Do You See What I See? [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. That's God's will for your life.

You realize that? For you not to worry at all. He really wants that for you. 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. 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. Are you ready for some good news? You don't have to worry. Not because your problems are necessarily small, but because your God is so big. We're in a new series called No Worries, emphasis on no. That's God's will for your life. You realize that? For you not to worry at all.

He really wants that for you. You'll notice our worries tend to lead us towards the thing we worry about. We look for what we worry about. Like the husband who, bless his heart, every night his wife would wake him up in the middle of the night and she'd say, honey, I think I hear somebody downstairs. He said, I don't hear anything. No, I could be a burglar.

Please go check. I can't sleep until you go down there. So he would get up dutifully, put on his robe, go down the stairs, look around, come back, get back in bed and said, it's nothing.

She'd say, thank you. And then next night, honey, honey, I think I hear something downstairs. I'm sure it's nothing. I don't hear anything. Put on his robe, go downstairs, look around, come back.

It's nothing. And he did this almost every night for 20 years of their marriage. And one night he went downstairs, she woke him up. I hear something downstairs.

I'm sure it's nothing. He went down, put his robe on, walked down the stairs, turned the corner, looked to the den, and sure enough, a burglar was stepping out the back door with their TV. And the husband said, freeze.

Thinking that the homeowner was armed, the burglar dropped the TV, put his hands up in the air. And the husband said, no, no, don't worry. I'm not going to shoot you.

He said, I just want you to do me a favor before you leave. Would you like coming upstairs with me? There's a woman up there that's been waiting 20 years to meet you. It's funny how the things that you worry about capture your attention and you start looking for it. And it obscures your ability to see what God wants you to see. Have you ever had a time where there was something that it was in plain view, but you couldn't see it?

See it? We, we, our family, we like to do the jumble puzzles. It's a, just a, it's a, it's a little word thing. You unscramble words, and then there's a certain number of letters that are circled once you've unscrambled those. And then you use those letters and unscramble those into words that answer a puzzle. And we just like to do the jumble. Well, once there was a jumble that we got really stuck on, not too terribly long ago, maybe a year or two ago, and we got one word, we just could not get it. Abby and I, my daughter and I, we were working on it.

We tried everything that we possibly could. It was, the letters were B-R-E-Y-E-H, B-R-E-Y-E-H, and just couldn't figure it out. And so, finally, Ann Luffy, she said, is Haribi a word? I said, Haribi? She said, you know, like heresy.

I said, well, I know, I don't think so. She said, it's the only thing it can be. We've tried every other combination, and she wrote in there, she wrote in Haribi, and we just set it down. I said, well, that's just ridiculous, Haribi. And a little later, Abby came in, and she looked down at the puzzle, and she said, oh, you got it. We said, we did? She said, yeah, hereby. We said, hereby? She said, yeah, like I hereby announce you husband and wife? We're like, oh, we'd written it down, but it looked like Haribi to us.

We had heresy on the mind, and so it was Haribi, but it's actually hereby. You ever had something like that? It's like it's in plain view, and you can't see it, because once your mind is looking for something else, you can miss the truth. We're going to look at a story.

This story is so, they should turn this into a movie. This whole story, it is set in the time of Elijah and Elisha. Elisha, the successor to the great miracle working prophet Elijah, during the time of a divided monarchy in Israel, and Syria was always wanting to invade Israel, and this is a story about how God enabled his people to see, and the Syrian army to not be able to see, because in the end, your worries will melt away, not by you saying, well, I don't really have any problems in life.

No, sometimes we really do, but they'll melt away when you see God's grace surrounding you supernaturally. We pick up in second Kings chapter six at verse eight, second Kings chapter six verse eight. Once when the king of Syria was warring against Israel, he took counsel with his servants saying, at such and such place shall be my camp, but the man of God sent word to the king of Israel, beware that you do not pass this place, for the Syrians are going down there. The man of God he's talking about is Elisha, and the king of Israel sent to the place about which the man of God told him, thus he used to warn him so that he saved himself there more than once or twice. So here's what's happening is that every time the king of Syria makes a military plan to attack Israel, the Lord shows Elisha the plans, and Elisha then goes and tells the king of Israel all of what he's heard from the Lord, and so they're always one step ahead of the king of Syria because of Elisha's prophetic ministry. And it will pick up verse 11, and the mind of the king of Syria was greatly troubled because of this thing, and he called his servants and said to them, will you not show me who of us is for the king of Israel? So obviously the king of Syria thinks that there's a spy in their midst, there's a double agent, somebody that is revealing their secrets to the enemy.

