Be: Just Be [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. He exists.

He is not an idea. He is real. This is the first and most important thing you can know about God. 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? You are a human being, not a human doing. Your doing flows out of your being. And in this crazy, busy world, God has a word for us tonight that goes to the very essence of His own being, that says to us, what matters is who you are, not all that you do. And when you get that revelation, the peace that it brings, and the focus in your life, not just the tranquility of not living such a stressed life, but the life that can be one of worship and joy as God leads you in your calling. We are tonight in Exodus chapter 3, and our series we call Saver.

And we are going to Saver. And we have a one word title for each one of these messages, Saver, Awaken, Celebrate, Breathe, Rest, and tonight the simplest verb of all, Be. Just Be. Exodus 3 verse 13, but Moses said to God, if the people of Israel, if I come to the people of Israel and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they asked me, what is His name?

What shall I say to them? And God said to Moses, I am who I am. And He said, say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you. God also said to Moses, say this to the people of Israel, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever.

And thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. One of the things that's made us crazy busy is technology. I was talking to Mickey Thigpen who's on our staff this week and he said he remembered when he was a kid, a young kid, he went to a science symposium in which they were discussing a new invention, the laser had just come out. And they were hypothesizing what uses there might be for the laser beam. And they didn't say things like maybe one day it could fix cataracts and be used in precise surgeries and all this.

But he said he distinctly remembered that one of the scientists said that it most likely would be used in typewriters to erase mistakes off the paper. And the thing that's funny about that is that not only was it wrong in that it was not installed on the typewriters, but that the answer was so wrong because nobody could envision at that time that we would all have personal computers and smartphones that would autocorrect for you as you're doing your word processing. In other words, it was so wrong that it wasn't even in the right category of being wrong.

It was so wrong. And this is the way people were, they thought that all the technological advances was going to grant us a lot of leisure. So back in the 50s, they were worried that we were going to just be bored in America because we had all this free time on our hands, not realizing that the technology actually made life speed up. And that we have this unbelievable tendency to, no matter what, to fill up all the empty spaces. Some years ago, I heard a medical doctor, Richard Swenson, give a presentation on his book called Margin.

And he said the problem in our lives is we leave no margin. It's like if you had a piece of paper and you have no white space on it whatsoever, you can't hardly read it if you have something like that. Where you just, see if you put this up on the screen for us where we have just a print, nothing on the right, nothing on the left, nothing to the top, nothing to the bottom.

You just look at it and you go, I can't even read that. You got to have some margin on a piece of paper to be able to even read it effectively. And you got to have some margin in your life in order to live it appropriately. It is Nike's famous slogan, just do it. But for our culture, I think the slogan has become just do more.

And we define ourselves by what we do. This is John. Meet John.

He's a carpenter. Here's Susie. Meet Susie. She's a doctor. Here is Sam.

He's an accountant. What do you do is what we say when we meet one another. We so define life by what we do that it's interesting as we read in Exodus 3 when God decided to give his personal name to Moses, to describe his essence. He said his name is I Am. Now there are many names for God that describe what God does. And those many attributes and activities of God are glorious and wonderful. But the most important name for God in all of the Old Testament, the foundational, personal, proper name for God means I Am. Or some might say it means simply being because it's taken from the Hebrew verb to be. And I want to talk to you today about how we who are made in the image of the great I Am are liberated by the gospel to be in the image of God.

And I pray that not only will this help you to learn how to savor the blessings of God each moment in the moment and become mindful of every blessing, but that you would see something radically wonderful about who God is and therefore about who you are as well. Names are fascinating to me. I'm just very interested in names. And sometimes parents name their kids very intentionally. My father-in-law Graham Lynch, his dad loved the world of finance.

And so Graham's younger brother was named Merrill, Merrill Lynch. But I think of some of the names that you can read about just for fun. I saw one that last name Knight, and the first name is Jed, and the middle initial was I.

