Spiritual Gifts II [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

No other illustration really makes sense except to say the gifts are like you're a member of the body, and the hand and the foot and the eye and the mind all need each other because we are so intimately connected. 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. So as you listen to today's message, 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 this later in the program. But right now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. So for years, my early years here, I was amazed at the notes that she would write to me. And she would write, you know, not just like your birthday, but just, I mean, whenever, spirit leader. She would write this note to me, and it would be so encouraging, full of scripture, full of just encouragement about how the Lord was using me, about the ministry, about our family.

I mean, whatever. I mean, just overflowing, often had just a wonderful sense, not only of love with it, but a kind of profound insight that was with it. And then you could see, she'd go on the front, then she'd go on the back of the car, and then she'd run out, and she'd start going vertically up the side. And then she'd go across the top, and then she'd come back this way, and then you got to turn up this way because it was this way.

Because she just like, she's just spilling over with it. And I just thought, it's so amazing that, you know, I'm the special one that Karen writes all these notes to. And some years ago, we had a big birthday celebration for Karen, and a bunch of people were there for this big celebration, a bunch of church people were there. And people kind of started saying things, and somebody stood up and said, you know, the amazing thing about Karen is these notes that I get. And I'm like, man, somebody else gets a note. And then somebody else said, you know, I love all those notes. And we realized, all these people were getting these notes all the time. It's just spilling over in there.

What is that? Well, that's the gift of encouragement. The word encourage here in the Greek language, I want you to know this, because I love this word, is para kaleo, which comes from para. You know that prefix para, like parallel, and it means alongside of.

Okay, like parallel means running alongside of each other like that. So it comes from para, and it comes from a Greek verb kaleo, which means to call. Now, this is really important because this word para kaleo is also related directly to the word para kleitos, which is Jesus's term that he uses in John 15, 26, to describe the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit, he calls the para kleitos, which is just a noun form of para kaleo, to encourage. He called the Holy Spirit the one who is the encourager. So that's the word Paul's talking about here in this spiritual gift that is called encouragement. So I point that out because if Jesus calls the Holy Spirit, the para kleitos, the encourager, when you are encouraging people, you're doing something very, very much like God.

It is the nature of God. This idea of the para kleitos, the one who's called alongside, it gets translated in a lot of different ways. And interesting, I read this week in one central African culture, they translate it as the one who falls down.

And I'm like, what? And the reason they do is because the image is if someone has been taken hurt or ill on the side of the road and a passerby comes to help them, they get down with them. And so they use the word to mean one who's fallen down next to someone else who's in need.

Wow. The encourager is also an image of one who is called in to help. And that's where you get the idea of an advocate.

In 1 John, Jesus is called the para kleitos, an advocate. And that's an image, a legal image of when you've been accused and you don't know what to do about it, you have an advocate legally who stands in the gap on your behalf. That's encouragement. And when we're discouraged, we just need someone who has a supernatural capacity to help reframe the story of our lives. The power to prevail and to endure comes when we have someone that puts courage into us. So people need more than just a pep talk.

They need something supernatural. And that's what happens in encouragement. It's not superficial.

It's not what Jeremiah spoke about when he said some false prophet say peace, peace when there's no peace. It's not superficial, but it is profound in that you don't fix somebody when you encourage them, but you help them face what they need to face because they're going to make it through it and you've been called alongside of them. Encouragement is the currency of heaven and discouragement is the currency of hell.

Who wouldn't want the gift, the spiritual gift of encouragement? I want to talk about leadership. Romans 12, 8, the one who leads, leads with zeal, do so passionately. I was looking back at a sermon that I preached in 2010 and I saw that I'd made comments about the gift of leadership.

And I want to read you verbatim what I wrote in 2010. I said, this is a very important gift. The spirit empowered capacity to lead God's people successfully while keeping a servant's heart. People with this gift usually have supernatural wisdom to see programmatic and administrative solutions that help the church. And I then had this line. Pastor Chris Lawson demonstrates this gift regularly. I looked to him for it. Have you ever searched for a spiritual solution and found that nothing would quite fit?

And then there's one adjustment in the logistics and suddenly it opens up right. And I wrote these words 2010. We had been laboring for a solution to a problem at Reynolda. Our church is full. What do we do? This is 2010.

No place for people to sit. And Pastor Chris said, I've got an idea. We could start a new worship venue using a video cast in the fellowship hall. And so we did. And in short order, our tenets had grown. But what we never realized is what we started back in 2010 of trying could we do the sermon by video and have a different band and the people. We didn't know it was going to become a multi site model where we have four campuses. And we've been able to expand our mission two or three fold. So leadership is anointed of the Holy Spirit and becomes a gift when there is a supernatural unction on it.

