How Love Wins Over Worry [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

Here's how you're like Jesus. He loves Jesus. The Father loves the Son perfectly, and He loves you perfectly.

It means, believe it or not, Father God loves you every bit as much as He loves His only begotten Son. 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, No Worries, as presented at Reynolda 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. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. You can learn more about it and contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Or call 877-544-4860.

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

Here is Alan Wright. We're all searching for perfect love. And if the only place you have to look is in this earth, you will not find it. And when we experience imperfect love, what happens is our souls are wounded. Sometimes it's just minor and it's just healed by the love that we receive after that, but sometimes it's major. But in any event, whatever wound goes unhealed, there are all kinds of ungodly beliefs that get attached to it. We start assuming things, we start imagining things, we start believing things that are contrary to God's Word. You see, fear is the exact perversion of faith, because fear and faith are both forms of belief. But faith believes God's Word and fear believes all that's not God's Word. You wonder how faith comes, and Paul makes it absolutely plain in Romans 10, verse 17. So faith comes from hearing and hearing through the Word of Christ. How do you get faith?

By the Word of Christ. So if faith comes by hearing and hearing the Word of Christ, how does fear come? I suggest it comes from hearing, but hearing the Word of all that is anti-Christ. You hear the Word of anti-Christ, and fear is introduced. And underneath, therefore, every fear, I believe, is something that is ungodly in its belief, something that is apart from God's revelation, something that is a deception, something that is a false belief, a lie, under every fear.

Now you think about it, if you think about your fears and you think about what's really at its root, I would say go deep with God, talk to others about it, and see if you can find out what is the lie beneath all of it. One time, years ago, at our Saturday night ministry we had in that day for young adults called Verge, and it was an informal time of worship of the young adults, and so on this particular night I was talking about this very thing, and I said, I think there's a lie that's underneath every fear, and I said, can we talk about this? Everybody take a piece of paper and write down several of your fears.

We put them in a basket. I started pulling them out and went through them, and there were a lot of themes that you could imagine emerge there in some of the fears, and one of them you wouldn't be surprised to see that emerged a number of times was fear of public speaking. I said, okay, let's talk about fear of public speaking. If there's a lie underneath the fear, what is that lie? What is the wrong belief?

What's the false belief? Somebody raised their hand, and they said, well, the lie is that if you get up and speak, people are going to laugh at you. I said, well, yeah, they probably won't laugh at you, but they might, right? They said, yeah, that's true. They might laugh.

You can't say that's it. I said, well, what else might it be? Somebody said, well, that if you get up there and you don't sound articulate, then people won't respect you as much.

They'll speak less of you. And I said, well, I don't know, but that might happen. I mean, that could happen, right?

I mean, it could. Probably won't, probably won't, but it could happen, yeah? And we kept going through these possible answers, like what's the lie that's underneath the fear of public speaking? Somebody said, well, people won't like you as much. People are rejected. I said, well, no, there's things that's possible that could happen.

It could happen. And finally, we kept going there trying to dig, dig, dig through this, and finally, one young man raised his hand and said, I think this is the lie. I said, what? He said, I think the lie is that even if I fall on my face, everybody laughs at me and rejects me that I can't still be okay. He said, but I can still be okay because God loves me infinitely and I'm His child and I'll be okay no matter what.

And I said, there we go, bingo, that's it. You see, you've got to get down deep enough to where the perfect love of God and Jesus Christ can address every false belief that's been attached to the places where we've been wounded in our lives. His love can heal anything. His love can heal anything. See, love builds security.

Love builds security. You know, it was until the mid 20th century that prevailing wisdom was for parents to not overly coddle their babies, their little ones, for fear of spoiling them. That was prevailing wisdom up until the 1950s. And it was all corrected by the groundbreaking research of Harry Harlow, a psychologist, who got these rhesus baby monkeys, rhesus monkeys. And he put some of them into a cage where they had nothing but a wire quote surrogate mother that had a bottle attached with milk. Some sorry substitute for a real mother. But others got a cloth surrogate mother so it was soft and had milk. Well obviously, the babies that had a choice preferred the cloth mother. But what they found was that given a choice, babies would have a cloth mother with no milk than a wire mother with milk. But the real thing they found out was they took these baby monkeys that had nothing but a cloth mother. So the only comfort they had was a feeling of softness. And they separated them from the cloth surrogate mother for three days. Because the, again, the prevailing thought was that, you know, if you want to toughen up your kids, you know, you need to let them be out there on their own some and they've got to quit being so reliant and being coddled so much. And what they found, of course, was exactly the opposite, that after three days those monkeys that had been separated from the cloth mother had become extremely insecure. And they would now just cling in near the cloth mother and they wouldn't even venture out very far away.

They lost all their sense of security. And so the study began to rattle all the silly ideologies that said you can love your child too much. And at first it was quite unpopular, but it's been proven over and over to be true that the greatest thing, of course, that can happen for a child is to just have loads and loads and loads and loads of unconditional love because the more love that goes in, the more security is built. Love goes in, fear goes out. Love comes in, security is built. Perfect love casts out fear, which makes our job really a lot simpler, doesn't it?

