Bragging on Jesus [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. The New Covenant is altogether more glorious than the old, because the old was between us trying to keep our side of the bargain with God. But in the New Covenant, we're taken out of the picture.

And instead, it's between the Father and the 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, Victorious Living, 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's a book written by Pastor Alan called God Moments, and it can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

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

Here is Alan Wright. Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters. In other words, he wanted to have official documentation that he had carte blanche to arrest and prison, persecute Christians. Letters to the synagogues at Damascus so that if he found any belonging to the way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. He's going to go bring them in shackles and bring them back to Jerusalem for their punishment. As he went on his way, he approached Damascus and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him and falling to the ground. He heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, Who are you, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom you're persecuting, but rise and enter the city and you will be told what you're to do. And verse seven, the men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice, but seeing no one. And Saul rose from the ground, although his eyes were open, he saw nothing.

So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And for three days he was without sight and neither ate nor drank. So you got to understand, maybe if you've been without sight for your whole life, you learn how to cope.

You learn how to, but this is sudden blindness that has come. And he has been overwhelmed by this and he doesn't eat, he doesn't drink. And this mighty Saul, you just got to envision, who'd come in like with authority to arrest anybody who wanted all this power. And now he comes in and he's just like led by the hand, stumbling in.

He can't even see the people that he formerly thought that he was going to come and arrest. That was the auspicious beginnings of Paul the Apostle's ministry that would change the whole world. Never, ever, ever did Paul forget that. He mentions that initial encounter with Jesus over and over and over. There's something about who God is and the way that he wants to use our lives that he can really, really move in the midst of deep understanding of our need for God, of our own humility. And this is the way it happened for Paul. And it's such a powerful scene that sets the context for everything Paul has to say in 2 Corinthians 11. Remember, there are these so-called super apostles that are evidently criticizing Paul.

He's not dazzling enough. He has had too many weaknesses and seemingly failures and too many, just too many moments in his life where he doesn't seem to be this grand apostle. And so others are trying to assert themselves and they're boasting all the time. And I think what Paul does here is he essentially just boils over really into sarcasm.

I mean, you know, it's so hard when you don't know the tone that he really meant to have here, but I really think that's what the tone ultimately is here. Let me pick up reading at the second half of verse 21 in 2 Corinthians 11. But whatever anyone else dares to boast of, he's speaking of those super apostles. I'm speaking as a fool, he says.

I also dare to boast of that. So he starts out like, okay, they boast about their Hebrew lineage, so he starts out with that. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham?

So am I. And elsewhere, Paul describes himself as a Hebrew of Hebrews, and he's got a perfect lineage if that's important to you. These apostles who are saying, yeah, it's important to follow Jesus. You remember the Judaizers he had to address in the Galatian heresies? And he said, you know, yeah, these people are saying, yes, you need Jesus, but you also need to be Jewish.

You also need to be circumcised. And Paul is just so mad about that. Because he didn't want people to be separated because of their lineage, or because of their ritualistic practices or their heritage, yet people are boasting in this, right? And they're missing the gospel when he does that. He says, I'm a Hebrew, I'm Israel, so am I. And then he goes, are they servants of Christ?

I'm a better one. And it's almost like right here where you would expect Paul would say, I've had more miracles through my ministry than they've had. I have had more churches that I have planted. I have had more people except Christ.

I have had more people who have discovered their gifts. He could have gone on and said, I've preached the bigger crusades. He could have gone on with all of that, right?

But instead, it just pivots right here. And he says, I'm a better one. And then it's just like he pivots and he says, I'm a madman. I'm talking like a madman with far greater labors.

And then he just starts, I think he gets sarcastic. Instead of listing all his accomplishments, he starts listing all his difficulties, far more imprisonments with countless beatings, often near death. Five times I received at the hand of the Jews 40 lashes less one. Forty was the legal limit within Judaism. And so they'd always do 39 because if the person who was administering the punishment went over the legal limit, then they'd broken a log and they would be punished.

So they'd just do 39. Three times I was beaten with rods. That's the Roman form of punishment. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked. A night and a day I was adrift at sea on frequent journeys in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger of false brothers, eight dangers. And toil and hardship through many a sleepless night and hunger and thirst often without food and cold and exposure. And apart from other things, there's a daily pressure on me of my anxiety for the churches.

