Freedom for the Next Generation Through Jubilee [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Allen Wright. When I was a kid, I loved playing football in the neighborhood. I loved playing basketball over the Ryan's driveway. All those games, I was always wanting to get the kids in the neighborhood to play the games. But maybe my favorite was Kick the Can. Anybody remember Kick the Can? Kids don't play Kick the Can as much.

They're missing out. All you need is a can. Your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series called Unleashed, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program today, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. You can find out more about it and even receive a copy of your very own for your donation this month to Allen Wright Ministries. So as you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer at PastorAllen.org. Find out more about it and make your request or call 877-544-4860.

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Here is Allen Wright. Okay, are you ready for some good news? In Christ, there is Jubilee. Jubilee in ancient Israel was a time every 50th year when all the debts were canceled, slaves were set free, and land was returned to the original owners. And Jesus announced that it has come to pass in Him. He is our Jubilee. I start today in Luke chapter 4 where we see the instance where Jesus is in His hometown of Nazareth and He's given the scroll of Isaiah. You read from Isaiah 61 and He is the guest preacher of the day.

And this is what happened in Luke 4 verse 17. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to Him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed. And here is the announcement of Jubilee, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. And He rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him, and He began to say to them, Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. And what He is referencing here is found in Leviticus in chapter 25. And all throughout Leviticus 25 there is descriptions of the nature of this incredible proposal of Jubilee.

And I'll read verse 8, You shall count seven weeks of years, literally seven Sabbaths of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall give you forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the day of atonement you shall sound the trumpet throughout all your land. And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you. In it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of itself nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you.

You may eat of the produce of the field. In this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his own property. And I'll pick up reading it in verse 39, If your brother becomes poor beside you and sells himself to you, you shall not make him serve as a slave. He shall be with you as a hired servant and as a sojourner. He shall serve with you until the year of jubilee. Then he shall go out from you, he and his children with him, and go back to his own clan and return to the possession of his fathers. For they are my servants whom I brought out of the land of Egypt.

They shall not be sold as slaves. When I was a kid I loved playing football in the neighborhood. I loved playing basketball over the Ryan's driveway. All those games, I was always wanting to get the kids in the neighborhood to play the games. But maybe my favorite was Kick the Can. Anybody remember Kick the Can? Kids don't play Kick the Can as much.

They're missing out. All you need is a can and some kids. It's sort of a combination of hide and seek and a race. The way we played it is the person who was it had to count to ten with his eyes closed while everybody playing went to their best hiding spot. And then the person who was it had to go and try to find people where they're hiding and then call out once you see them.

And if you saw a person, you call out their name and you had to run back. If you were it, you run back and tap that can before the other person could come that you called out and kick that can. So you'd be going out there and say, I spied George behind the tree in the Simon's yard and then both of them start running towards the can. And if the person's it, tags the can, that person is now put in jail. And jail is just standing in between a few trees right there beside the driveway. And the point of this is it could be a dozen kids playing, but it's got to go out there and spy everybody, go back, tap that can and get everybody in jail.

And once that happens, then it doesn't have to be it anymore. But the thing that was so fun about the game is that if a bunch of people are in jail but there's still somebody out there hiding that hadn't been found, if that person can run and kick that can before it gets over there and touches the can, then everybody in jail is set free. And you just need to remember that I've told you before when I played hockey the trophy that I got, right? Most hustle, Mr. Hustle. And so I was younger than a lot of the kids and I might have been littler than them, but I tell you I had some of the fastest legs in the Claxton School District.

And I was good at this game and I loved it. It happened plenty of times where I was the last one hiding. I had some good hiding spots and nobody found me and the whole neighborhood's locked up in jail. And they're just waiting. Can somebody, can Allen come around the corner and just come flying up here and kick that can? It's the greatest feeling in the world to get where you see it and he's over here or she's over there. And I come around the corner and I say, that's it, I make my move. And I'm flying in there and kick that can and everybody goes, woo!

And off they go and the game is a total reset at that point. I think that's where my call to ministry began right there. That's all I do.

That's still what I do every day. I'm just looking to kick the can so somebody can get out of their captivity. And anyway, the thing I love about it is that even if you had been caught in the first 10 seconds of the game and you've been in jail for 25 minutes, if somebody kicks the can, it's back to ground zero and it's a complete reset.