So that's a Jedi Knight. I saw a man whose last name was Light, and they called him Bud, Bud Light. A guy whose last name was Bacon, and his first name was Chris, and his middle initial P, which made him Crispy Bacon.

And this one particularly I thought was funny. A man named Hurt, and his first name was Ken. And so his name was Ken Hurt. But the odd thing was he was a medical doctor, so he was Dr. Ken Hurt.

But anyway, I can't laugh too much. My whole life I've been Mr. Wright. So everybody's like, you know, oh, you met Mr. Wright, didn't you? And so the meaning of names is fascinating to me. We were very intentional with our kids' names, very intentional. Our son is named Matthew Bennett Wright. We call him Bennett. We were going to name him Bennett Matthew Wright, but his initials would be BMW, and I thought that might not be good.

And worse than that, it would have been BM Wright, and we thought, well, yeah, that's, we can't give kids an opportunity for that one. So we put Matthew before, so that's why Matthew Bennett Wright. But Matthew is a beautiful New Testament Greek word that means gift of God. And we had some considerable time in our efforts to conceive, and God gave us this child, and we see him every day as a gift. And Bennett is a family name. It is Anne's mother's maiden name, and my wife's middle name as she was growing up, Bennett, and it is from the Latin for blessing, like the word benediction that I give at the end of every service, shortened benediction, and you got Bennett. And so it was a gift from God, and it was a blessing. And our daughter Abigail, I knew for sure that I wanted to name her Abigail. She was born in the midst of a time of spiritual renewal in my life in which the joy of the Lord had just overtaken my life, a joy that really hasn't left, and it was from the Holy Spirit, and the joy of the Lord is the most wonderful thing. And Abigail means my father's joy or my father is joyful, Abigail.

And she's Abigail Anne Wright. Names mean a lot, especially when someone has named them because they signify something. But what's different with God is that God, when he names someone, he not only has the capacity to identify who they are, but he has the capacity to make them become who it is that he calls them to be, which is a very powerful thing. So he calls Abram, which means high father, he changes his name to Abraham because that means a father of a multitude, and he was going to turn him into the father of nations. The name Joshua is actually the name in Hebrew, Yeshua, Yeshua, and it means the Lord saves or the Lord of salvation. Interestingly, Jesus is essentially the English version of the Greek transliteration of Joshua. Yeshua became Jesus, which to us is Jesus, but Jesus' name is Yeshua.

So when the angel told Mary and Joseph, you shall call him Jesus, they were saying you shall call him Joshua, Yeshua, because he will save the people from their sins. Names are fascinating. To know someone's name is a very personal and powerful thing.

That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. With so much worry about yesterday's failures and so much hurry getting ready for tomorrow's tasks, 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 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. Interestingly, when Jacob wrestled an angel in the midst of the night, this manifestation of God, and wrestled and wrestled. And we read it, Genesis 32 verse 27. He said to him, what is your name? The angel asked him that, the messenger of God asked him that. And he said, Jacob. Then he said, your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you've striven with God and with men.

So his names change. And then, but this is interesting, at verse 29, Jacob asked him, please tell me your name. But he said, why is it that you asked my name?

And there he blessed him. He wouldn't give him his name. In ancient cultures, especially, it was understood, once you knew someone's name, it was in a sense to give you a kind of power over that person. And so here's a picture of God being unwilling to reveal himself in that moment to Jacob.

Part of this is because it is so intensely personal. There's a big difference between calling the leader of the United States Mr. President versus calling him Donald. There is a big difference in knowing someone's proper name rather than merely a title. And what's interesting in Exodus 3 is that when God appears to Moses in this burning bush, and then they have this ongoing dialogue, what we saw today is God wanted Moses to know God's own personal name. There's a beautiful scripture in Psalm 9, verse 10, those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.

