Pastor, author and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.
The seeming lack of freedom of having to wear compression stockings pales in comparison to the teaching of the teaching today in the series called Unleashed as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. We'll send you today's special offer at PastorAlan.org. Find out more about it and make your request or call 877-544-4860.
That's 877-544-4860. Again, our website, PastorAlan.org. More on this later in the program. But now let's get started with today's teaching.
Here is Alan Wright. I don't know what it would be like, a destroying presence that began moving down through every alleyway and every hamlet of Egypt just as the 15th day of Nisan started. And not much after midnight you would have heard it, the shrill shrieking of mothers and fathers running out of their homes and crying out, help, help. It's my child. It's an odd story. And it is full of very, very specific instructions for the Hebrew people. And that's one of the things that's odd about it. Instructions that will become part of a festival that is celebrated on and on centuries ahead by the Hebrew people.
The instructions were very clear. That every Hebrew family was on the 10th day of Nisan, the first month of the Hebrew calendar, on the 10th day of Nisan, to take a lamb into its household. It could be a lamb or a goat.
And very specifically, it had to be a male, it had to be a year old, and it had to be unblemished, have no defect. So you couldn't just go out and get some of your livestock that was sickly and going to die anyway or something like that. You have to take whatever is most precious. And all of this is a powerful and beautiful picture of something that God's going to do 1,500 years later for real in the person of Jesus, the one that John the Baptizer called the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. And then, after having this lamb in its household for these days, on the 14th day of Nisan, at twilight, they were to slaughter the lamb and then to roast it and eat it with unleavened bread.
There's not going to be time for you to wait around for the yeast to rise. And bitter herbs that later, when they celebrate the Passover, they'll tell their children this reminds us of the bitterness of slavery. Both these things to remind you that when God moves to deliver you and set you free, you don't stand around and think about it. You take it and you move on. And you never forget the bitterness of slavery because you'll never relish the beauty of freedom if you can't remember what it was like not to be free. And eat all of the lamb and burn any part of it that you don't eat because this lamb is given totally for you.
It's not partial. It's a complete sacrifice. And you're to take the blood and paint it over the doorposts and the lentils of your homes, the instructions said, don't leave the house after that, for at midnight the destroyer is going to come through.
Very, very specific instructions, aren't they? And if you were an ordinary Egyptian observing all of that, you might think, my, how unusual these people are and what strange rules they have and the contrast, part of this is the irony. The people who had this revelation with instructions about this very narrow idea of truth seem like they're the ones who are confined and constricted and yet they were the ones who were free.
It is a very powerful, powerful image, of course. Let me just make a few observations about the nature of this to help you understand my point about the relationship of revelation from God and freedom. And the first point that I take from all of this that is so central to the gospel is pictured in the Passover. The whole focus was on the blood of the lamb.
The focus was not on the righteousness of the Hebrew people and the unrighteousness of Egypt. The focus of this moment in time, the saving moment. The focus is on the blood of the lamb.
It's not so much about did the people inside the house in the Hebrew huts, did they have a good day or a bad day? It was about the unblemished lamb whose blood was shed and was applied in faith, trusting that God would look upon that blood and would pass over bringing salvation, deliverance, and freedom to their house. And why this is so important is because most people, most Christians tend to think that in some measure your approach to God is a process where He examines you for your worthiness as to whether or not you're going to be allowed into His presence. But everything that makes the gospel good news, everything that's so wonderful about it, hinges on this point, is that God is not looking to your worthiness but to the worthiness of the lamb. And in later times when there would be thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Passover lambs that were sacrificed, and they would bring those lambs to the priest to be inspected as part of the Passover worship.
The priest did not inspect the worshiper for worthiness. The priest inspected the lamb. So when you come to God in your worship, when you come to God in your need and in your prayer, when you come to God in your joy and your longing to be close to Him, there is an examination that takes place, but it is not an examination of you, Christian.
It's an examination of the Son of God. He looks to His right hand and He sees the unblemished Lamb of God who has died in your place and He sees the blood that has been shed for you. And so you are welcomed into the presence of God because God has come in the person of Jesus Christ once and for all, the writer of Hebrews said, and had His blood shed and sprinkled figuratively into the holy of holies and the heavenlies once and for all time so that anyone who accepts Christ comes not by his or her own merit, but by the merits of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. The blood of Jesus that saved you is the blood that secures you. And the second thing you have to notice about the Passover story is that the Lamb was brought into the home. And I don't know if you ever noticed, this would be kind of a strange thing to think of, but this Lamb that's going to be slaughtered and eaten, it comes into the household.