How else could they always be one step ahead of them? And this is where the story starts getting pretty comical, and in fact the whole story has an edge of laughter to it, of irony and satire and laughter even as it's raising up the incredible power and grace of God. Because look at verse 12, one of his servants said, none my lord, O king, but Elisha the prophet who is in Israel tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedroom. This is so funny because he's not really saying that Elisha is in there going to the king of Israel and saying, well I heard the king of Syria talking about brushing his teeth the other night, and he needed some new toothpaste and heard a few things that he said to his wife.

That's not really what he means. What he's just saying is that this man is reading your mail. He knows everything going on because God's speaking to him.

It's a story about who can see what God sees, and whoever can see with God's eyes is the one who's actually powerful. So verse 13, king of Syria said, go and see where he is that I may send and seize him. Go and see where he is. He's like, we need to send out our own spies to go and try to find Elisha, figure out where he is so that then we can kidnap him. They want to kidnap him.

Maybe the king of Syria is thinking I could use him to give me some insight. But verse 13, it was told him, behold he is in Dothan. No espionage was needed. Elisha was not hiding. Everyone knew where he was. So verse 14, he sent their horses and chariots and a great army and they came by night and surrounded the city. They came so they couldn't be seen in the middle of night.

It's clearly overkill. He's coming after one man and he sent a whole army who fills up the city and the hillsides. And here's what happens at verse 15. When the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, behold an army with horses and chariots was all around the city and the servant said, alas, my master, what shall we do? So what happened is the servant gets up to go and fix coffee, go out and get the morning paper, steps out to the porch and he looks around and goes, oh no, I looked up the Hebrew for alas. And it's actually a word that sounds like what you would say. It is ah, ah, there are horses and chariots and soldiers everywhere.

And he comes back to report this. He is completely of course consumed with the enemy that is at hand. This is the nature of worry. Once it catches your attention, it's all that you can really see. Our perspectives get shaped and distorted.

The things that you're interested in, the things that you expect to see, these are the things that influence what you actually see. If you expect the worst, then you'll usually look for that. Like the husband who was so inattentive to his wife and he worked all the time. He never showed her any much attention or there was no romance. And she had a particularly horrible day.

She was at home. She had two sick kids, a broken dishwasher, a flood in the house, all this stuff. She was just having a terrible day. She talked to him in the middle of the day and he decided he was going to change his ways. So he just stuck around, got dressed up, went by a dozen roses, arranged for a babysitter and was going to go and just take her out for a date that night. And so he came in unusual fashion. He just came to the front door, had his roses all dressed up, rang the front doorbell. And there he was standing and she opened the door and she started crying. He said, what's wrong? She said, I've had a terrible day. First the kids are sick and the dishwasher is broken and nothing's going right.

And on top of it all off, you come home drunk. You're shaped by what you expect to see. If something is more interesting to you, then that's really what you'll likely see.

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. If I said think of a double delight tea rose, the kind that has the big beautiful bloom. Think of that rose bush and maybe this rose bush has flowers that have a mixed crimson and ivory type flower on it with fantastic aroma. Could you just take a moment and envision that rose bush?

Okay, what did you see in your mind's eye? Well, probably what you saw was just an individual beautiful flower, right? You probably were just thinking of that beautiful rose. But you probably weren't thinking of was the rose bush thorns and the leaves. But in actuality, the leaves and the thorns constitutes more of the actual rose bush. I said think of a rose bush, you think of a flower because the flower is the part that catches your interest.

Whatever it is that catches your interest is what we tend to see. And psychologists have taught us that we tend to distort therefore not only what we see but how we remember the events of our lives. And what this means is that if you're depressed, your mind's eye is looking for the reasons that you're depressed.

We like to make sense of the world. And so if you're depressed, your tendency is to look at your life and go nothing good ever happens for me. And so you look at every little bad thing which of course makes you even more despondent. And so what God wants to do is change our vision. It is the nature of the power of the gospel. And for us when we get stuck in worry, what he wants to do is essentially turn our sights towards something else. You know it's interesting most of the time in most sermons and most of the time we talk about worry we'll say things like, well don't worry because most of the things that you worry about will never come to pass.

And that's absolutely true. One of the things that's so futile and diabolical about worry is that we think up all these hypothetical things, these things in our imagination that never come true. And so we spend our energy worrying and dreading them and it's a miserable feeling.

