Little By Little [Part 2]

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 Second Wind as presented at Rinaldo 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, a copy of Pastor Alan's book, Lover of My Soul. This 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. That's pastorallen.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 Allen Wright. Let's start with this. Farming isn't just a matter of planting and cultivating and harvesting crops. It also involves protecting the crops from pests and predators and disease. And it requires a proper rotation of crop land and grazing land. And in Canaan, a lot of the farming to be at its best is what they call terrace farming, which is very labor intensive.

And God was essentially saying, I'm going to give you the whole land, but right now you don't have enough people to take the whole land. You might have enough to get the crops planted, but you won't have enough to protect them. You won't have enough to water them. You won't have enough to watch over them.

You won't have enough people to be able to properly rotate where you're going to do the farming. He's saying essentially, I don't want you to have too much success too quickly that you can't handle. I'm going to let you continue and grow and increase, and then you'll be ready for it. There's so many ways that God just is letting us increase before we are given the whole promised land. And instead, so if you put it in the negative, it'd be like, well, you can't handle success, but that's not the way God talks.

He talks in the positive. He's saying, I'm going to bless you with a land more fertile than you ever imagined. It's flowing milk and honey, and crops are going to grow quicker than you've ever seen them grow before. And it's going to be more fruitful than you ever imagined. And so I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you some time to increase so that you can fully enjoy it and make total successful use of it all.

What's the point of having all the land if you can't take care of it? Y'all, I have trapped three groundhogs now, and I paid a man to come. I paid a man. I said, the groundhogs are gone. I paid a man, my man, Lewis, to come and install wire mesh up against my back screen porch slab, because the groundhogs were digging under our back porch, up against the house, and my wife was pretty sure the house was going to fall down. And so we got the wire mesh, attached it up against the slab, down a foot in the ground, out a foot and a half so that the groundhog would come, dig, hit wire, get frustrated, go somewhere else. And we came back from somewhere and the groundhog had dug two feet down under the wire mesh and back up under my slab again.

And I looked down in the backyard and saw the biggest, bushiest, fattest groundhog the other day. What is the point of having more houses than which you can protect from the groundhogs? I'm not going to give you the promised land too fast, lest the wild beasts and the groundhogs come and undermine everything you're doing, because you gotta plant the crops and then you gotta keep the groundhogs out of it.

And you gotta do both, and you need to have enough skill, enough experience, and enough people, and enough resources to do it. Otherwise, it's all been a wasted venture, and you had a big splash in time, and you got yourself a trophy, and you're a one and done. We've got a saying around here amongst our leadership and our staff and that, what if you win? What if you win?

What if all the things you dream of, what if they come to pass? I want to be ready for it. Here's what it does when you take the land little by little. Here's why it's so beautiful and powerful. Taking the land little by little in the first place, it builds gratitude. It builds gratitude. You know, if you get everything at once, maybe you celebrate once and then you forget to be thankful, but boy, when you get it little by little, you learn to celebrate every step of the way. Oh, to celebrate every step of the way.

To just take a step and find something good in it and just pause there and give thanks to the Lord. Don't you love that story when David was bringing the ark back into Jerusalem and he was being given the throne, and it said they would bring the ark in and they'd go for a little bit and they'd stop, and then they'd offer a sacrifice and they'd praise the Lord. And they'd just go a little bit for a stop and praise the Lord. I think part of the reason God wanted to give them the land this way was I want you to go into it and march one day around Jericho and praise the Lord. And march another day around in faith, praise the Lord. And on the seventh day when the walls come tumbling down, praise and thank the Lord. And then catch your breath after you celebrate and get ready for the Philistines. It's going to be battle after battle after battle. Your promised land is a battleground. And part of the beauty of that is that you get to celebrate and give God thanks for every battle that you see Him win.

And every step of the way every single step of the way. Gratitude, Brene Brown says, is in her research the single most important practice for emotional health. And Voskamp in her best-selling book, 1000 Gifts, a wonderful book, said she learned a lot when she decided to make a list of a thousand things for which she was thankful. She writes, I begin the list not of gifts I want, but of gifts I already have. Number one, mourning shadows across the old floors. Number two, jam piled high on the toast. Number three, the cry of a blue jay atop the spruce tree.

She started writing. She said, when I give thanks for the seemingly microscopic, I make a place for God to grow within me. This dare to write down 1000 things I love, it really is a dare to name all the ways that God loves me. When you give Him thanks for every little thing, you're remembering how loved you are and how good He is. Little by little means you get to praise Him day after day, battle after battle, step after step. Whatever's good, give Him thanks. Here's the second thing that little by little does is it builds hope.