That was a good game. Don't you ever feel like in life that's just like, I just need a reset. Like all of the mistakes of my life and all of the trauma and all of the debt and all of the problems and all of the shame and all of it just, if I could just have a reset. This is essentially what Jubilee was all about. Every 49th year, according to the Levitical law, in ancient Israel there was to be a reset. And what it meant was that slaves were going to be set free, indentured servants set free and go on with their life. And debts were cancelled or as some scholars have noted, they were completed by that date. A little complicated but debts ended. And land was restored back to the original clan. And so when Jubilee arrived, everything changed. And as we're thinking our mission's emphasis about reaching the next generation, I just think that what this new generation that has got a plague of hopelessness over them, what they need to hear is Jubilee.

That's Alan Ryan. We'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Today is the final day we're offering this special product. 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. Can I just tell you that the urgency of reaching kids today begins with this, that in 2012 the world population surpassed 7 billion people. And at that time, people under age 30 accounted for more than half of that number. In America, most people who ever accept Christ do so as a young person. 63% accept Christ between ages 4 and 14. And only 23% of people in America who become Christian do so after they're 21.

There's something else that's going on. It's complicated as to why there's so much hopelessness, but a huge study of 20,000 teenagers in 2009 discovered that 15% of all teens believe that they're going to die young. This University of Minnesota researcher therefore took this data to challenge the conventional thought that teens engage in reckless behaviors because they're so naive and they feel invincible and immortal and challenge that thinking, said maybe the reason that a lot of teens are engaged in reckless behavior is because they have so little hope.

If you think you're going to die young anyway, there's just not much at stake. And then you have the impact of the secular world, which has always been a battleground, right, as to who is going to have the mind of a young generation. Now, with the number of hours that any young person spends on a screen, the media has and the screen has the attention of the young person. It's not just how much time they're on those screens. It's what they're doing with them. It's too uncomfortable to even talk about all the statistics, but I'm just going to give you one of them. 80% of all teenagers have posted or sent sexually suggestive messages.

It is a battle for the minds. These are tomorrow's influencers, and God loves them so much. And I just love the kids. And I want every child, I just want every child to have somebody that could speak blessing over his or her life, just somebody that could speak a word of truth that you have a future and a hope that you were made in the image of God, that there can be a reset by the jubilee of Jesus Christ, that the things that have happened in the generations that have preceded you do not lock you into a forecast of doom over your own life.

I want to do more and more. And I think the message of jubilee is what is needed. Jubilee is probably, according to historians, the most radical, sociological, ideological proposal ever made by a civilization.

To think that you would set all the slaves free, cancel all debts and return land, it's so radical that it's hard to even imagine. And what's interesting is that even the rabbinical scholars admit that they cannot attest that jubilee ever actually happened in reality because there are so many times that Israel was invaded, marauded by enemy nations, exiles, and splits of kingdom within Israel, and all of this made it really impossible to ever actually follow this cycle and actually enact jubilee, which is absolutely powerful to think that jubilee never actually was enacted until Jesus announced today it's fulfilled in your hearing. It was announced, jubilee, after the 49th year, it was announced on the day of atonement, which this day of atonement, or Yom Kippur, is the highest and holiest day in the life of the Hebrew calendar. It actually marks the first day of the year in the Hebrew calendar. It is the day of atonement, and it is the one day that the high priest was allowed to go into the Holy of Holies and there offer not only blood sacrifice on behalf of himself, but on behalf of all the people of Israel. And so the high priest represented the entire nation before God in the holiest place on earth, the Holy of Holies of the Temple. And there the people knew that for another year their sin was covered as a people.

So that day of atonement that was pointing to the day in which Jesus would come as the true high priest and the Lamb of God and be offered up on the cross as our sacrifice once and for all, for all who are in Christ therefore are engrafted into Him and we are represented in Jesus our great high priest before God the Father and so this is the highest and the holiest day and for us as Christians it is of the deepest prophetic significance. And so it's on the day of atonement at the end of the 49th year that jubilee would be announced. And the way jubilee would be announced would be through the trumpeting of a ram's horn. And that horn was the yobel, the ram's horn.

And yobel, that's where we get the word yubilee. And this yobel shofar, this trumpeting horn would sound. And when the sound of the trumpet went forth jubilee was enacted. So if you were a slave you're just listening for the sound of the horn and that horn sound meant it's here and you're now free. But that horn was never sounded on an actual jubilee but when Jesus unfurled that scroll of Isaiah and He read it and He said today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing, He was the jubilee horn. He was the shofar that day.

And when He announced that it is fulfilled it came to pass. A powerful picture of two absolutely precious matters to God. And to understand jubilee you need to understand both these. You need to understand unmerited favor for the jubilee was called the year of the Lord's favor. And you need to understand Sabbath because it was the 49th year which was a Sabbath of Sabbaths of years. That's the way Leviticus 25 describes it.