The thing that on top of all of this is that I care so much for all the churches. Who's weak and I'm not weak? Who is made to fall and I am not indignant? If I must boast, verse 30, I will boast of the things that show my weaknesses. There's five near death experiences that he lists.

Danger everywhere. Truth of the matter is great leaders are humble. A very dear brother, a parishioner here and a very dear friend, Merwin Hayes went home to be with the Lord this week. He and his colleague Mike Comer have written a book for leaders called Start with Humility in which they say that both the Greek and Latin words for humility have essentially this connotation not far off of the ground, not getting too much in the ivory tower, getting too far away. Comer and Hayes say humility is humanness, vulnerability, keeping one's accomplishments and talents in perspective. It's not low self-esteem.

It's not an inability to assert yourself, but humility is, as they say, not becoming so high on yourself that you lose touch with who you really are. And when you see someone who is in a position that could be lofty who yet keeps their feet on the ground, so to speak, there's something very moving about it. I love this show, The Undercover Boss. You ever watch The Undercover Boss? Well, it takes like an executive in a big corporation. It goes incognito like one of the workers at the ground level of the organization. And it's so funny because oftentimes they'll go in there and they might run the company, but they don't even know how to use the forklift.

They go in, but they don't know how to make the doughnut or whatever it is. And it's funny to watch them be sort of incompetent, but it's really moving to see it because what we're seeing is someone who could try to stay above everything but instead comes and is with it. That's, in a sense, what humility is all about. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Ever been facing a problem when a well-meaning Christian friend said something like, you just need to have more faith. The problem with such an exhortation, of course, is that telling someone that they ought to have more faith doesn't actually help a person have more faith. We all want more faith, but what can we do to get more faith? In his highly acclaimed book, God Moments, Pastor Alan Wright describes one of the most important biblical pathways to building your faith, remembering God's presence in your life. When you see God's faithfulness yesterday, you'll find it easier to trust him tomorrow. Your life is full of God moments, and through Alan Wright's teaching series and book, you'll have a treasure map to help you discover them all. When you make a gift, we'll send you a very special bundle. It's Alan Wright's faith-building book, God Moments, and the CD album of the series that he has preached on the subject. We'll send you both when you make your gift today. It's time to discover your God moments from yesterday and be filled with fresh faith for today.

Call us at 877-544-4860, or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. It's interesting. People, sociologists and psychologists, have studied why do people brag, and one of the things they found interesting enough in a 2012 Harvard study is that there are parts of the brain that are stimulated when you talk about yourself. It's the same kind of sensations that the brain gets when eating food and receiving rewards. Some say it's like a survival technique because it's so important for us to be affirmed where we have been hurt and we feel empty, and Tim Keller, I think, says it very well that it's like the ego, the self is hurting, and that's why it wants to talk about itself because you don't generally talk about something in your body unless there's something wrong with it.

You wouldn't talk about the third toe on your right foot unless it was hurting. You don't even think about it, and so it is the soul doesn't need to talk about itself generally unless it's hurting, unless there's something wrong, and so there's a way in which we're trying to just survive by promoting self because we actually feel hurt on the inside. The fact of the matter is that pride and boasting is not just so much about me being boastful about something that is intrinsically good about me. Instead, pride is about the comparison to others.

C.S. Lewis said it well. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next person. He continues, we say that people are proud of being rich or clever or good looking, but they are not. They're proud of being richer or cleverer or better looking than others if everyone else became equally rich or clever or good looking, there would be nothing to be proud about. And I think that the goal that God has for us is that we move ourselves into a gospel mentality where we're just simply not in that kind of comparison game at all.

In other words, there's a way in which God can bring contentment in who you are in Him. I thought one of the hardest days of our life was when we dropped our son off at college in Texas and he didn't know anybody. He was just walking out to a field where there were 3,000 other freshmen and we'd homeschooled him, sheltered him, and we'd just drop him off.

