Prayer and Praise in the Spirit [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

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, Higher Power, as presented at Rinaldo Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout our entire program today, 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.

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Here is Alan Wright. Praise God for everything we learn intellectually. But there are some things, and Mary needed it, you cannot get except for spiritually.

Prophetic words, revelatory words, like what Elizabeth got that didn't come from her mind. She didn't figure that out. She had a miracle happen. The baby in her own womb leaped. And as the baby leaped, she could have won.

That's not like a normal kick of my little baby. It was something different. She felt it, and instantly she was filled with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit came upon her in power.

She was anointed, and she just began to speak out these words. Who am I that I should be in the presence of the mother of my own Savior? And your mind doesn't get that. The Sukkah doesn't get that. That's spiritual. So, it's possible, beloved, that your soul, the Sukkah, can be extremely troubled, and the Spirit still rejoices.

This is very important to understand. Now look at this in Matthew 26, in this agonizing scene at Gethsemane, where Jesus knows that the crucifixion is nigh. Verse 37 of Matthew 26, Taken with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, Jesus began to be sorrowful and troubled. And then he said to them, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.

Remain here and watch with me, soul, Sukkah. Son of God was 100% God and 100% human, and your soul can experience pain emotionally, so great that a physical phenomenon, which Jesus experienced, happens medically, where blood will begin to come out of your pores. It is one of the heightened, most heightened stress responses the body can experience. What he was saying, I remember Jesus spoke perfect truth. He was being perfectly honest. He said to his friends, This is crushing to my soul. He knew what was going to come, and it wasn't the physical suffering. It was the weight of taking upon himself the sin of the world. Of the pure, holy, sinless Son of God being treated as if he'd committed all of our sin. He said, I can barely, barely stay alive right now.

Please pray for me. And they couldn't stay awake. Their bodies just couldn't stay awake. So a couple of verses later, verse 40, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping.

What's going on here? And he said to Peter, So could you not watch with me one hour? I just needed an hour of intercession from you. Watch and pray that you not enter into temptation. And then he has this to say, The spirit, that's the pneuma, the spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh, the body, sarx in Greek, is weak. So in the course of five verses, Jesus has mentioned soul, suke, trouble to the point of death. The body, the physical being and the spirit, the pneuma of a man or woman.

Spirit, soul and body. And what he's saying here has been so encouraging to me for many years now in my Christian life. That he's saying that your flesh is weak and you've seen that my soul is troubled to the point that I can barely stay alive. But the spirit, the born again spirit, is willing. And I wish that English translations would render this by its more common meaning, desiring. To will is to want or desire. Willing, we say willing as if, would you be willing to take the trash out, honey? All right, I'm willing. And that doesn't mean I want to, it just means, okay, I'll do it.

That's not what willing means here. It means more like, what is your will? What do you want?

What do you want more than anything? And he's saying the spirit is always willing, always wanting, always yearning, always ready to pray. Always ready to rejoice. The spirit within you is always eager to commune with the Holy Spirit and to have love and joy and peace that passes all understanding. The spirit within you is always ready, always wanting to commune with the Holy Spirit to receive prophetic revelation. Your spirit being is not tired, is not worn out, is not confused. Your spirit being is altogether new.

Behold, the old is gone, the new has come. You're a new creature in Christ. You are a spirit being who can commune with the Holy Spirit all the time. It's the only way you can understand how Paul can say pray without ceasing. I want to develop my life so that my spirit, even my body's tired and my mind is confused, that my spirit is just continually communing with the Holy Spirit.

And the invitation, therefore, is to cultivate the life of the spirit. John 4, 23, Jesus has been meeting with a Samaritan woman and she's having this conversation where she doesn't know the things that she's saying. And she's talking about, well, where are we supposed to worship?

Is it on this mountain or that mountain? And she's talking about all this religious stuff. And Jesus says, the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father's seeking such people to worship Him. God is spirit. God is spirit. And those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth. So the mind, my soul, doth magnify the Lord.

My mind is set upon the truth because the truth is God is good. God is glorious. God is holy. God has come in the person of Jesus Christ.

And I've been set free from the law of sin and death by the grace of God through the cross of Jesus Christ. And I recount all of that. So Mary's mind is just magnifying God for who He is and all that He's done. But she's worshiping spiritually.