So let me just talk about this. Unmerited favor and Sabbath, these are the roots of understanding jubilee. An unmerited favor is essentially grace. It is to say that everything that we have from God has come to us by grace.

There's not one person who's righteous, not one person who has lived a sinless life, not one person therefore who was born outside of the sinful condition of this world. And so every good gift that has come from God has come by His grace. And the specific grace of God coming to us in the person of Jesus Christ is the ultimate gift of God. For He came and He died for those who dishonored Him.

He came and died for His enemies and this is the grace of God. Unmerited favor means that you are given a gift that you don't deserve and favor will get you what skill and hard work and personal planning could never get you. As important as it is to work hard, to make a plan and to do all you can, there are just some things that you will never get in this world except by the favor of God. God's favor can open up doors that you could never open up. God's favor could fill your heart with blessedness and gratitude in a way that you could never cause of your own effort. And it was for this reason we just made a huge attempt with our kids to just everything we could possibly do to speak into their life that you are blessed and highly favored.

I think it's absolutely one of the most important things any parent could ever do is just get it into your child that you are blessed and favored. Look for favor. Look for blessing in your life. Listen, a lot of bad things happen in this world and we have trouble like everybody else.

But where's the focus of our hearts and where's the focus of our lives? I just wanted my kids to just know they're blessed. You know, when I was becoming a pastor, everybody was like, Oh no, your kids, they're going to be pastor's kids. You know how they all turn out. You know how bad that is. You know, and they're saying it's because they're going to feel so deprived. They're going to have so much pressure on them and everything. I said, Well, how am I going to combat this? And one of the things we just decided was we're going to just keep pointing out to them what a blessing it is to be the pastor's kids.

And so I remember it. Bennett would be two and a half years old. He and Andy would come over and visit me in my office and I'd talk to him a little bit and I'd say, Bye, give him a hug. And I'd say, Oh, wait a minute, Bennett, Bennett, Bennett. And I'd give him a pencil or something.

I'd give him a sticky notepad or something, you know. And I'd say, You know why you're getting that, don't you? I'd say, You're the pastor's son. He's like, Ah, this is awesome. And every time that anything good would happen that was related to the fact that we were the pastor, we're like, That's because you're the pastor's kid.

They think it's the greatest thing in the world. We never talked about the fact on Saturday when everybody else was going to the football game and doing all the stuff they're doing that dad's at home studying for a sermon. But on Monday when we would go out to eat and we'd be getting our pizza or whatever and there's no crowd because everybody's back at work, we'd look around and we'd say, Look at this. We're the only ones here. Look at all this. We don't even have to wait for a table.

We just come in. You know why, don't you? Why, why? Because you're the pastor's kids. We're off on Monday. You're like, This is awesome.

Alan Wright. I like that story. It's a good perspective there. And it is a teaching that we're closing in here towards the end of Unleashed. We have another installment, the final part of his teaching, Freedom for the Next Generation through Jubilee coming on tomorrow's broadcast.

Alan is back with us in the studio as he shares a parting good news thought for the day. Stick with us. This is what the Lord says. I will restore the fortunes of Jacob's tents and have compassion on his dwellings. The city will be rebuilt on her ruins and the palace will stand in its proper place. Those timeless words from Jeremiah 30 reveal the heart of God. He loves to restore. In ancient times, cities would often be rebuilt on top of the ruins of the former city.

The new city would stand higher with safer walls and a greater perspective. In Pastor Alan Wright's 8-message CD album, Out of the Ruins, you'll discover how God can rebuild your life gloriously out of yesterday's disappointments. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Today is the final day we're offering this special product. Call us at 877-544-4860.

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It's free and just a click away at pastoralan.org. Back here in the studio to share Alan's parting good news thought for the day. And here's that word jubilee. I love that word, but it kind of takes us all the way back, I think, to the very beginning of the series when you were talking about the Jewish people, right? Yeah, and when Jesus took up that scroll of Isaiah, read it, and said this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing, what he announced when the idea of the year of the Lord's favor, he says it's come to pass, he's talking about jubilee. Every 49th year, everything goes into jubilee, which meant slaves go free and property gets reverted back to its original owners and it's a complete reset.

It's such a radical, unbelievable notion. And I just, my heart, so for the hope of our young generation that sometimes starts feeling trapped or hopeless, but the Spirit of God is a jubilee spirit. It means that you're not stuck, you get a clean slate in Christ. It means you get not only a reset, but you get an inheritance in him, and you keep praying for great hope for today's generation. Today's Good News message is a listener-supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.