And I saw Bennett a couple weeks, happened to be in Texas, saw him a couple weeks or so or two or three weeks after he'd started school and he just loved it, you know. And I was talking to him, we had a meal together and he said something that I'll never forget. He said, you know, I was walking around campus the first week and I realized I don't know anybody and I realized that nobody here really knows anything about me. Nobody knows of any golf tournament I ever won. Nobody knows of any debate tournament I ever won.

Nobody knows of any scholarship that I received or anything else good about me. He said, and I just sat and I just walked and I thought about that. And he said, and I decided, I'm okay with that.

I thought, well, praise God. Because you just are gonna have to accept the fact that at any given point there may or may not be somebody there to affirm you. And affirmation is wonderful.

I'm not, it's a wonderful thing to be affirmed. But there is something deeper, I think, that God has for us that it's a gospel mentality where we're not really rising and falling on that sense of affirmation because in a real sense what happens in the gospel is that you get healed and over time and you get taken, in a sense, out of the picture of performance. And what I mean by that is that what Paul is saying is that he is not trying to measure himself against the other apostles, the so-called super apostles.

He's not trying to measure his life against whether he's done better than somebody else. He's trying to teach them something very powerful here. He's trying to teach them that he's not even gonna enter into that kind of thought process.

Tim Keller says this very well of Paul. He refuses to play that game. He does not see a sin and let it destroy his sense of identity.

He'll just not make a connection. Neither does he see an accomplishment and congratulate himself. He sees all kinds of sins in himself and all kinds of accomplishments too, but he refuses to connect them with himself or his identity so although he knows himself to be chief of sinners, that fact is not gonna stop him from doing the things that he's called to do.

You see what he's saying? Because as long as you're in that system of thought, am I doing well? Am I doing well spiritually? Am I not doing well spiritually? Have I done much? Have I not done much? As long as you're in that sense comparing yourselves or even weighing your own life against some scale, as long as you're in that, if you think that you're doing better than others, then it's gonna be pride.

If you think you're doing worse than others, it's gonna be shame. And what Paul's saying is you need to come out of that all together. Again, Tim Keller, gospel humility is not needing to think about myself, not needing to connect things with myself. It's an end to the thought such as I'm in this room with these people.

Does that make me look good? Do I wanna be here? A true gospel humility means I stop connecting every experience, every conversation with myself. In fact, I stop thinking about myself. The freedom of self-forgetfulness, the blessed rest that only self-forgetfulness brings.

The way out of this, the way out of a life that's so centered on self, either boasting about self or feeling ashamed of self, the way out of this is twofold. And the first is, as I was saying earlier, you don't think about your third toe on your right foot unless there's something that's hurting about it. And the very best way to quit thinking about the toe on your right foot is for it to be healed. So if there's something about you you're having to think about your own soul over and over, it probably means that there's something there that's wounded, right? And part of the reason we pray for one another every Sunday is that we believe that God is outside of time, and so He's able to actually minister in a palpable, real way, not just a figurative way, but in a real way, He's able to minister His love to every moment of your life.

I really believe that. It's something we can't wrap our minds around. You see, God's not in a continuum of time, is He?

He's in eternity. It's something different that we can't wrap our minds around. But because of that, someone who is omnipresent and outside of time could be at moments in your past and in your future.

I don't understand these things. Physicists say if we could travel at the speed of light, time would stand still. Maybe it's because God is light that He is able to be at every moment. That's why we pray. We pray that God would be in every moment of our life, the times in which you needed to receive love and you didn't, the times you needed to receive affirmation and you didn't. What if God were to come into that very moment, even some of the moments that you are not consciously aware of, and you invite Him in and you say, God, I want to be healed because I don't want to have to always be thinking about that place within me.

I yearn for that. But here's the other thing that happens. What happens, and this is what Paul is talking about here, and all throughout 2 Corinthians, and everywhere that you see Paul write, he is so highlighting the power of the Gospel by saying the Gospel is Jesus plus nothing else. Jesus plus none of your accomplishments.

Jesus plus none of your righteousness. You see, even if you took your very, very best accomplishments and your most spiritual attributes and your greatest acts of service and everything that you could list as part of some religious life that could be impressive to somebody, even if you took all of that and you stacked it all together, it would be of no value in your salvation. So Paul is like, why would I have any interest in listing before you all the things that I have, quote, accomplished spiritually?