That's Alan Wright. And we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Would you love a better marriage? You don't need more good advice.

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That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. This goes far to explain what I've been trying to emphasize during pandemic. Everywhere you go and everybody you talk to is tired. And everybody you talk to is just confused and worn out. Look where our minds have gotten us, honestly. Look at the levels of hatred and disagreement that we got.

Really, people are going to lose friends over whether they wear a mask or not. Really? It is crazy. It's crazy. It's nonsense.

And it's absolutely happening. It's ridiculous. And it just shows we gravitate to the mind, and what we need to do is cultivate the Spirit. If I'm with you in worship, if I'm communing with you together in Jesus' name in the Holy Spirit, why do I care what your opinion is about a mask or not a mask or a vaccine or not a mask? We're talking about worshipping the most holy God. We're talking about life in the Spirit. Oh, hallelujah! God is glorious and wonderful, and He's loving.

He's perfectly loving, and He loves you infinitely, and He wants your Spirit to apprehend this all the time. We got to let our Spirit inform our minds. Remember, I love the mind. I'm not denigrating the mind. I love the mind. The mind is limited. The mind is limited. Mary's mind could not comprehend all of this. Who could? She needed spiritual revelation.

Let the things the Spirit can show you change how you think, or else you will limit your thoughts to what you can understand, and you can't understand enough, beloved. I was for some reason thinking about when our kids were little, and one time we took them to go play putt-putt. We like to play putt-putt. I always like to do fun things with the kids. You know, parents, just play with your kids.

If you want them to be really smart, play with them. And so we just play with them. I just love playing with them, and we go play putt-putt. And at putt-putt, if you make a hole in one and you got a green golf ball and the green light is on, you get to run over there and get a little prize, a discount on your next game or something like that. Well, I'm in this one instance. I declared to the kids, I said, in addition, if you make a hole in one, you get a dollar. And they're just adding some fun to it. Well, unfortunately, neither child got a hole in one, so neither one got a dollar. And we're leaving the putt-putt, and they're in a bad mood.

I was like, wait. You know, parents, you have different priorities in your home, but attitude is the... I would never discipline for a mistake. I wouldn't discipline for somebody who tries and fails. I wouldn't discipline even for just momentary, fleshly, you know. But attitude, when you get to choose, no, no, no. There are children starving in parts of the world right now, and you in a bad mood because you didn't make a hole in one?

No. But just think about that scene for a moment. We are playing putt-putt. People are starving.

We're playing putt-putt. And it's a beautiful day in a beautiful city, and you're in a happy family with every kind of resource imaginable, and you didn't win a dollar, and you're in a bad mood of what you didn't get. And here's the thing. The reason I'm making this illustration, it's not just that they didn't understand their situation in life. It's they didn't have any understanding of who their father is. It's tough for a four-year-old to understand.

Right now, all I know is I didn't get a dollar. Oh, child. Oh, dear child. If you had any idea the number of hours your father has prayed for you, when you sleep at night and he comes in and lays his hands on you and prophesies over you, and every time you had the smallest earache, he got on his knees before God, if you had any idea that your daddy would lay down his life for you, and what you don't understand, child, is that we're going to pay for every one of your horseback riding lessons and every ballet lesson, and then we're going to cart you all over the nation to speech contests, and then we're going to pay for you to go to University of North Carolina, and you're going to be sending me credit card bills, and I'm going to say how many times you've been to Starbucks this week, and you're worried about a dollar, you don't have enough revelation to understand your situation. You've got to get it spiritually to know who God is. Oh, my soul magnifies God, because my spirit is rejoicing in Him.

He's my Savior. I done preached myself happy here. Hallelujah.

Sometimes I need my own sermon worse than anybody else. Philippians 4, 4, he said, Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice. Rejoice, have joy again. Have joy again after that.

Rejoice. How are you going to do that spiritually? I've said this so many times, but the engagement of worship together releases spiritual power, and I don't know how else to say it, but we need each other so much, because we're cultivating life in the Spirit. Did I ever tell you about the man who was having a hard time getting out of bed on a Sunday morning, and his wife said, Get up, honey, it's time to go to church. He said, I don't want to go. And she said, Give me three good reasons. And he said, Well, number one, he said, I'm tired and I don't feel like going. He said, Number two, he said, The church isn't that good. And number three, he said, Nobody likes me there. She said, Come on, get up, honey. He said, Give me three reasons I ought to go. She said, Well, number one, the church is pretty good sometimes. And she said, Secondly, there are some people that like you. And thirdly, you're the pastor. Now you've got to be there.

Get up and get up. I went to a silly football game in Charlotte last night. And I had an I was so pulled up from my Wake Forest Deeks and I got stayed to the third quarter. And to drive back from Charlotte because I had faith. I just thought it was going to turn for the better.

But it didn't. And so I went to bed late last night. And when the alarm goes off and I hadn't had enough sleep in a Sunday morning, what do you think my body tells me? Same thing your body tells you. It's warm and nice and soft. That alarm went off.

I didn't know where I was in the world. The body says stay in the bed and the mind says, Well, you know, you can rationalize it, but the spirit. So the key, therefore, to rejoicing in the Lord always is not to try to overcome all your circumstances or to have your mind make sense of everything all the time, but to keep your spirit in ever increasing communion with the Holy Spirit.

And he'll tell you secrets. Hallelujah. This goes really far to explain how, for example, I'll put these slides up here, that while all good gifts are from God, not all are equal. So the body experiences relaxation and the soul can experience satisfaction. Hey, everything worked out great.

My team won, you know, whatever. But the spirit has peace that passes understanding. Or you could say it this way. The body, again, the body's wonderful. The body's a masterpiece. Experiences pleasure.

And soul experiences happiness. You know, if things are going great, hey, you just got a great report from one of your kids. You know, Abby called this week. She has some good things happen at her work.

And, you know, we're parents. Like, that's fantastic. I'm so happy about that. That's great.

You know, she could have called and it wouldn't have been a good week. But it was. We're happy about that. But what the spirit can enjoy is joy. Joy. So it's okay, beloved, to endure difficult circumstances and admit that our souls are troubled and that our bodies are weary of a long pandemic. But there's an invitation to live spiritually. Our souls, our minds, magnify God. And our spirits rejoice in God our Savior. You're a spiritual being. And your spirit is ready and willing. And that's the gospel.

Allen Wright. Our good news message. Prayer and praise in the spirit from the series Higher Power.

Stay with us. Pastor Alan is back here in the studio sharing his parting good news thought for the day in just a moment. If you've ever thought that being filled with the Holy Spirit meant shutting off your mind, you're in for a wonderful surprise. God's word and God's spirit were never meant to be separated. Word and spirit always belong together.

The key to abundant life in Christ isn't knowing your Bible. The secret isn't being filled with the spirit. The answer is both word and spirit. Though some traditions emphasize studying scripture and some traditions emphasize the spirit, the path to real Christian growth is the fullness of both word and spirit. As someone once said, all word, no spirit, you dry up. All spirit, no word, you blow up. Both word and spirit, you grow up. When you make a gift of support this month, we'll send you Allen Wright's newest audio album on CD or digital download titled Word and Spirit.

It's about the beauty of balance. Embrace the fullness of God's word and his spirit and grow like never before. With word and spirit, you'll grow up and you'll be helping someone else grow as well. And remember, when you partner with Allen Wright Ministries, you'll be broadcasting the love of God to thousands every day. 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. Now we are in our final days of offering this special product. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Allen Wright Ministries.

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It's free and just a click away at pastorallen.org. Back here in the studio to share Pastor Alan's parting good news thought for the day, prayer and prayer for the day. Prayer and praise in the spirit. Pastor Alan, what's our closing thought? Well, God invites you into a spiritual life.

And what that means is not at all the same thing as inviting you into a religious life. It really is more technically to say that we are comprised of spirit, soul, and body. We think about things. We feel things with our body. But there is the part of us that is born again that is in a very real sense in direct communion with God. You know, spirit communes with spirit. And Daniel, we spend a lot of time in school growing up, educating our minds, and we spend some time, some of us do, trying to train up the body.

I need to do a little more of that lately. But on the whole, we don't think as much about what's happening with us spiritually. And the invitation that we get is for a life that can cultivate prayer and praise in the spirit. And you're a spiritual being. And that gives you an intimate access to God. And so our bodies can be tired and even hurting, and our minds can be confused, and we can still be in the spirit. That's a powerful thought. Today's Good News message is a listener-supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.