

That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new life. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to join us here as we're together in the studio sharing in our special Friday blessing broadcast.

As we dive deeper into the power to bless. Before we get started, I want to remind you that if you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program today, hop on over to PastorAlan.org for our special resource right now. It's another book that Pastor Alan has authored, Lover of My Soul, and it can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. So as you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. As always, the latest book is available there as well. Go to PastorAlan.org, or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. And of course, more on this later in today's broadcast. But as we get started with Pastor Alan in the studio and the power to bless, it's good to be with you again, Pastor Alan. Daniel, it is so good to be with you. I love these special Fridays where we get to just go deeper into this incredibly powerful biblical truth about blessing, the vision that's spoken in faith over our lives and how we can learn to speak life and empower the people we love. So Daniel, love being in the studio with you.

It's a lot of fun. There is a story that that I think we have talked about maybe in different teachings, but it made the book because it's just that good of a story. And it's one of those moments in the car with your child that you will never forget. I guess I guess I never get tired of telling this story. And, uh, and, uh, grown up, but I guess he was in fourth grade. Maybe we were on the way to the golf course, a little Bennett blurted out, dad, how can you get addicted to something? And, uh, I'm like, he's in fourth grade gulp.

What is he doing? Asking me about addiction, you know? So I stammered around, swallowed hard. Well, uh, Bennett, if you're addicted to something, then you feel like you have to have it. And you, if you feel like you don't have it, then you start wanting it really bad. Addictions are terrible.

They can control your life, you know? And I tried to give him a fourth grader version of addiction. I didn't, Daniel, I didn't want to be talking to my fourth grader about addiction.

You know, where it's coming from the agenda for the car ride, right? I said, Bennett, why do you ask? Uh, he said, well, I saw on ESPN, something about a professional golfer who blew $2 million gambling, and they said he had a gambling addiction. And so Bennett said, can you get addicted to gambling?

Oh, but going deeper in this thing now. I said, well, yes, son, you can get addicted to even to gambling. Bennett said, I don't understand. He said, he's rich. He's famous. He gets to play golf all the time. He gets paid to do commercials.

He has about the perfect life. Why would he get addicted to gambling or anything? So I'm sitting there, Daniel, I'm like, well, how do you formulate to a 10 year old all that I've learned about the complex sources of addiction, how childhood wounds and innate sin and deep seated shame become a breeding ground of chemical, emotional, psychological dependencies? How can you explain to a pre-adolescent how a deep sense of inadequacy can create annoying anxiety that craves to be mask? You know, all of this going through my mind.

And finally, I just tried to keep it simple. I said, Bennett, as strange as it may sound, that pro golfer isn't really that happy. And I think he's looking for a way to feel better, even though he's rich and famous, gets to play golf all the time. I think deep down, I know a few things about his background and some of the things he's been through and his upbringing.

I said, I think deep down, he just doesn't feel good about himself. Well, it was quiet for a long moment. And then in a classic, a classic response, little Bennett said with confidence and a slow, happy drawl. Well, I love myself. I muffled my laughter. And after, after I got myself together, I said, well, that's good, Benny, you'll probably never be addicted to anything.

We love to tell that story, Daniel, because childlike, innocent exclamation. But it really is profound because if someone truly accepts him or herself, truly has love for self, that's the point where actually you can forget about self. And we want to talk about that today. I want to talk today to our listeners about the person that you may be least likely to bless, the person that it might be. You struggle the most with forgiving the person that you're least likely to ultimately affirm.

It might be that person is yourself. So, Daniel, we're going to talk today about what does it look like to bless your own life? I'm glad you brought that up. The book is titled The Power to Bless. It's written by Pastor Alan Wright.

We're in the studio today in a special Friday broadcast. By the way, the book's available wherever good books are sold. You can come to PastorAlan.org.

If that's the simplest way for you to do it, we welcome you at PastorAlan.org to get a copy for yourself. So maybe this is the secret of the book in a sense. It's the power to bless. It sounds very outward focused, and much of it is learning how to bless your family, your kids, those around you, maybe those in your workplace. But yeah, we're going to talk today about, you've got to start with your, it's kind of like putting the oxygen mask on yourself, I imagine. It's very much like that.