That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. 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 woo you, 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. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.

When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. 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. Romans five, verse three. Paul lays this out very clearly. We rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. There's a well-defined process that is at work. It's inviolable.

It always happens this way. And it leads to the thing that we need to live life with energy and fervor, and that's hope. He's saying our suffering, hard things, things that might be painful temporarily, things that feel heavy, okay? It brings to mind the image of a weightlifter. In fact, when he says that that suffering, those hard things, produce endurance, the word for endurance is a word that means most literally bearing up under the weight of something. So when you do that, you're like a weightlifter who lifts the weights, causing some sort of micro tears and muscle tissue, very small, but it feels exhausting. And but then give it a day or so and those places rebuild and are bigger and stronger. Those muscles are bigger and stronger.

The way that muscle gets bigger and stronger is by bearing up under a weight. I was laughing with a bush before and I trimmed some trees and stuff using a long pole yesterday morning before the rains came in. I woke up this morning, I said, why am I sore?

What did I do? Oh yeah. And I was just thinking about, man, I remember I've had that same pole for 20 years. And I just remember 20 years ago, I can hold that pole up like this, and now I'm like propping it against my arm and holding it up, taking a break with it. Evidently, sitting in front of a computer and typing sermons and sitting in planning means doesn't build muscle. Evidently, you got to let the muscles bear up under some weight of something.

It doesn't build up otherwise. I'm talking about things now in the Spirit. We rejoice that we've got some weight that we can lift, Paul's saying. And it's produced this endurance with us, and the endurance has produced character. He's saying it's put muscle into our soul. It's put steel into our spirit. It has changed us in our character. See, God's plan for us is to grow in the fruit of the Spirit that changes our character so that we walk with Him in an abiding way.

It's one thing to worship Jesus, which I love, and get excited with the people of God and feel some momentary joy because you're visited by the Holy Spirit. That's fantastic, but that's not character. Character is how you think and you feel all the time and what you do with every little hardship, and are you like just a ship tossed on the waves, a roller coaster all the time, or is there something that's incrementally getting stronger?

This process, Paul says, is making us stronger. Our character is being changed, and that character, he said, produces hope. See, when we lack character, as soon as something bad happens, we're like, oh, okay, well, that's it.

That was it. I knew it was going to be bad, and there it is. It's bad, it's bad, you know. But see, character's not like that. Character's like, uh, yeah, we lost that game, but that's fine.

We just had a little bit of an off night there, but you know, with the training we've been through, and we know that the ball's going to start falling through the hoop here soon. Character produces hope, which is not wishful thinking, but it is a blessed certainty of a better future. That's what God wants us to live with. Ultimately, with the hope of heaven in our heart. We have an absolute certainty, because of the deposit within us of the Holy Spirit, that heaven is where we're going.

So we just get to live like that. I think God wants us to live like kids knowing Christmas is coming. Like, I don't know what I'm going to get for Christmas, but man, it's going to be good. I don't know everything's going to be about heaven, but I know it's going to be good. I can feel it.

It's coming. That's what He wants us to live with. And here's the third thing. I think why He gives us the promised land little by little.

Maybe this is the most important. It builds faith. Because faith is something that increases as you see God's faithfulness over time. And therefore, when it comes little by little, the testimonies are growing. You're not a one and done where you got this sudden one big testimony.

You are a child of God who's taken the hand of the Father, and He's walking you step by step, by step, by step, little by little. Years ago, we had a visiting evangelist from Australia. His name was Clark Taylor.

Many years ago, some of y'all remember Clark Taylor. He had a healing ministry, and amazing miracles happened under his ministry. And he was a healing minister. Miracles happened under his ministry, and he had a series of meetings with us. And we remember all that, but I think one of the things we all remember most was he preached a message one night about growing by one percent.

It was just fantastic. And he said it like this. He said, are you having a hard time having faith for the whole final vision to come to pass?

He said, that's all right. Could you just get faith to grow by one percent? Could you just imagine any arena of your life getting better by one percent? Well, yeah, we could do that. You might be thinking, I want to eat healthier, and I want to get more fit, you know.

And if you've got a vision of being the weightlifting poster child, well, you might go, I can't see being that. But could you imagine just eating and exercising one percent better than you are now? I can do one percent.

