Delight: Take Pleasure in Obedience [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

God does not invite us into greater sense of condemnation of self. God instead invites us into a life of great delight. 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 we've called Saver, 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, an audio album called Saver. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries, either a CD album or a digital download of these audio messages.

So as you listen into today's messages, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Or call 877-544-4860.

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? Life in Christ is not so much duty as it is delight.

We are at the culmination of a series that I've called Saver. It is about becoming mindful of every blessing from God in the moment, each moment. It is about letting go of our constant obsession with replaying the past and our preoccupation with always being somewhere in the future and instead being in this moment to experience the grace that God has for us in this moment. And today, fittingly, to conclude, we come to Isaiah 58. Isaiah 58, verse 13. If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable. If you honor it, not going your own ways or seeking your own pleasure or talking idly, then you shall take delight in the Lord and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth and I'll feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. And then the single well-known verse from Psalm 37, verse 4. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. We're talking about delighting in the Lord.

In the Lord. Well, last week, a week and a half ago, we had a big, big staff party and it was so fun. All the staff, all the family were there.

Kids had great fun, things going on, and it was just a night to say thank you to all the staff and lots of giveaways and fun games and activities. And one of the fun games we did was, I know Pastor Chris was behind it, constructed a little family feud game that I was to moderate. And well, one of the questions in the survey of the family feud, so the people are around their tables, the staff, and they're supposed to come up with the answers and see who can get the most points based on this. And so one of the questions was common words, statements, or elements of Alan's sermons. And I bet you, you could guess the number one response of common statements.

It would be, what would you guess? Are you ready for some good news? Survey said 31 points for that. And secondly, that's the gospel. So they got that. Most people got that right. Now this third one, I don't know.

Here's Chris. He just wants to make fun of this because I said it like one time. It beggars belief. Well, I do like the phrase because J.I. Packer wrote this in his Knowing God and one of my favorite passages when he talks about how exquisite the gospel is and that we have become the children of God and that God's own happiness is tied up with ours.

And he said, it beggars belief, but such really is the gospel. So maybe every now and then I say that. And then fourthly, the response was a sports reference. I have been known to make a sports reference, maybe golf every now and then or basketball. Fifthly, another sports reference. And sixth, one more sports reference. So in honor of Pastor Chris's Family Feud questions, I've got one prolonged sports reference as the illustration today. It'll just run throughout the whole sermon.

So that only counts as one, right? It's fitting because it's Master's Week. And by a fluke, because of inclement weather on the horizon in Augusta, Georgia, they're playing the Master's final round earlier today, trying to get it all done by two o'clock before the storms come in.

And so any of you golfers that I see on your phone checking the score will be called out publicly, and thou shalt not tell the pastor any of the scores because he's taping it, and will rush home to watch the exciting conclusion. Why is the Master so special? Well, it starts with this golf course and this golf club, Augusta National Golf Club. You can't apply to be a member of it, so you've got a lot of money. Well, that doesn't mean you can become a member of it.

You can become a member of it. You get invited to, and there are all kinds of important traditions at Augusta. They're very subtle about it, but very important traditions that are there. And these traditions all kind of spill forward into this beautiful tournament week. The Master's is one of four majors. We call them in the golf world, but what's different about it is the other major tournaments move to different venues, but the Master's is the only major. It's played at the same place every year, Augusta National. The winner gets a green jacket, and as the members of the club can wear green jackets, and the winner of the Master's can wear that green jacket throughout the year wherever he wants to, but after a year you have to turn it back into Augusta, and it has to stay there, and you can only wear it when you're on the grounds of Augusta. It is the most beautiful, beautiful golf course you could ever see.

Just think of it this way. When you go to the concession area to get a pimento cheese sandwich and the area you're standing in where all the patrons have been trampling, the ground is nicer than any golf course fairway that I've ever played on. It's immaculate.