When you don't know what to do, love somebody. Because we know that what we tend to do is take our anxiety and shift it towards somebody else. Anxiety feels terrible and we just tend to try to shift it towards somebody else. I tell you, I don't know why this came to mind, but I was thinking one of the most anxious things I ever did as a parent was sitting in the passenger seat with a 15-year-old driving 65 miles an hour on the highway. That's the most nerve-wracking thing you ever do. And I don't know how it was that Anne convinced me that that was my job to do it all. That's nerve-wracking. You've got to sit over here in this seat with no brake and no steering wheel and try not to make your kid freak out because you're so nervous.

And I don't know what some of your strategies have been, parents, but mine was I found a kind of a place on the handle of the door that I could grip as hard as I wanted without breaking anything. And I'd take my right hand and I'd grip that door as tight as I could possibly grip it. And then my voice would say, okay, now we're going to merge onto the interstate highway. Okay, let's get our speed up a little bit. We probably need to be going more than 30 when we get in front of that truck that's going 75. Okay, let the truck by. Let's let that truck go by. Let it go by.

Let it go by. Because you realize that you don't want to take your anxiety and put it into the child because the child, you see, is going to pick up on the anxiety and then drive worse. And so you find a way because you want instead to show acceptance. As soon as we feel like that we might not be accepted, then we become more afraid. Perfect love casts out fear.

How can you know a perfect love? This is the key, verse 17. By this is love perfected with us so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment because as He is so also are we in this world. Isn't that a strange statement? As Jesus is, so we are in this world.

Strange statement because Jesus is resurrected and glorified in the Lord of the universe. How could we be as He is? The key is to look at everything else John says about how perfect love assures us over and over through 1 John, be assured, be confident, be assured, be confident.

That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Can you imagine what it would be like to be accepted perfectly? Envision it. Being free to be yourself with no fear of rejection. If you mess up, people don't roll their eyes, make fun of you or love you less.

Imagine no more of that anxious feeling that you get deep down in your gut that makes you feel like the pressure is always on so you can never really relax. What you're imagining and longing for is a life with no shame. In paradise, before sin came into the world, the Bible tells us only one thing about Adam and Eve's relationship.

They were naked and felt no shame. Ever since the fall, the human heart has been riddled with shame. It's a lie that says until you measure up, you can't be truly acceptable. Shame causes some to say I'll try to be perfect in order to be accepted and others to decide, since I'll never measure up, I might as well rebel.

Either way, the heart is poisoned by shame and there is only one antidote, the grace of God in Jesus Christ. In his highly acclaimed book, Free Yourself, Be Yourself, Pastor Alan Wright not only exposes the lies of shame, he leads you into a revolution of God's love that heals your soul. Discover freedom, joy and destiny as you shed performance-based living and let God take the shame off you for good. It's a life-changing, full-length book from Alan Wright.

Free yourself, be yourself. 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. What John is saying is I've seen in the Gospel and in the love of God that this is the key. Not you trying harder to sin less, not even you trying harder to be less worried and afraid, but you being filled with more confidence. Which is why I can't imagine in a million years anybody that would want to proclaim the Gospel in such a way that would leave you wondering if you're a Christian about whether you are saved and God's child forever. The whole thrust of the Scripture is to give you assurance that when you're a Christian, something amazing has taken place that is mind-bending.

Listen to this. When you accept Christ, a miracle takes place and it's God's plan and it's His provision and so you can count on it. Whether you feel it or not, when you accept Christ, here's what happens. Christ takes all of your sin, every bit of your sin. He takes it to the cross and there you wonder why it was that He was crying out, Eli, Eli lama sabachthani, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? You wonder why it is that He is there bleeding on that cross and suffocating slowly.

It is for this express purpose He came to take your sin. So much so that you can count on this, that when God is your Father and you are His child, there is no sin, none whatsoever that God remembers about your life. It has been thrown into the sea of forgetfulness, cast as far as the east is from the west, which is an infinite distance, right?

An ever increasing infinite distance. That's how far your sin is away from you. You have been thoroughly washed, your conscience has been cleansed, your soul has been set free, and you in God's eyes are no longer a sinner, you're holy.

Jesus is holy and you're holy. You say, but I still sin and Jesus never does. I understand that, but positionally, in the eyes of God, He looks upon you, Christians, as if you'd never sinned. Now, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that, but that is exactly what the gospel teaches, nothing less than that. You come before God at Judgment Day, Christian, there's not going to be any big screen playing back all the mistakes of your life for your grandmother and Gabriel the angel to see. How could there be when God's already thrown into the sea of forgetfulness as far as the east is from the west?

It's not even there, it's not in the mind of God anymore. And until you can see that it's just as if I'd never sinned, you haven't really grasped what it means to be justified. But when you see it and the more that you see it, can't you start believing more in the perfect love of God for you?