Why would I need to spend time listing for you the things that seem to be good or that I value? Because what he's saying is that while those things may have some value in the kingdom, in terms of the standing that I have with God, they're of no value whatsoever. Instead, what Paul says is that he who knew no sin, Jesus, became our sin so that we who had so much sin would be declared to be the righteousness of Christ. See, in the Old Covenant, there was an arrangement through a mediator, through Moses, where God said, if My people will obey Me, then they'll be My treasure possession and I will bless them. And so the people agreed, we will obey God, but they weren't able to obey God. They lost their faith within one long weekend after the Red Sea. The people proved immediately that though we mean well and we want to obey, that there's no capacity within us to obey.

We were born in sin and we fall short of the glory of God. And so what happened in the New Covenant was God said, I need a person. I need a human being.

I need a man. I need one man who could be obedient at every juncture of his life and never be disobedient. One perfect, sinless human being to represent all of humanity. And so the covenant, the New Covenant, is really between the Father and the Son. And the Father says, if you'll be obedient even unto death on a cross, then you will be highly exalted and blessed. And the Son never says no to the Father, never says yes to the devil, and is obedient even unto death on a cross. The New Covenant is altogether more glorious than the old because the old was between us trying to keep our side of the bargain with God. But in the New Covenant, we're taken out of the picture.

And instead, it's between the Father and the Son. And therefore, Paul says that whoever believes in Christ is in Christ. And the way that you're blessed with every spiritual blessing is not because you've merited it, but because you have been found to be in Christ. Because Christ has accomplished it all. When He said on the cross, it is finished, He means it is finished. The living of a perfected human life has already taken place.

The punishment that was due to all humanity has already taken place through the cross of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It has been proven that Christ's work was efficient and was sufficient and was more than enough to pay and cover for all of our sin so that anyone who would receive Him would be in this sense hidden in Christ and therefore your personal merits are taken out of the picture. It doesn't mean that the things you do in your life don't matter.

Every single thing you do in your life matters. But in terms of your walk with God and what matters in the end, all that matters is Jesus. And so Paul says, if I'm gonna boast, I'll tell you what I'll do.

Let me tell you all the times I've fallen and nearly died and couldn't make it. If I'm gonna boast, he said, I'm gonna boast in Christ. It's an invitation to move from feeling like you gotta brag about yourself to bragging on Jesus. And that's the gospel.

Allen Wright. And today's teaching as we come to the conclusion in our series on 2 Corinthians Bragging on Jesus. Allen is back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and our final word today. God's always been there. In every moment, you narrowly escaped from danger. In every moment, you were surprised by a blessing.

In every moment, you just knew the direction to take. God was there. Your life is defined by countless moments of God's grace.

Perhaps they've been covered by the sands of time or have just gone unnoticed in the rush of life, but your life is full of God moments. When you make a gift, we'll send you a special bundle, both Pastor Alan's heart-stirring book, God Moments, and a CD album containing all his audio messages on the subject. Make your gift today and start your spiritual treasure hunt to uncover your God moments.

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That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, pastorallen.org. Allen, in that last teaching there, I really like how you unpacked even the science behind the ego and the mind and really how this can be a symptom of something going on. But you go back to bragging on Jesus because in the victorious life, we realize that we are nothing without him, but he's given us every power. When your life switches from being preoccupied with your own performance and shifts over to being preoccupied with the grandeur of Christ's performance, when your life shifts away from always asking the question, how am I doing? Have I done well enough?

How are people thinking of me? And instead it shifts to what has Christ done? How well has Christ done? See, what that does is it moves you away from preoccupation with self to preoccupation with the grace of God. And that's where God wants us. That's where we're empowered.

That's where life changes. And it's a matter, therefore, of our lives being focused on Jesus the author and the finisher of our faith. The question's not are you worthy or have you accomplished and do you have something to brag about. That's just not the question anymore. God wants you to feel great about yourself.

He wants you to have tremendous inward esteem. But the question's not whether you've done well enough. Real gospel living means that's just not the question. The question is, has Christ done well enough? And the answer is he's done perfectly. And that's the gospel. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.