It's just one less piece of pizza than I had last time. You know, I mean, just one percent. Could you imagine your marriage? Just, okay, maybe it's in a rough patch. And it's hard to envision it being this perfect marriage over there with fantastic communication and great respect and love and intimacy and all of that. But could you imagine, could you have faith for it to get better by one percent? Yeah, we could do that. We could communicate one percent better. Could you just imagine your prayer life?

Yeah, right now it's hard. I'm not seeing, I can't see being one of those spiritual giants. I'm up at five in the morning, I'm praying for an hour and a half, and I'm going, could you just envision your prayer life getting one percent better? What is there at work that's going on that you need to improve at, and you know that it needs to get better? Could you just imagine it getting better by one percent?

You see? Because here's what happens, if you could just have faith for improving by one percent, then once that one percent has happened, guess what you need then? You need faith for the next one percent. And you need faith for the next one percent, and the next one percent.

And just go by one percent at a time until you realize it's a hundred percent. I think this is why God says, I'm going to give you the land little by little, because you don't probably have faith for the whole kit and caboodle right now. You don't even have any conception of all that I'm going to do for you. Oh no, I have seen, no ear has heard what the Lord has laid up for those who love Him. Oh, God is the one who's able to do exceedingly abundantly above and beyond all you could ever ask and imagine. You can't wrap your mind around all that God wants to do, so just have faith right now for what's in front of you. One percent, little by little, the next battle belongs to the Lord. He said, I'm definitely going to give you the land, so take the word and the vision.

Here's how we're going to do it. I'm not going to give it all to you in a day. I'm not going to give it all to you in a year.

I'm going to give it to you little by little. And then when you hold the trophy, ah, it's sweet, but you hadn't idolized the trophy. It's just a manifestation of all of the progress over a long time. So now the trophy is just a manifestation of a character that has built hope into your very life. God will, in the end, He says, confuse the enemy, and the enemy will turn his back.

And beloved, isn't that what's happened? The death of the devil. The devil fought that by putting Jesus on the cross that hell was winning the ultimate victory. But shall we say it, the devil was confused. He was mistaken because it was through God's plan and the foreordained purpose of Jesus's coming that He would go to the cross and lay down His life so that He could take on the sin of the world. And so while all the demons mocked Jesus, they were confused.

They thought they were winning, and they were losing. And suddenly, upon the shed blood of Jesus, and the earth began to shake, and people started coming out of their tombs, and on a resurrection day, the stones rolled away, and an angel saying, he's not here. There was, Paul says, a public humiliation in the heavenlies of all the demons who had become confused, and now they are on the run. Resist the devil, and his purposes will be confused, and he will flee from you. Take it little by little, and don't be frustrated if you don't get the whole promised land at one time, because in due season, beloved, we are going to reap, and that's the gospel.

Alan Wright. Today's good news message is titled Little by Little, the series Second Wind. Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio sharing his parting good news thought for the day in just a moment. Stay with us. 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 woo you, 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. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.

When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. 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. Back now in the studio with Pastor Alan, sharing our parting good news thought for the day. So little by little and second wind, what's your takeaway here, Pastor Alan? So when you get a sense of destiny in front of you, it's a glorious thing. And when you get a hold of the promises of God and you read the word and you go, oh, this is what God has promised me. There can be a disconnect, a dissonance between what I'm experiencing right now and what I know God has promised. And maybe there's something, our listener, you've been praying about it. You've been diligent in praying about it.

And you feel assured that God wants this, you know, the fulfillment of this prayer request, but it hadn't come yet. Well, that's the way it was with the promised land. He said, here's this land.

He gave them the borders and the specifics of here's the land you're going to get. But he said, I'm going to give it to you, but you're going to get it little by little, step at a time. And, you know, I think part of this, as we've learned today, Daniel, is that God wants us to build in a sense, spiritual muscle. You know, if you're going to build up physical muscle, it happens little by little.

It's something that you lift the weight and unbearing up underneath that. You might not, might not feel pleasant, but there's a process that then a little by little new muscle tissue is forming. And there's something like that here at the end of this pandemic. And we're still living in a lot of uncertainties that we've been through so much and God is on the move. And I would say to our listeners, you probably have some more steel in your spirit now than you did beforehand. And you may not feel it yet, but it's there. And you may not feel like, because you don't have the whole promised land, because you don't have all of it yet, that you're not making progress, but you are. God's taking you and it's okay.

If it's just 1% today and 1% tomorrow, you're on the way. Promised land's coming, little by little. 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 pastorallen.org. That's pastorallen.org. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.