It becomes kind of one of them, and yet it's not one of them. The Bible said in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, literally Jesus pitched His tent in our midst. He tabernacled. He made His home with us. He became one of us. He was with us, and yet He wasn't one of us.
He was human, but He's also God. He came because we're identified with Jesus. The Passover, the people were identified with this Lamb, and we're identified with Jesus.
And all these events, here's the third thing, all these events had very specific timing. This is very important to God, because He was painting a picture on the history, the landscape of history so that it would make clear some things for us as Christians. They were to take the Lamb in on the tenth day of Nisan. Well, the tenth day of Nisan, we learned very clearly from the Gospels, is the day that Jesus came riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. The people were crying out, Hosanna, Hosanna. He's riding in on a donkey into what we call Passion Week, and we call this the triumphal entry, but it was triumphal only in the sense that He was moving now resolutely towards Thursday and Friday, and then Sunday Easter.
That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. 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 eight-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. 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. So the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world came into Jerusalem on the same day that every faithful Jew was taking a lamb into their household. And Jesus ministered in Jerusalem, and then came the fourteenth day of Nisan, which was the day that the Passover was celebrated. And so Jesus celebrated the Passover with His disciples.
And they gathered into some upper room, and they would have, like every faithful Jew, they would have at twilight slaughtered the Passover lamb and prepared to have a feast together and eat the lamb, and they would have had the unleavened bread and bitter herbs. But when He came to the unleavened bread on the fourteenth day of Nisan, He lifted up the bread in front of His disciples and said something mysterious. He said, this is My body, and it's given for you. He was saying the Passover has always been about Me. The Passover itself was a picture of what I'm doing for you. He's saying in the same way that they were to eat of that lamb and eat all of it, He's saying I want you spiritually, I want you to take Me in.
You're going to find life in Me. And so there it is that the Lamb of God, Jesus, is celebrating the Passover by eating the feast of the Lamb on the fourteenth day of Nisan, fifteen hundred years after these events that took place in Egypt. And then, as it was in Egypt just at midnight when the fifteenth day of Nisan arrived, there was judgment against the firstborn. And it was on the fifteenth day of Nisan that the firstborn of all creation, Jesus, was put upon a Roman cross. He bled and He suffered and He died for you. The only difference, notice this, between the Hebrews and the Egyptians on that fateful night was the blood.
All this is an evil tyrant who would oppress them, but let's face it, there were also, I'm sure, some morally good Egyptians, just like there were some of the Hebrews who might not have been morally good at all. The distinction about those that were going to be judged and those that were going to be set free was the blood of the Lamb over their door. But why was the blood over that door?
The blood was over that door only because they had been given instructions. They had been given a revelation. So you can say they were saved by the blood, but you could also say they were saved by the Word of God. If an Egyptian, don't you think, the way you read the story, if an Egyptian had received the revelation and believed it and applied it, and they had blood over their door, the destroyer would have gone right by the Egyptian home.
The difference was they had no revelation. What I'm saying is that the heart of the Gospel is God's commitment to reveal Himself to sinners, and the pathway to freedom is revelation in the power of the blood of the Lamb. It is a revelation of the gift of the Son of God. And I don't understand what opens up some eyes while other eyes remain closed, but I know this, that God loves to save. And God wants the whole world to know of the saving, cleansing, forgiving, redeeming power that is found in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. He does not come to condemn but to set us free. The Word of God is not binding. The Word of God is liberating.
The truth will set you free. This goes far to explain why Jesus so passionately said, those whom the Son sets free will be free indeed. That every other measure of freedom is small in comparison to the enormity of the freedom for those who are in Christ. That those who receive this seemingly narrow revelation about the person of Jesus with what seems like, to the person who has no revelation of God's grace, it seems binding, it seems constricting. It seems like if I yield to God, He's going to take away my freedom. But to those who have eyes to see, they discover that this is the avenue by which life is opened up. Jesus came that you'd have life and have it more abundantly.
See, we're oftentimes initially resistant to the very truth that will set us free. You know, it's so interesting that so many of medical discoveries over the years were initially rejected. Like in the 1850s, it was roughly around then when anybody started having any idea about bacteria. And there was a Hungarian physician who noticed that so many of the mothers of newborns were dying. Eighteen percent of them were dying from infection. And so he noticed that those who had washed their hands after performing autopsy, this is vile to even think of it for us, we understand it, but they wouldn't wash their hands after doing an autopsy and go deliver a baby. And eighteen percent of the women were dying. And some of them washed their hands and the doctor observed that less of those women got infected. So he proposed a theory and it said start washing your hands and reduce the mortality to two percent rather than eighteen percent.