It is pristine. It is a tournament that the pros all want to win, and there is a certain decorum that is there. There are no cell phones allowed, no cameras allowed. The CBS commentators are not allowed to call the people attending fans or spectators. They must be called patrons, and the Master's will only allow CBS to have four minutes of commercials for every hour of the broadcast.

It's just too special. You can't be contaminating something so holy with commercialism. There are no sponsors. There are no signs on the golf course. There are no electronic signs. They still do the old-fashioned little white signs up there, and there almost always is incredible drama.

I could go on and on. I could, if I could afford to take the time off, I would just sit and watch every shot. You'd like to get a ticket to the Master's, but it's one of the hardest tickets to get. You just have a hard time because there are so few of them to go around, and there's a lottery that an ordinary person can enter, and if so, you can get a chance to buy a ticket. Otherwise, somebody needs to give it to you.

You could go on eBay and pay a fortune for one, but if you try to buy one outside the gates, they will arrest you. There's no scalping right outside the gates at Augusta National. It is the most special golf tournament, and it's happening right now while I'm preaching. I say all of this to say that, as you can see, I'm a connoisseur of the Masters, and I like reading about every little detail of it, and I like hearing the stories and the traditions and the funny moments, and I can remember specific golf shots. I take delight in the Masters.

To delight means that you experience an inward serenity or happiness by the simple appreciation or admiration of something or someone. Let's call it mindfulness, but it isn't a new psychological program, and it isn't rooted in Eastern religion. Mindfulness, living in the present, is God's idea, and the Bible unveils the way. Pastor Alan Wright invites you to savor life each day. When you make your gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's eight messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Make your gift today and learn how to savor the textures and flavors of God's grace each moment, in the moment, every day of your life. 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. Something that arises within the beholder, not so much because the object of delight does something for you, but just because it is. I can't think of a more fitting word to culminate this series we call Savor, because to delight in the Lord is to savor his goodness. And it is perhaps the most apt description of a life of mindfulness of God's blessings, is to cultivate this capacity to delight in the Lord.

And if you delight in the Lord, I want to show you today how it changes everything. Delight. It is a Hebrew word that comes from a root that means delicate, or pliable, and came to be known to mean luxurious. So to delight is to experience something that is wonderful, luxurious, and it causes you to have an elation, a sense of joy within you.

It can at first seem like, well, maybe that is sort of a feminine type word. And there are some things from which we derive joy that we wouldn't say necessarily is a delight. It's not the word that you expect to hear from the defensive linemen after a really physical football game. Hey, Bubba, that was a big game today, and you had five individual tackles and two sacks.

What was it like out there today on this 95 degree day when that very physical battle? Well, John, you know, it was a real delight. No, it doesn't really, delightful doesn't really fit that setting. But don't think that it's just a feminine type concept, because I've known men that love, say, to work on an old classic car. And the purr of a good carburetor working well can be a delight. I've known men who have a woodworking shop and can build big furniture, and they delight in that. My stepdad was a construction superintendent, built some huge skyscrapers in New York, and he took me and showed me around, and he took delight in big, big buildings. So, a delight is something that is within us all when there's something that we behold or we get to participate in or experience that causes us admiration and beauty. The thing about delight that I'm trying to convey to you is that to delight in someone or something is not necessarily to get something from them, any more than the Grand Canyon does something for you, other than just be.

Somethings are just so beautiful, and your soul delights in them. My mother's had a hard month. She's had to be hospitalized after an emergency surgery, and she finally got home, and then an infection made her go back and get another hospital stay.

She's doing better, I think she comes home today. But in between those hospital stays, something delightful happened. She hadn't been able to experience it until she got out of the hospital because of hospital restrictions, but she got the opportunity to meet Bethany Harper-Stewart, her second great-grandchild. And what a delightful thing in the midst of hospital stays to be able to meet a great-grandchild for the first time. And when you get in the presence of a cute baby, there is something that just delights you, isn't there?