And there's more. Because when you're a Christian, you not only are so fully forgiven that God doesn't even see your sin so He can't hold it against you, but you, by God's own miraculous plan, are credited with the life that Jesus lived. You have become rich in Christ, clothed in Christ, hidden in Christ. You were chosen in Christ, redeemed in Christ. You have taken Christ into your being. You have been made one with Christ. You are now a co-heir with Christ. And when God looks at you, He not only doesn't see your sin, but He looks at you and He sees the clothing of Jesus Himself and He says, ah, that smells like my son or my daughter. That you look like Jesus to God the Father.

You smell like Jesus. You are like Jesus to Him. That's the only way Paul could say that you are a co-heir with Christ. You don't get a dribble down inheritance to some little portion of what Christ had. You get what Christ had. As Christ is now, so you are in this world.

Wow! It bends my mind to think of it, but it is surely the gospel of Jesus Christ. It means that you can experience the perfect love of God through the revelation of what He has done for you in Jesus. And that's my prayer. Ask Him to just baptize you in that love. Quit struggling so much to try to rebuke your fear. You don't cast out fear as much as you displace it with the love of God. I wish I could tell you more about the love of God. I wish I could tell you how wide and long and high and deep is the love of God. God's love is wide, wide.

You can't go around it. You can't find someone that God doesn't want to reach. God loves everyone. God loves people lost in religion. He loves people lost in rebellion. He loves old people and young people. He loves black people and white people and brown people and tan people. He loves people in North Carolina and South Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, North Korea, South Korea.

His love goes to the Far East and the Mideast and Down Under. He loves Papua New Guineans and Nigerians and Colombians. He loves everybody.

He loves little people and big people. He loves rich people and poor people. I wish I could tell you how wide is the love of God. He loves educated people and illiterate people. He loves the people who love Him and He loves the people who hate Him. He loves the people who know Him and the people who don't know Him yet. Oh, the love of God is so wide. I wish I could tell you how high is the love of God, how long the love of God is.

The love of God is so long, it is longer than any place you could ever get in front of. You can't get around it. You can't get behind it. You can't outrun it. You can't stall it.

You can't stop it. The love of God is from everlasting to everlasting. His love is pure and perfect. His love is long enough to be in your past, long enough to be in your future. His love is there.

It's longer than the circumference of the whole world. His love doesn't give up. It doesn't quit.

It doesn't stop. You can't truncate it. You can't translate it. You can't abbreviate it.

You can't interrupt it. His love was there when you were born. His love was there when your father was born. His love was there when your father's father was born. His love was there when Adam was born. His love was there when the angels were created.

His love was there before he spoke. I wish I could tell you about the length of the love of God. Love so high is higher than the highest building, taller than the tallest mountain. It is transcendent. It is resplendent.

It is heavenly. It is taller than the tallest Goliath. It is higher than the greatest intellect.

It is higher than the farthest star. It is higher than your highest thought, taller than your greatest dream. I wish I could tell you how high is the love of God. The love of God runs deeper than we could ever fathom. His love is deeper than your darkest thought. His love is deeper than your blackest hour. His love is deeper than your deepest pit. His love is deeper than any philosopher's wisdom. His love is deeper than the deepest well and it never, ever runs dry. I wish I could tell you how wide, how long, how high, how deep is the love of God, but it cannot be told. It must be revealed.

It must be experienced. The love of God can be set upon your heart and set you free. I love him so much. I think we just get to spend all eternity just discovering more and more the depths of his love for us.

It's perfect. Here's how you're like Jesus. He loves Jesus. The Father loves the Son perfectly and he loves you perfectly.

It means, believe it or not, Father God loves you every bit as much as he loves his only begotten Son. Abigail Wright became a lover of dogs and I don't really know how except she grew up in love. And I believe that you can grow up in love. And as much as I and Abby had forgotten that she ever even did have a fear of dogs, I believe the love of God can so set you free that one day you'd look back and go, I forgot I even used to have that worry.

I don't even remember having that fear. So great can be the healing mercies of God. Perfect love comes in and fear must be flung out of doors and that's the gospel. Alan Wright and today's teaching how love wins over worry is part of our greater series simply titled No Worries.

And I encourage you to stay with us. Alan is back in the studio to wrap this up with a parting good news thought for the day here in just a moment. Can you imagine what it would be like to be accepted perfectly envision it being free to be yourself with no fear of rejection. If you mess up people don't roll their eyes make fun of you or love you less in his highly acclaimed book for yourself be yourself. Pastor Alan Wright not only exposes the lies of shame, he leads you into a revolution of God's love that heals your soul.

Discover freedom, joy and destiny as you shed performance based living and let God take the shame off you for good. It's a life changing full length book from Alan Wright for yourself be yourself. 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 pastor alan.org. Alan, a common phrase for Christians is love wins. And that would also count over worry.

And that is one of those phrases that is deeper than deep right there. It wins out over worry as we've seen today because perfect love and fear do not go together. And wherever there is fear, John has said, there's not perfect love. So I think the focus that we're learning is yes, there may be strategies for our listeners that are dealing with specific fears. There may be a variety of strategies for dealing with that. Certainly recommend counseling, medical help. And there are different strategies for managing our fears, but ultimately what God's answer is his love, the assurance of God. So draw near to God and his perfect love. I think it will fling fear out of doors. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.