Those that know your name can put their trust in you. There's something very important about the fact that God wanted Moses to know his name. And this was not a title, it was God's name that he gave him. Yahweh is how we say it. It is the most important name for God in all of the Old Testament, but it has never been translated into our Bibles. It is literally in Hebrew these four letters that we transliterate YHWH, and it may have been, I say may have been, because Hebrew originally did not have any vowels indicated. That came later, the vowel points we call them, but it may have been pronounced Yahweh. But those four letters are considered to the Israelites the most holy four letters that are imaginable. Now when those four letters in Hebrew in the Old Testament appear in your Bible, in almost every English translation they appear is the word Lord, all capitalized, L-O-R-D. So whenever you see the word Lord, all capitalized you can know that actually it's this word Yahweh. And they were considered so holy that the Jewish people were afraid to say the name lest they accidentally use the Lord's name in vain.

And so the Jewish people would not say the name Yahweh. Instead they used the term Adonai, which is the Hebrew word for my Lord, or actually it is my Lord's. And in the same way mysteriously that Elohim, the name for the more generic name for God is in the plural so Adonai is, not because there's more than one God, but is to say you are the Lord of Lords. And so Adonai means my Lord. And so many times if they came to the text and they're going to read Yahweh, they would either just read it, still an Orthodox Jew would do this, and either just skip it or say the name, just say the words the name, or they might say Adonai, which is my Lord, another name for God in the Old Testament.

Now what happened is that Adonai over time became merged with the four consonants for Yahweh, and the vowel sounds of Adonai were added. And so that's where you end up getting the word Jehovah. It actually is Yahweh, but using the Adonai vowel sounds, so it would be like Yah-ho-ah, which there is no Latin for a J, and when it came Latin it, it became Jehovah. So this is to say that the word Jehovah does not exist in the Bible. So Yahweh is the name that he gives in Exodus 3.

We're going to look at it more closely. Yahweh is usually translated Lord in English translations, but this is not a really acceptable or satisfactory rendering of it because Lord is a title, and Yahweh is a personal, proper name. So it's one of those things that's just insufficient in our translations because it would be like every time that you referred to me, and it was only Pastor and never Alan because God has given his personal name. This is very important in the Scriptures because Yahweh occurs 6,828 times in the Old Testament, which is more than three times as much as the simple word God, Elohim or El.

It means, beloved, to lay the foundation for this, it means that as holy as he is, that God wants to be known in a very personal way. To give his name is to say, call me Yahweh. It's like the president of the United States saying to you, call me Donald.

It's like the queen saying, call me by my name. And so if you could imagine the holy, holy, holy God who meets Moses and gives him his name. Now let me just go a little further with this because I don't want to make this, I'm trying to talk about something that is endlessly deep in a fairly simple way here because I want you to see this, that actually if we could put back up the Exodus 3 text, the verb that is rendered here in Exodus 3 13, that then Moses said to God, if I come to the people of Israel and say to them that God, your father has sent me to you, they ask, what is his name?

What shall I say to them? And God said to Moses, I am who I am. The words that are used there is simply the Hebrew verb for to be.

It's Hayah. And literally what this says is God said to Moses, I am being that I am being. I am that I am. Alan Wright. And today's teaching, we're placing a bookmark right here in this teaching called Be Just Be.

It's from the series Saver. Alan is back with us in the studio, sharing a parting good news thought for the day in just a moment. Please stay with us. 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 probably predicted I would say this, to be or not to be, with a title like this. And I like what you've referenced. We are human beings, not human doings. It's important to realize that your value is not in what you do. Your value is that you are. So you can just be.

Nike might say, just do it. But today and tomorrow, I just want to say, just be it. And we're taking our lesson from the fascinating name, the personal name that God gave and said, this is who I am. I am that I am, or I am being that I am being, that God exists and that he is in the present with us, that he is who he is, that he already is who he is, that he is God. And we learn so much from that. We'll learn more tomorrow, Daniel, that if God is primarily defined by the fact that he is, we're primarily defined by the fact that we simply exist and it makes us infinitely valuable. So when you get caught up in the midst of the busyness of the season, just sometimes take a moment and just be.