And especially if it's your own. And so mom got to meet Bethany, and then unfortunately she had to get back in the hospital, get an infection, treated it. But when I visited her in the hospital, one of the main subjects is, isn't Bethany cute?

Isn't she just so special? And she's such a big little girl, just for being a month old. And I don't know, her eyes, her eyes, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, do we, we've had long conversations just about her eyes, and how she just fixed her eyes on her mother, Courtney, and how beautiful her hair is, and how, in other words, delight is something that you can experience even when the object of your delight isn't doing anything for you, because a baby doesn't actually do something for you. A baby can't even smile for a while, and the baby doesn't contribute to the family budget.

The baby takes away from the family budget. The baby requires you to do things for the baby, and yet you take delight in the baby. I'm talking about the design of our souls. Our lives need delight, and all the good gifts of God can be sources of delight. It is God's plan for our lives, and the ultimate delight is in the Lord Himself.

Delight as a very notion stands in contrast to the notion of self-denial. Now, in the Christian life, there are, of course, many times that we deny ourselves, and there are many ways in which God has called us to let go of lesser things in order to follow Him, but there is grave misunderstanding about this amongst Christians, and there is certainly terrible misunderstanding about this amongst those who have yet to know Christ. The context of the prophecy in Isaiah 58 is rooted in the first place, God correcting His people in their idea of the kind of fast that would please Him. Isaiah 58 verse 5 says, Is such the fast that I choose a day for a person to humble himself? Is it to bow down his head like a reed?

Some translations could put it to wilt like a reed, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him. Will you call this a fast and a day acceptable to the Lord? What God's saying here is, do you really think that by going around and denying yourself food, and then looking like a wilted reed, and putting sackcloth, and sprinkling ashes, and saying woe is me, and subjecting yourself to self-condemnation, do you really think that that's the kind of fast that I want?

And the answer, of course, is no. He's saying, does it please me at all? There are some religions and ideologies that essentially teach that self-sacrifice is the mark of great spirituality, but such is not the notion of the Christian faith at all. Instead, God does not invite us into greater sense of condemnation of self. God instead invites us into a life of great delight. There is an idea amongst some that to be a Christian means to deny oneself in the sense of making sacrifices for God, evident to God, that somehow inspire God to bless us. But beloved, the Christian life is not a celebration of our sacrifice to God. The Christian life's a celebration of God's sacrifice for us. Alan Wright, an important teaching today.

It's delight taking pleasure and obedience. And you might be thinking, well, what's with that? We've got more of this teaching to come as we come to the conclusion of Saver. And Alan is back here in the studio here in just a moment with a parting good news thought for the day. With so much worry about yesterday's failures and so many pasts, sometimes it's hard to focus on the moment that matters most right now. In a hurried, worried season, God invites you into the present.

Modern day life coaches call it mindfulness, but it isn't a new psychological program and it isn't rooted in Eastern religion. Mindfulness, living in the present is God's idea and the Bible unveils the way. Pastor Alan Wright invites you to Saver life each day. When you make your gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's eight messages to you. Make your gift today and learn how to Saver the textures and flavors of God's grace each moment in the moment, every day of your life. 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, you have this teaching today. It does kind of catch your ear, take pleasure and obedience. Most of us have kind of a skewed view of obedience and how can this be enjoyable, right? Exactly. Well, it's a completely wrong view of obedience to think that is drudgery.

In fact, none of the commands of God are ever meant to be burdensome. Instead, what God's interested in is letting our delight and our sense of duty coming together. When you really delight in something, you don't even think about the sacrifices that you're making towards it. And I use the example of some of my delight in, for example, watching the Masters Golf Tournament. I take delight in that.

Well, you don't have to say, now, Alan, you need to mark out some time and be sure that you're there ready to watch it. No, it's just what you're delighted in. You find that you're oriented towards it. Delight yourself in the Lord and He'll give the desires of your heart. So the delight of God and the commands of God are not in conflict.

And we've got more to learn about that tomorrow. 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.