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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When you order the video series, we'll also send you two copies of the accompanying study guide. Whether your marriage is going through some special challenges or your marriage is in a season of health, you'll find powerful, transformational truth in good news for your marriage. Make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today and fill your marriage with the grace of God. 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, pastorallen.org.

Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. Let's talk about mercy. I love the gift of mercy.

Romans 12, verse 8. The one who does acts of mercy do so with cheerfulness. The mercy gift enables a person supernaturally to feel what others are feeling. A mercy gift empowers someone to be able to love and care for others who are in need, not because they ought to, but because they feel it so deeply that they want to.

It's as if they must care. The mercy gift is so beautiful because it almost has a prophetic quality to it because a person full of mercy may become aware not by human intuition or intellect, but may become aware of what someone else is feeling and therefore what they're experiencing in life, and the connection then becomes powerful and palpable, and the mercy heart then starts overflowing with a desire to help, and that turns usually into prayer. Pastor Brandon has this gift beautifully. He will at times have been praying with him and praying for people, and you can just see when this comes upon him that the Holy Spirit is granting his pastor's heart a mercy that then often erupts in tears, doesn't have to, but feels almost down to his very bones, almost shaking with it, a sense like what the Holy Spirit himself does, where he begins to intercede with groans that are too deep for words, and we need to have the mercy gift be accompanied, Paul says, by being cheerful about it. What does he mean by that? He doesn't mean cheerful like you have a mercy gift and you go into a difficult, hard place where there's grief or pain and you're just chipper.

That's not what it means. What it means is that when you have mercy by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, you not only don't mind being in that place that others would avoid because there's pain or struggle or hardship there, but you're glad to be there. That's a beautiful thing, and God gives this to me, and I'm so thankful for it. I don't ever feel like someone says, Come over, Pastor, my beloved spouse is dying.

I don't ever go, No, I want to run the other direction. No, I'm glad to hold someone's hand in the holy moments of making a transition to heaven. I'm glad to be amongst those that mourn when you have mercy. I know Jesus healed because he loved people, and oftentimes in the Scripture, you'll see it said that Jesus saw the crowds and had compassion.

That's why he sometimes wanted to go take a nap and get by himself, but he was stirred with his mercy. It's the heart of God. Oh, ask God for that gift. I want to talk a little bit more about the revelatory gifts or the prophetic gifts. We said last time that the idea of prophecy is not like Old Testament prophecy where there were thunderous rebukes from the Jeremiahs and the Amuses, not like the Old Testament prophets were expected to be infallible or else they were condemned as false prophets. No, we're told in Corinthians that the New Testament prophecy is for upbuilding, for encouragement and consolation, and we're told that when we get prophetic words, we're to weigh them, which means that they're not coming perfectly and we need to discern, does that really feel like it bears witness to me?

I almost wish we had a different word for our day than prophecy because it's been misunderstood and abused. We're talking about supernatural revelatory words that bring encouragement and people know that God has spoken. Let's talk about a few of these revelatory gifts, discernment. 1 Corinthians 12, 10, to another, the ability to distinguish between spirits. Some years ago, an elder came to me and many years ago said, I had a dream in which you had been approached by God and he offered you the gift of discernment and you said no. And he said, did you say no to the gift of discernment? I said, of course not, I would never decline a gift of the Holy Spirit from the living Lord, what are you talking about?

Take that dream home with you. I didn't put it exactly like that, but this elder, we kind of spoke to each other that way. But a few days later, I got to thinking about it and I thought, well, and I had in my mind at that time the idea that my plate is pretty full of seeing needs all the time and I struggle about trying not to figure out I got to fix them all. And I think that maybe I had thought that discernment means that now I'm going to walk in the room and not only do I see all the needs that are present, but I'm going to see every demon and every other dark thing and every other problem and I got to do something about that. And the Lord really helped me see, no, that's not what the gift of discernment is about. To discern something that is a problem doesn't mean you're supposed to fix the problem. It might just mean you're supposed to avoid the problem. It might mean that you are going to distinguish between spirits, meaning knowing what is evil and what is of God and that maybe God just wants you to pray or maybe God wants you to know who to link arms with or who to not link arms with.

It's a very valuable gift. The word of wisdom is mentioned in verse 8, to one is given through the spirit of the utter of wisdom. And this is a kind of revelation that can happen through you in which there is perhaps a confusing situation or a stalemate or a dilemma and there just seems to be no way forward except for a supernatural word of wisdom. And this happened to me I think one time years ago when a man came seeking counseling because he was believing he was called to a new vocation and his wife didn't believe it was good or godly. He told me about the new vocation and honestly I didn't bear witness to it and I didn't think it was a particularly noble vocation. But he was so positive in his mind that this was God and that his wife was standing in the way that their marriage was in jeopardy. And I thought, how in the world can we move forward?