And most of it is because we most of it never actually happens. But it's actually not the way the bible speaks about addressing worry. It's not really that God comes to us in his word and says don't worry they're not really going to be any any troublesome things that happen. In fact that's not the story of the bible at all. In fact the story is more like Joshua taking the people into the promised land where there's going to be battle after battle. And we looked at this text where Joshua takes people takes his people into the promised land and pretty soon you discover that they have to really fight in the promised land but God's with them. So in Joshua chapter one and the great motivational speech that God gives to Joshua he says to him in Joshua 1 verse 5, no man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life just as I was with Moses so I'll be with you. So by saying nobody's going to be able to stand against you is to say you're going to have to face some real foes. You're going to have some real battles, some real troubles. But he said I'll be with you. I'll not leave you or forsake you. Be strong and courageous for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them. So taking the promised land is a battle. God doesn't say it's going to be a piece of cake.

He doesn't say oh there's going to be no troubles in them. He says instead I am with you in a mighty way. And what God does in the mystery of His grace is He comes to you in a thousand different ways by the presence of the Holy Spirit to let you know He's with you. Who can understand all the ways of God?

But this is surely who He is. A God who as long as we're in this world allows us to experience the troubles common to this world and yet never leaves us and never forsakes us and turns our attention to the greatness of His grace. Anne and I were reflecting on this text this week and talking about examples of when did God open up our eyes to something in the midst of our troubles. And one of the stories that came back was one that many of you've heard before. When Anne was pregnant with little Abby we were away we were out of town at the beach and she started having some scary symptoms. We called a gynecologist friend of ours and described what was happening and he said well she could be miscarrying and you know how immediately just all of the swirling fears and worries that enter your heart and we said well should we go to the hospital and he said well you're in an area that might at community hospital might not have a real quality ultrasound machine and you might go and they might not be able to see the heartbeat even if there is one I don't know that it'll help you to go but Anne and I talked about it she said I want to go and Bennett was little and we agreed it would be better for me just to stay back with Bennett and so Anne drove herself to the community hospital to have be examined and see if we could figure out what was happening. And on the way she later told me while she was driving to the hospital the Lord spoke to her. She said she heard very plainly that the Lord spoke to her heart and said I'm going to give you this baby twice and she said a peace settled in on her heart that was just absolutely supernatural and she went and she had visited the hospital and sure enough they worked hard on the ultrasound to try to find a heartbeat and they could not and so she drove herself back having learned only that the machine there at the hospital could not find a heartbeat and she came back and reported this to me and I saw a piece on her face that I could almost not believe and she told me what the Lord had said to her and she said though they didn't see the heartbeat I know the Lord spoke to me about this baby and he's going to give this baby to us twice and the baby is going to be fine. And so that was it and I don't remember what month we were in and what week we were in in that pregnancy. Abby was born healthy little girl and she turns 21 this month and we always had assumed that what the Lord meant was I gave this baby a conception and I'm going to give you this baby when she's born but a little less than a couple years after she was born through a very hard time in our lives and was driving down the road and a car ran full speed a stop sign and broadsided the station wagon and destroyed the station wagon and turned it flipped it over and a giant jagged mass of metal came down in the middle of the back seat and missed little Abby in her car seat by inches and she was hanging upside down in the car the middle of Buena Vista road that was leaking fuel until finally somebody was brave enough to crawl in and get the little baby out of the car and we took Abby to the hospital along with Ann and while Ann had some injuries Abby didn't have a scratch and after we made it through the trauma the spirit spoke to Ann and said I told you I'm going to give you this baby twice.

Told you I'm going to give you this baby twice. That's peace that passes understanding when the ultrasound machine doesn't show a heartbeat because if God can take what you see what you hear and change it into what the eyes of the spirit can see then all of your worries will melt away. Allen Wright in today's teaching do you see what I see from the series no worries. Allen is back with us here in the studio in a moment sharing a part in good news thought for your day. 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 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 Allen Wright free yourself be yourself the gospel is shared when you give to Allen 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 Allen Wright ministries call us at 877-544-4860 that's 877-544-4860 or come to our website pastorallen.org Allen as we've come through a teaching called sanctified imagination now we're here putting a bookmark do you see what I see and it's all about living a worry-free life what's your closing thought for today our perspectives our memories the way we see the world can too often get distorted we can have judgments of what we expect to see we can find that only only our particular interests carry us into the way that we're going to see something but what God wants to do to cure our worries is to open up our eyes and let us see more the way he sees to really see our lives accurately we would need to be able to see all of the ways that God is at work providing and the natural I can't see that Daniel but the the spiritual I can and the Holy Spirit's here to help so ask him open up the eyes of my heart Lord so I can see as you see as you see today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries