Like Ephraim and Manasseh [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. I want your troubles to be forgotten so you can be twice as fruitful as you ever thought you were going to be, because the Lord is able to do abundantly, exceedingly above and beyond what you could ever ask, think, or imagine.

We just need to get our thinking cleared up, to get our minds liberated so that God can use us for everything He wants to use us for. 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 that we've called The Top Ten from Pastor Alan, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina in the first 10 years of Pastor Alan's radio broadcast ministry. 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 digital copy of The Top Ten from Pastor Alan Wright. This digital download can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries, or if you prefer, we do have a CD album available. Your choice as you listen to today's message go deeper as we send you today's special offer.

Contact us at PastorAlan.org, that's PastorAlan.org, or call 877-544-4860, that's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now, as we get started with today's teaching, like Ephraim and Manasseh, the blessing God offers everyone, a classic message that became much of the subject of his newly released book, The Power to Bless, available wherever good books are sold or at PastorAlan.org. Here now is Alan Wright. See, a generation has changed and now this isn't Isaac being tricked, this is Jacob saying, I know, I know I deceived my daddy, but I'm not being deceived right now.

I know what I'm doing. I know he too will be a people and he too will become great. Nevertheless, his younger brother will be greater than he and his descendants will become a group of nations. He blessed them that day and said, in your name will Israel pronounce this blessing? May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh. So he put Ephraim ahead of Manasseh. And to this day, any faithful Hebrew patriarch on the Sabbath day will say to his sons, may the Lord make you like Ephraim and Manasseh. And I think that day Jesus had all these little children coming up. He's blessing them and then he's saying, with a smile on his face, knowing all that is to come, and he's saying, may the Lord make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.

Kind of strange, isn't it? You might envision that there'd be a prophetic blessing to be spoken over the sons of Israel on a regular basis that might be something like, may the Lord make you like Abraham, the mighty man of faith, that you could have faith like Abraham, you know, that'd be a blessing. Or maybe to say, may the Lord make you like Moses, a worker of signs and wonders and great courage to lead people in the direction of God. May the Lord make you like David, who was a man after God's own heart and the king of Israel. May the Lord make you like Solomon, wiser than any man on earth. But instead, the blessing that is spoken is, may you be like Ephraim and Manasseh. And we don't hardly know who Ephraim and Manasseh are. Isn't that strange?

Isn't it strange? May the Lord make you like Ephraim and Manasseh, and they were once removed from even the main tribe of Israel. Who were they?

What great things did they even do, you see? May the Lord make you like Ephraim and Manasseh, the primary blessing to be spoken. Amazing. You know, what is interesting about it is that it's spoken to an individual. So you got one child here, one person, and you say, may the Lord make you individually like Ephraim and Manasseh, make you like two people, Ephraim and Manasseh.

Together you be like them. That's strange too, isn't it? What is this, what's this all about? Well, in the first place, if you're going to try to figure this out, you got to realize there's something up once again with the older and the younger, and the older somehow missing what should have come to him, and the younger getting what shouldn't have come to him. And you see it over and over, this incredible exchange, you know, that's taking place.

So that's going on. And so that's got to be part of what it is, and make you like Ephraim and Manasseh. But I think if you really understand it, look at their names. Ephraim and Manasseh. Manasseh is born first. Joseph has been through so much pain, so much agony, and his firstborn son, he names Manasseh, which has to do with forgetting, and means something like, or sounds like, forget my troubles. In other words, it's like, I have been through all of this adversity, but look what the Lord has done.

It has been as though He has made me to forget the pain of the past. And then his second born is Ephraim, and Ephraim means, or sounds like, twice fruitful. Now maybe Joseph was just saying, I've got a second son, so he's made me fruitful with the first, and now he's made me fruitful with the second.

It could be just that simple. But what's embodied in the name Ephraim is you're fruitful, and you will be fruitful. See, that's the promise of God.

And so there are two things that are going on here. There is the fact that the Lord has made me to forget my troubles, but He's also made me fruitful. He has caused me to be able to be healed of the memories, and now He is making me fruitful in the land. And there's a promise that's still in front of me.

I've forgotten what is behind. I'm pressing on towards what is in front of me. I've gotten healed of the hurt so I can move on with this. And see, what I think is that when the Hebrew patriarch is crossing his hands and he's saying, make you like Ephraim and Manasseh, that what happens is that the blessing of Christ, the first born, the blessing that should have only been for Christ is getting put upon the younger. And so the younger is getting what he didn't deserve nor what he earned. And here's the thing about Christ. See, every person, every person in this world, Christ said, you're going to have trouble. We're going to have troubles. There are going to be people that despise you. There are going to be people that lie about you. There are going to be people that hurt you. You're going to go through difficult things.

There are going to be traumatic experiences. In this world, you're going to have trouble. But Jesus said, but take heart because I've overcome the world. And here's the distinction between Christ and us. Not that we have troubles and He didn't. He had more trouble than we had.

Right? I mean, nobody has been persecuted like Jesus was persecuted. And Joseph was despised by his own family. And Jesus came into that which was his own, and his own did not receive him. I mean, Joseph was, Joseph was of mere flesh, a mortal human, and he was a good boy.