It's very much like that. And what we're going to see today is that it's not just that, oh, you as much as anybody deserve to be blessed and need it, it is even deeper than that. It is ultimately to say that you don't have to think about self unless the self is hurting and unaffirmed. This is a truth that Tim Keller has been very helpful in explaining when he said, you never think about your big toe unless your big toe is hurting.

I tell you, when you think about your big toe, Daniel, if you get up in the middle of the night and it's dark and you're stumbling through and you catch it on the edge of the bed, you will think then about your big toe. And Keller says, you know, the ego is like that, the soul, that we don't have to think about the self, the soul, the ego. We don't have to think about self unless self is hurting. And so when we learn to accept ourselves in Christ, when we quit rejecting the self that God made in his own image, when we quit thinking that humility is the same thing as putting ourselves down, when we come to the place of actually cooperating with God to bless the life that he's created in his own image, then we become more and more secure and we actually can forget about self. So what we're talking about today is not an invitation to self-absorption. And it certainly isn't an avenue towards the spirit of the age that is really promoting self-centeredness and it's kind of narcissistic ways of saying we just need to care about yourself. We're talking about something much deeper than that.

We're talking about the deepest foundation of a secure soul that, yes, we need the blessing of others, but we must quit cursing our own lives. I know that you have talked about kind of a movement in a sense, maybe superficially, hashtag blessed. It's been going around.

Yeah. Would you say maybe this is a jumping off point here is a way of people responding. Well, how are you today? Well, I'm blessed.

Well, that maybe is a good, it's a good starting point here. It's showing gratitude. It's, it's, it's taking account that, you know, I'm, I'm up, I'm vertical, I'm breathing, I've got breath. Uh, God has seen fit to give me another day here. So starting with gratitude, but it doesn't end there. And that's your point, right?

Yeah. You start with, uh, it is a wonderful thing that God has done good things for me. But I think when Paul speaks in Ephesians of being blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ, this is something much more than hashtag blessed.

Uh, this is, this is better than I had a nice lunch today, you know, or even that, uh, wow, I got a new car, hashtag blessed. This is the deepest treasures that we find in Christ. So to accept oneself in Christ, Daniel, is to accept the gospel. It is to accept that Christ has done for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. And when that gospel is pure, as someone has called the naked gospel, when it is undefiled and has no hint of law in it, that's the place where you say, here's what makes the good news so good.

My merit doesn't matter at all in the salvation equation. In other words, the acceptance of self depends on the acceptance of the gospel, in order to accept ourselves. And this is something that is profoundly illustrated in the story that we call the story of the prodigal son. And just like there's something deeper, I think when we all hear the prodigal son story, we say that's a wonderful story about that particular son, but there's more to the story of the prodigal son.

But there's more to the story as I love the way you tell it. It really is the story of a father who had two sons. Yeah, it's the parable of the father who had two sons. And in fact, the word prodigal, which means lavish, better describes the father.

The father is the one who shows the lavish acceptance. I remember one time in studying and preparing to preach this, what is probably my favorite story, other than the story of the gospel itself, is certainly one of my favorite texts. I think anywhere in the New Testament, if I could just, if you said you could only have one text to preach on the rest of your life, it'd probably be this story.

It's so remarkable. It's so, there is no literature greater than this story because it tells the human predicament and the human story. This father has two sons. The older is the one who is treasured by society, gets a firstborn blessing, is supposed to get a double portion of the inheritance, and like so often in our own society, gets so much of the attention and often becomes the one who is a conformist and is expected to be successful in the world's eyes. And so the older son is dutiful at home and the world applauds him. This younger insults his father and says, give me my inheritance. It's like saying to his father, I wish you were dead.

I'd like to have it now. Goes off to faraway land, squanders it all, and is living amongst prostitutes and just wasting his inheritance. And I remember getting ready to preach on this one time and just going, well, you know, there it is.

That's the picture of it right there. All that son cared about was himself. It's like as I was having that thought, it's like I heard the Holy Spirit just say, cared about himself, cared about himself.

Yeah. And I had this this thought, you know, to our listeners. Think of somebody that you love. Think of somebody that you truly could say I love. Maybe it's a child, a parent, a sibling, a friend, but you love that person.

Put them in your mind. You want because you love them, you want the very best for them. Would you ever, in a million years, send them off to the pigs and the prostitutes? Would you send them off to ruin? Would you ever send them off to humiliation? And would you ever send them off to shame their own lives and their family?

Would you ever send them to a place where they became superficial? And would you ever do? Would you ever do that to a person you love?

Of course not. Who would you do that to? You do that to someone you disdained.

You'd only do that to someone you didn't like. So think of yourself and think of some of the ways you speak to yourself and some of the ways you treat yourself and some of the things that you do with your life. And I realize, Daniel, that our problem is not self-love, too much self-love. Our problem is too little self-love because whatever you love, you take care of. And somewhere we got real confused and we thought if we blessed people and we bless ourselves, it's going to go to our head and we're going to become self-absorbed. But there is a huge world of difference between self-absorption, which we might call narcissism, and self-love, which is a godly acceptance of self and affirming who we are in Christ. Because until we profoundly accept ourselves, what we'll be doing, we'll be rejecting ourselves. So here's the principle, whatever you love, you treasure and you take care of. Whatever you hate, you disregard, you dismiss and you harm.

You know, I would say again to our listeners, think of something that you love, think of maybe just something in your life. Maybe you're a car person and you've got a car that you take good care of. You like it. Would you ever, if you loved your car, would you ever go take your keys out there and scrape down the side? Of course not.

Right. I just got a new guitar this year. I played the guitar as a kid and I'm getting back into it, Daniel. And so it's good. I got my calluses back on the fingers and it's a nice guitar.

And I'm so excited about it. Would I walk around with that guitar so carefully, like I don't want anything to touch it, you know. Right.

Well, that's just a guitar. So I think that that if we could learn to authentically love ourselves in Christ, learn to bless our own lives as God has blessed us, then so many of the destructive behaviors that we wish we could overcome would naturally be overcome. We don't need self-hatred, we need self-love. Pastor Alan is with us. Pastor Alan is with us. The book is The Power to Bless.

And this is a very important part of the book here. We talk about really blessing yourself. And maybe if I could continue with a car analogy and you tell me if this is your experience, especially as you've been speaking and writing about this, and maybe there are more illustrations you could go with on this, but I see two camps of people. If you have a car with a dead battery, totally maybe unblessed, does not even realize that you've accepted God's blessing, you're not going anywhere, right?

On the other hand, you may have Christians who have not realized, maybe they're struggling with it's difficult to acknowledge this idea of self-worth. So putting a fully charged car battery in the back seat is not going to help either. That's right. You've got it connected and realize that it's okay to harness that power.

Are those kind of the two camps of people you're speaking to? Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's a good image because when a life gets blessed, it's like recharging a battery or charging it for the first time. It's like connecting your life to the fuel of God, which is His grace that's come to us. Remember, how did God save us? Well, He came to us knowing all of our sin ahead of time. Uh, He already knows every sin in your life, past, present and future. So He can't be disillusioned with you. He already knows it. And He came in love in the person of Jesus.

So what God does is He blesses in order for us to understand our identity and then live out of that. So back to the prodigal story, this was one we call the prodigal son. He has wasted his inheritance and wild living. He's separated from his father by his own choice, used up all his money, and now his friends are gone and he's hungry. And he's getting ready to eat the food that's for the pigs. Jewish boy amongst the pigs, unclean animals. And the thought comes to him, boy, I sure was better at my father's house. I think this is a young man who is amongst the pig slop and he remembers the smell of lamb chops on his father's grill. He remembers fresh fruit at the table and joyful times.

He remembers what it's like. See, this is what actually the conviction of the Holy Spirit is, is at this moment where instead of just feeling worse about himself, he feels convicted about his sin. But at the same time, he begins to feel hopeful about his future. That's what the conviction of the Holy Spirit is.

The conviction of the Holy Spirit is entirely different than the condemnation of hell. The spirit of shame says, look at you, you've ruined your life and now you're doomed and you might as well give up. But the conviction of the Holy Spirit comes with blessing, comes with this idea that your life's not over. You might have made mistakes, but you're not a mistake.

You have a hope and a future. And he begins to think that way. He begins to think about how it could be better. He begins to think about being with his father again. And that draws him home. So what my point is here, Daniel, is that it was even the tiniest seed of love and regard for his life.

Maybe there would be still some semblance of acceptance in my father's house. And that thought, the hope, even a seed of self-worth, is the thing that turned him back to the father. We get this so backwards, we think if we condemn ourselves, that somehow we're going to talk ourselves into being more victorious over our sin patterns.

Not so. It's when we affirm the self in Christ. We're not talking about narcissists. We're not talking about self-absorption. We're talking about accepting how loved we are and blessing the life that God has created in his own image and blessing it. Blessing it by beginning to speak and say, I'm made for more than this.

That's a blessing. I'm not made for the pigs and the prostitutes. I'm not made for the unclean. I'm made for the clean.

I'm not made for a lonely life of superficiality where my only friends are the ones I've bought. I've got a family and it's the family of God and there's a place for me. And you see, when you begin to talk like that, then that changes everything. And it changed this young man's life and what a picture it is. And he comes back home and his father runs to meet him and puts a robe on his shoulders, a ring on his finger, sandals on his feet, kills the fatted calf and throws this great party. And the older brother, who really is a picture of dutiful living under the law, never comes in the celebration. And it's like, he can't, he doesn't get it. He doesn't, he doesn't see. So ironically, the story ends on the somber note.

Will the older son ever come in the celebration or will he just feel like a slave? What a picture of life, of ministry, of theology, and how important it is to love the self, bless the self and see yourself as the father does. Daniel, I cannot think of anything more important for our maturity and our victory over sin than blessing our own lives. God's love, you've heard about it with your ears.

You've believed it in your mind. Now experience it in your heart with Alan Wright's beloved book, Lover of My Soul. The Bible is a love story from beginning to end. You are the spiritual bride of Christ, the perfect bridegroom. The Bible tells about a God who has gone to unimaginable lengths to win.

Unimaginable lengths to win you and to walk with you hand in hand. For any man who has fallen in love with a woman, you've tasted the sweetness of what God's love for you is like. For any woman who has searched for true love, what you long for can only be found fully in God. Gary Chapman, renowned author of the five love languages says, the incredible reality that God pursues us in love comes to life in Lover of My Soul. Ancient biblical accounts explode in the heart. Accept Christ's proposal, enjoy his embrace, revel in his love.

After all, it's a match made in heaven. It's Lover of My Soul by Alan Wright. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860 or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Back now with Pastor Alan and The Power to Bless is a book that he's written in our special Friday broadcast.

Before we close out, we've got time for our final closing thought in the line of the old song that says, His royal blood now flows through my veins. Praise God. Praise God. I'm a child of the king. Stop acting like an orphan. This is the good news of the gospel.

And this is, I'm sure, is part of your closing thought for today. I had someone sent me an image not long ago that sums up the transformation in the the younger sons and the prodigal story, the younger son's life. The image said, religion says I messed up.

My father is going to be so mad. But the gospel says I messed up, better call dad. And I think that when we come into this mystical self-realization of how loved we are by the father, that's when we can begin to bless our own lives. And we can begin to speak differently. We can begin to forget ourselves and care about others. And so if you're feeling a little ugly, maybe think of Revelation 21.

You're called a radiant bride. If you're feeling a little worthless, maybe think of Second Corinthians 4 7. You're a treasure in an earthen vessel. Maybe you're feeling unwelcome. Well, Luke 15, our story says, lost and now found. Maybe you're feeling small.

Well, First Peter 1 23 says, try the seed of a great fruit tree. That's what your life is like. You're feeling bland. You're the salt of the earth.

You're feeling ignorant. You have the mind of Christ. You see, you see, you can just go through the scriptures, Daniel, and just begin to take what God has said about us in Christ and speak it over our own lives. So we started out our time together, laughing a little bit about the trivialization of blessing on the old hashtag blessed. Boy had a good dessert today, you know, after lunch, which is a blessed, right? But it's not the deepest blessing. The deepest blessing is this, is that we have been redeemed in Christ. And here we are, the father's arms are open wide to us, and we can hear him pleading with every son or every daughter that's ever been trapped in self curse. Come enter the celebration.

The band is playing. The grill is cooking the fine feast, the laughter's in the hallways. So whether, you know, I'd say to our listeners, whether you've wandered away to a faraway land or whether you've become weary, just slaving in a local fields, you can come home. Christ died to make you acceptable. And so in his name, I urge you, accept yourself. Christ took the curse so that you could be blessed. And in his name, you can bless your own life. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.