And you know what he received for this? A lot of rejection. Nobody believed there was anything to it for a long time. Did you realize it wasn't until the 1980s that anybody believed that ulcers are not just caused by stress and spicy food, but by bacteria. And there was a Western Australian gastroenterologist who proposed this and nobody would believe him.
It was rejected. So finally he drank, crazy, he drank thousands of millions of bacteria from a Petri dish to infect his own gut and then treat himself with an antibiotic to prove what he was talking about. But here's what you find out.
If you can find someone who knows a lot more truth than you do about something, and that person cares for you, you become eager to receive the truth and apply it. I've been trying to be a good nurse for my wife during her recovery, and one of the things you learn if you've ever had a surgery is that the medical community is very serious about this. They've learned there's a real risk of blood clot after surgery, and so you've got to take precautions against it. So they said to my sweet wife after she's hardly even begun her recovery, they said here's what you need to do. We need you to get up and move around at least a little bit every hour. You've just had your hip replaced.
You don't feel like getting up and moving around every hour. Here's the other thing. They said, and then you're going to wear these compression stockings. Now, if you've never had the blessing of seeing or wearing a compression stocking, they are small, shriveled-up looking hoes that look like they could barely fit around a garden hose that you're supposed to pull up over your toes, ankle, and halfway up your leg. And they said, now we want you to wear these 23 out of 24 hours every single day.
Here's the problem. When you just had your hip replaced, you're in no mood, nor have the ability to bend down and bring a small stocking over your toes and drag it up over your ankle and up your leg. So guess who's the compression stocking putter on her? And you feel really bad about that because you're having to push real hard on somebody's leg who just had major surgery on that leg. And I'm like, is this hurting? But there's no way to get on otherwise. But you do it because the seeming lack of freedom of having to wear compression stockings pales in comparison to the lack of freedom you experience if you get a blood clot. Because then you're in the hospital. So you take the thing that seems like it's constraining because it's actually freedom to you. And there's a way in which the gospel can initially, to those who haven't had eyes to see, can seem so confining or so constraining, but then once you have eyes to see you realize, no, this is liberty, this is freedom, and the truth sets you free. What's so incredible about the Passover story and the amazing deliverance of the people of God is that if you were an Egyptian that night, and say you were a, quote, good person, and you came and you started speaking to the destroyer, to this dark presence, if you're speaking out to it and you say, but I'm a good person, and I do good things for people, or I'm an educated person, or I'm a wealthy or an accomplished person, doesn't any of this save me? If you had spoken to that dark presence and it spoke back to you, it would have said no. And you say, well, what could save me?
And the voice would say, nothing. Nothing can save you but the blood. But if you were a Hebrew, locked up inside of your little Hebrew hut, and you felt the cool light of the anointing of the Holy Spirit fill your room while there were shrieks of terror throughout the rest of Egypt, and you were a child in that family and turned to your dad and said, Dad, what have we done that has made us so special that we have deserved this? It could be that that father had been impatient and blasphemous that very day, and he would have to say to his child, nothing.
We did nothing. We have nothing but the blood. Because the glory of the Gospel is that to say nothing but the blood is not only to say nothing but the blood can save you, but is also to say nothing in addition to the blood is necessary. And when you see that, you're free. Fear and shame and condemnation fall impotently to the ground for those who discover the power that is in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that's the Gospel. Alan Wright and today's teaching, Freedom Through Revelation. It's in our series Unleashed, and please stay with us.
Alan's back in the studio sharing a parting good news thought for the day in just a moment. 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 eight-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. 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 here in the studio to share Alan's parting good news thought for the day. And when we're talking about freedom, when I hear you talk about freedom, it's good to kind of pinch yourself and say, no, this is a real, true freedom. This is not some weird bait and switch. It's true, real freedom.
Absolutely. God is absolutely for our freedom. Christ came that we would be set free. And those that are in Christ are free indeed.
The picture of our spiritual life is a move from the image of slavery to the image of being an heir. But the real issue in the end is not so much whether people value freedom. Everybody values freedom. It's how you actually have freedom. And what we've seen today is that just as surely as the Israelites were saved by the revelation, by a truth that the destroyer's coming through, but where there's blood of the Lamb, you'll be spared. We are saved. We are free by the revelation of Jesus Christ and what God has done for us. And the more you see it and the more that you know it, the more free you actually are. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.
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