There was no way to talk him into, hey, maybe your wife is right. And while I'm sitting there praying about this, a story, an image from many, many years earlier came right up into my mind. And it was a story of a case in which I had been offered a scholarship to go to Israel for five weeks. But we had just had our baby boy and Ann had no grace for me to go off for five weeks when we had a baby boy at home. I felt like it was God and I was supposed to go and she didn't have grace for it and so I realized that the higher priority was for me to honor my wife and to cultivate our marriage and I stayed home.

Well, a year later I got offered the same trip, she had grace for it and I went. I told the man that little story because I was essentially saying perhaps there's a way in which there's something that you feel really is God but there's a higher priority with your wife and instead of trying to talk him out of the job, let him see that image and I think it just came like a word of wisdom and it's like the light just turned on, you see what I'm saying? So sometimes when you're in that, you just ask the Lord, would you give a word of wisdom here? The word of knowledge is similar to this but it often comes with visions or impressions or just knowing something that maybe the Lord wants to address, maybe something that the Lord wants to heal, to another the utterance of knowledge versus according to the same spirit and this is like sometimes it just comes up in these images in a prophetic way. My assistant, Laura Hull is fantastic and everything she does in our work and I love partnering with her but one of the things that's a tremendous gift about getting to work with is she has a beautiful revelatory gift and the way it shows up with Laura all the time is she just gets images. It just pops right in her mind from the Holy Spirit and it's just fantastic. So just I mean it happens all the time but I was thinking about our spy family and it made me remember a story from some years ago that we were at the New Year's blessing service and after everybody had been having a blessing spoken over for the new year, Laura and a team came to bless me and my family and the night before by some fluke, our family had gotten out an old DVD of the animated movie The Incredibles and we had just enjoyed watching The Incredibles and we came in on Sunday morning and afterwards Laura begins the time of blessing and she began with these words, I just have this image that came in my mind of you guys are The Incredibles and she began to just speak out blessing about how God was doing incredible things and of course what was happening there was immediately we go that's not a fluke, that's not a coincidence, that can't have happened, God has our attention. So God brings impressions like that and all of these gifts that we've talked about last week in this, they really in the end are not like us and our spy gadgets because what really the only image that makes sense of this, Paul says in verse 12 of 1 Corinthians 12, just as the body is one and has many members and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ and no other illustration really makes sense except to say the gifts are like you're a member of the body and the hand and the foot and the eye and the mind all need each other because we are so intimately connected. You have, if you're a Christian, gifts of the Spirit, some you may not even be quite aware of, it's time for them to be fanned in the flame and the Lord says eagerly desire, so ask him.

He may just be ready to give you a new gift and that's the gospel. Alan Wright, our Good News message, spiritual gifts from the series Higher Power. I encourage you to stay with us because Pastor Alan is back here in the studio sharing a parting good news thought for today.

You're in just a moment. You'll also learn how to pray for your spouse and how to bless one another with a faith-filled vision for the future. To help you grow, when you order the video series, we'll also send you two copies of the accompanying study guide. Whether your marriage is going through some special challenges or your marriage is in a season of health, you'll find powerful, transformational truth in good news for your marriage. Make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today and fill your marriage with the grace of God. 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. Unlock the power of blessing your life. Discover God's grace-filled vision for your life by signing up for Alan Wright's free daily blessing. If you want to fill your heart with grace and encouragement, get Alan Wright's daily blessing. It's free and just a click away at PastorAlan.org. Back now with Pastor Alan, our parting good news thought for the day. And I think that's a good thought right there is to be bold enough to ask.

Ask the Lord to show you. You know, I think that when I think about encouraging every listener to really want God to move in your life by the power of the Holy Spirit, and you go, well, why? And it's because we love people.

This is what it is about. Jesus ministered not just for the sign and wonder of revealing himself as the Son of God, but because he loved people. He saw people and saw that they seemed like they were harassed and helpless as if sheep without a shepherd. He saw the sick and even when he was tired and probably should have retreated for his own personal rest.

He couldn't because he cared so much. He had compassion upon them. And people in the world today are lost and people, listen, listeners, you have friends that, and family members, they need the healing mercies of God. They need encouragement that comes supernaturally. They need wisdom.

And God would like to use you. And that's what the gifts are about. So we don't long for the gifts in our lives so that we could be showy. We don't long to have the gifts of the Holy Spirit so we could say, look how spiritual I am. We don't long for the gifts of the Holy Spirit so we can feel like we've got some spiritual badge.

It is because we love people. And I want to help people, and I think you do too. So ask God for more and more of the power of his Holy Spirit to work gifts in and through you. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at pastorallen.org or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. 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.