And yet he was, he was mocked and he was, he was, he was ostracized and esteemed not, and it's painful. And Jesus has been through everything we've been through. But what happens to us is when we go through difficult things in life and those wounds come, because of our sin nature, what we tend to do is make a sinful response to the pain that's inflicted against us. That sin nature inside of us causes us to take offense, causes roots of bitterness to grow up that poison us inwardly. And not just our sin nature, but just our sheer frailty of not being able to understand what is happening to us. So when we get rejected in life, when we face things in our own families, even when we're little children, our minds don't understand it. And what happens is that our minds, we either form judgments, we form, we form vows in our spirit about, about how we're going to live our life that are ungodly. We start trying to deal with why have I been through all this trouble?

You see, why have I been through all this adversity and this pain? And your mind tries to deal with it and make sense with it. And what it does is that the trouble, the pain associated with it gets lodged into your soul. It becomes part of your psyche.

It becomes, it becomes part of the fabric of your soul. And our responses to all the different pain that we experience have come through either our sin nature or our immaturity by which we don't know how to process it. We don't know the meaning behind it. We don't understand it. You see, when you're a little child, if somebody hurts you or abuses you or something, you don't know why they're doing it. So you assume, well, there's something wrong with me. Well, it wasn't because there was something wrong with you.

You just didn't understand. It was somebody else's sin. And, and all of this gets tangled up into our minds. And therefore our minds are filled with a lot of wrong thinking.

Our soul has been in, in, in, in grafted into it, had been the pain of the past. But Christ was different. Christ went through everything that you and I went through, except when Christ went through it, never once did He form judgment in His heart. Never once did He take a spirit of offense. Never once was He just confused by it and make wrong ungodly thought patterns develop.

No strongholds ever developed in His mind. No, no sinful responses because there was no sin in Christ. So He understood it for what it was. And He understood it to the point that He even hung on the cross and said, Father, forgive them.

They don't know what they're doing. He knew that it was a sinful world that He'd come into. And so He would be treated by sinful people in these different ways. He never internalized it and said, well, there must be something wrong with me. So His thinking never was clouded, never became impure and never became distorted. And what was so important about that is that because His thinking was never distorted, He was able to keep His eyes on the cross and fulfill His destiny. And He didn't live His life in response to His own negative thought patterns because of all the pain in the past. But what happens to us?

What happens to us is all the pain in our lives, we either have a sinful response to it or wrong thinking about it that's associated with it, and that pain is so great and it's there and it lives on in our memory. And here's what I believe God offers to you. I believe He offers a great exchange.

I believe what He offers is that the right hand should have only been upon His firstborn, Jesus, and the second born. That's you. That's me.

That's Alan Wright. And we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. The life changing message of good news has been taught over radio from Alan Wright Ministries for quite some time now.

And God has used every one of those messages. But some broadcasts have really hit home in special ways. In gratitude of more than a decade of radio, we have assembled the most powerful best love messages from each year of the first 10 and put them together in one special album. When you make a gift to Alan Wright Ministries this month, we want to give you Alan Wright's top 10 CD album or digital download.

Are you ready for some good news? Make your gift today and discover God's grace afresh with Alan Wright's top 10 of the first decade. 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. He crossed his arms, not just that you would be saved, but so that this hand that would have been on Jesus's mind is crossed over and he says, I give to you the mind of Christ. See, I believe that God heals memories. You know how God can heal a memory? It's cause God is so smart and so big and so transcendent because he's not confined by time. God's not in time, is he? He's in eternity. And eternity is not a long period of time. It's something categorically different. It's outside of time.

Do you know what that means? It means that God is able to be at every moment of your life, at every moment of your life, at any time during your life. I know it sounds strange, but God can be with me when I was four years old, even though right now I'm 45 years old. He is still at that place. And here's what happened to me, I believe. I believe that God has come in and there's still to be healed, but many of the memories are healed. It's not that the memory's not there, it's that my response to that memory has been forever altered. So when I'm a fourth grader and I don't know why my daddy's leaving home, I can't understand the dynamics that make a marriage break up.

All I know is that he's leaving. And all that my little limited immature mind and my sin nature knows to do with that is to think, well maybe there's something wrong with me. And there's definitely something wrong with our family. And how does this affect who I am in the world and my destiny in the world?

And probably other people are going to reject me and it's going to make me hurt even more. You've got all of that going on. But Jesus was there. He understands it. And in fact, he can be there right now.

He's outside of all of this. And I think what happens is that when you come to Christ, he's switching. He's – I want you to be able, Allen, to live your life free of all the sinful responses to the pain of your life. I'm not saying that I erase all the pain.

That pain was real. I'm not – he didn't even give Jesus a life without pain. But he gave him a mind and he was flawless and sinless. He was the son of God. And so he was able to live his life without ever associating negative things and internalizing negative messages because of that pain. He knew who he was. And he said, now I want you to know who you are.

So I don't just feel a little bit better about my past. I get healed in my soul. That's his plan for the Holy Spirit to heal you. We're all going to go through pain, but God is so good. And Joseph realized it.

And he said, I've been through so much. But if there's anything that Joseph demonstrated in his life is that his soul somehow remained whole so that when he encountered his brothers, he demonstrated it by saying, I forgive you. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. And I'm not going to carry a sinful response to all this pain from my life. God has healed my memories.

I've forgotten my troubles. So my firstborn is named Manasseh. But he had a second born and he named him twice fruitful. Because see God doesn't just want to heal you of the pain associated with your memories of traumatic things. Our destiny is not just to get healed. Our destiny is to be fruitful in this world.

Remain in me and I'll remain in you and you will bear much fruit. Your destiny is to be bearing fruit for the kingdom of God. And there are good works that he has prepared for you to do from the foundation of the world. There's so much God wants to do through us.

Not that our name will be in lights or some big platform, but through our sphere of influence in our corner of the world, God is going to use you and he's going to bless you. He wants to bless you with the fruit of his spirit, love and joy and peace, patience and kindness and goodness, gentleness, self-control. He wants to bless you with the fruit of his spirit and he wants to bless you with productivity for the things that he calls you to do. When God calls you to do something, his plan is for you to prosper at it, to succeed at it.

When he takes you to a promised land, his plan is wherever you put your foot, you're going to take that ground. And what he knows is that what happens to us is that the devil uses our past to keep us so locked up in the memory of our previous sin, our previous failure, our previous hurt, our previous trauma, that that's the only thing that could keep us from moving forward in the promised land. But if God could get us healed enough of the past so that we forget our troubles, then we could move on and be twice as fruitful as we ever were before.

So I want to make you, you see. So I want it to be that you be like Ephraim and Manasseh. I want your troubles to be forgotten so you can be twice as fruitful as you ever thought you were going to be because the Lord is able to do abundantly, exceedingly above and beyond what you could ever ask, think, or imagine. We just need to get our thinking cleared up, to get our minds liberated so that God can use us for everything He wants to use us for.

That's why, that's why Jacob without knowing it just acted under the unction of the Holy Spirit to show us what was coming. I'm going to give you the blessings that should have just been for Christ. I'm going to give you the mind of Christ. You got the same Spirit that Christ had. If you get His mind, then you can start understanding how Jesus could be so audacious to say, you're going to do the things I did and even greater things you'll do. You know how the revelation just progresses and it profits.

When you profit, you don't even know what you're saying. You just got a little piece of it. You can't fully, but when the Lord spoke through Jeremiah and He said, I will lead them beside streams of water on a level path where they will not stumble because I'm Israel's father. I'm Jacob's father. I'm Israel's father and Ephraim is my first born son. Do you see what's happening now in the revelation? By the time Jeremiah gets around, the way the Lord's talking, he's just forgotten that Manasseh was the first born and now he's saying Ephraim is my first born son. You know what that means? It means that in Christ you have just as complete access to the Father as Christ Himself ever had. Therefore, Paul says, let us enter boldly with confidence into the throne room of grace. You are fully, completely, 100% His sons, not just like an heir somewhere down the line.

I wanted you to know how you have a priority and a favor. I crossed over my arms and you now have become sons and daughters. And if you get the Spirit of God in you, the first thing that happens is the Spirit Himself testifies with our own spirit that we're God's children.

That's the competition going on. The voice of the sin nature, the voice of the world and the voice of the tempter is always trying to tell us we're not fully sons and daughters. But the Holy Spirit is always speaking to us testifying, you are like Ephraim and Manasseh. They weren't even part of the tribes, but they got adopted by Israel. And if we're children, then we're heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs of Christ. That's good news.

Wow, let that sink in. Alan Wright. In today's teaching, the blessing God offers everyone like Ephraim and Manasseh.

Stick with us. Alan will be back here in just a moment with more on this and some additional insights. The life changing message of good news has been taught over radio from Alan Wright Ministries for quite some time now. And God has used every one of those messages. But some broadcasts have really hit home in special ways. In gratitude of more than a decade of radio, we have assembled the most powerful best love messages from each year of the first 10 and put them together in one special album. When you make a gift to Alan Wright Ministries this month, we want to give you Alan Wright's top 10 CD album or digital download.

Are you ready for some good news? Make your gift today and discover God's grace afresh with Alan Wright's top 10 of the first decade. 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. Alan, what good news and the blessing God offers everyone. So don't let the enemy tell you you're not good enough.

You're not fully a son, not fully a daughter enough yet, right? Right, Daniel, this story, absolutely one of the most beautiful, mysterious, intriguing stories in all the Bible of the blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh and how this is the blessing that was to be spoken over all of Israel and symbolically spoken over every single believer. And I just want to say this personally to anyone who's hungry right now to receive it, but I want to speak the words of blessing. May you, your life be as Ephraim and Manasseh. May your life be lived out of the assurance that you've received the blessing in Christ that you never deserved, but is most surely yours because of simple faith in Him. And may it be that you forget yesterday's troubles and become twice as fruitful as you ever imagined. It's the blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh. May it be yours. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.