How to Get People to Change [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. God gave you an excellent brain, so use it. You see, that's actually a blessing.

Instead of saying, You're a dumb kid, I expect you to fail. You say, What I see you doing right now does not match who I know that you are and what I expect your life to be. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see yourself in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, Free Yourself, Be Yourself. 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 can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org, or call 877-544-4860.

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

Here is Alan Wright. Alan Wright These three ways of helping people to grow, I would say, are God's ways. The ways that God helps us to grow are the very same ways that we could help others to grow. And the first is this, to sow good seed. Here's the basic principle.

Paul says in Romans 12 verse 21, to not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Everything, everything in this world is built upon the principle of sowing and reaping. And sowing and reaping teaches us essentially that this is the design of God for the universe.

Everything reproduces after its own kind. You put an orange seed into the ground, and if you get the right conditions, what will grow is an orange tree, and what it will produce is oranges. An orange seed will never in this world produce apples. So if you were to plant an orange seed, somehow hoping that you're going to wind up getting an apple out of it, would be the utmost folly. Because you can't.

There's no way. Well, in the same way in the spirit, what we sow is what we can expect to reap. So if there is someone in your life, let's start with our kids, and you would like to see your kids be more patient, because they're impatient, and they're always, they're always talking about how they want it, they want it now, or they're impatient, they can't wait on this, can't wait on that. The temptation is what? To be just impatient with them. To be impatient about their impatience. To sow seeds of impatience into some child's heart that is already full of impatience is going to only produce a bigger harvest of impatience. So biblically, what Paul is saying is don't be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Sow the spirit that you want to see cultivated in the one that you love. Whatever it is that you want to see developed in the other is the very thing that you should sow.

So oftentimes what I try to do is just stop myself, because I feel my flesh wanting to just respond. See, if somebody sows unkindness towards you, because of the law of sowing and reaping, that sowing of unkindness towards you is trying to place a demand on you of a harvest of unkindness. That's what you wonder, why do I feel so much like I want to be unkind to them because they were unkind to me?

It's because of the principle of sowing and reaping. The very judgment they brought against you is causing there to be within you a demand in the natural to cause you to judge them back. But we are not under these natural commands of the spirit. We are under a higher order of grace.

We've been set free. And so we have the potential by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ to say what's being sown towards me is unkindness, but what I have in me is the Holy Spirit. And the fruit of the Spirit is love and joy and peace and patience and kindness. And I'm going to allow the spirit of kindness to be sown.

It goes to the flesh. It's contrary to everything the flesh wants to do because what we tend to want to do is just just look at somebody that's frustrating to us and they're not doing what we want to do and our tendency is to just treat them by sowing seeds that are just as negative as what they're demonstrating. But it never makes sense to expect an orange seed to produce an apple.

Whatever you want to see developed in the other is what you can sow towards them. Sowing and reaping. And it's all it starts in Genesis chapter 1. It goes all the way through everything Paul teaches. It goes all the way through the Bible. Everything operates according to this principle that all things reproduce after their own kind. I think that's something very practical that you can do.

I think you can stop when you get in a difficult situation in a relationship of any type and you say, well, what should I do here? How could I actually help them get a vision of the harvest you want to see? What change would you like to see? Sow the seed that can produce that harvest. That's number one. The second thing that I've discovered biblically that I think we can do is to treat people like heirs, not slaves. To me, this is one of the most fascinating themes in the entire Bible. Do you ever notice that when the people of God were set free through the Passover, if you're not familiar with the story, it's the story where the blood of an innocent lamb was put over the doorposts of the Hebrew homes while they were slaves in Egypt. And wherever there was blood over the door, the destroyer passed over those homes and yet killed all the firstborn of the Egyptians where there was no blood over the door. And through this, Pharaoh let the people go so they were set free by the blood of the lamb. It's a great story, a Passover story. Well, as soon as they're set free, there's an odd thing.

We won't turn there now, but look it up sometime. There's an odd thing that you see, and that is that the Lord told the Hebrew people to plunder the Egyptians on the way out of Egypt. It was odd. In other words, He said, tell them to give them their gold, their silver, their jewelry, their stuff, their valuables.

That's odd. Now, this is in part to provide for the people of God as they went on their way, but I think there's something else going on. I think that God wanted the people to begin to learn early on, you've been slaves, now you're free, but I want you to learn something other than the fact that you're free.

I want you to learn this, you own something. So what was the whole narrative about? It was about the movement to a promised land. God wasn't just saying, I'm going to set you free from slavery. He was saying, I'm going to give you a territory and I want you to reign in that territory. I want you to have dominion in that territory.

I want you to rule in that territory. You have an inheritance, you have a promised land. So the gospel is not just the announcement that you are saved from your sin and you get to go to heaven one day. The gospel is an announcement that you are saved from your sin by the blood of the lamb, but you were saved so that you would know that you are an heir. You are an heir of these incredible spiritual riches with which you have been blessed in Christ Jesus. That God wanted His people in the Old Testament to understand themselves, not only that they were free people, but that they were responsible people. They were heirs.

They are recipients of a great gift with great potential and they have a destiny. One day we were, I was up at the office on a Saturday afternoon years ago and I just was up doing a little work, but Mickey Thigpen, our executive director, was up on that Saturday afternoon and he was in the office and he was doing something, this was many years ago, and he was doing something, some task, and I said, Mickey, why are you up here on Saturday afternoon doing that task? And he said, well, you know, such and such didn't get it done this week. And I was like, well, why didn't so and so do that?

That's part of her job, you know? And he said, I don't know, I guess it's just a matter of ownership. What he was saying was, you know, he said, I've got ownership over this. He said, you know, I'm not going to rest until this, you know, I'm responsible for this.

I can take ownership of this. And he said, I need to do it. And he said, you know, someone else, he said, he was talking about a particular employee at that time who just, you know, just, you know, looked on it more like, oh, just a job you come to and you go away from, you know, more like it. And then Mickey said, I'm trying to convince her that she's not a slave. I was sitting there thinking about the idea of ownership and slavery and who was actually taking ownership. And I heard the Holy Spirit say to me, we're standing in their office, I heard the Holy Spirit say, only free people own things. Slaves don't own things. Slaves don't think like heirs.

And until people see themselves as owners, they'll never really work to their full potential. And Mickey and I started talking about this. We about had a glory fit right there in the office. You know, you ever get one of those revelations, it's like, I'm seeing something I've never seen before.

That's Alan Wright. And we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Can you imagine what it would be like to be accepted perfectly? Envision it. Being free to be yourself with no fear of rejection. If you mess up, people don't roll their eyes, make fun of you or love you less.

Imagine no more of that anxious feeling that you get deep down in your gut that makes you feel like the pressure is always on so you can never really relax. What you're imagining and longing for is a life with no shame. In paradise, before sin came into the world, the Bible tells us only one thing about Adam and Eve's relationship.

They were naked and felt no shame. Ever since the fall, the human heart has been riddled with shame. It's a lie that says, until you measure up, you can't be truly acceptable. Shame causes some to say, I'll try to be perfect in order to be accepted and others to decide, since I'll never measure up, I might as well rebel.

Either way, the heart is poisoned by shame and there's only one antidote, the grace of God in Jesus Christ. In his highly acclaimed book, Free Yourself, Be Yourself, Pastor Alan Wright not only exposes the lies of shame, he leads you into a revolution of God's love that heals your soul. Discover freedom, joy, and destiny as you shed performance based living and let God take the shame off you for good. It's a life-changing, full-length book from Alan Wright.

Free yourself, be yourself. 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.

Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. Here again, in the same way that if someone is acting with unkindness towards you, you're tempted to sow a seed of unkindness. In a similar way, when someone is acting like they won't take ownership of anything, we tend to turn around and treat them even more like a slave. Some years ago, Bennett was little and we had just been playing in the yard.

We sat down on the steps to have lemonade. He was about six years old, eight years old at the time, and all of a sudden out of the blue, he said, Daddy, what's a slave? And I thought, I don't know if I want to talk to him about this right now. You know, and I said, well, I guess he's got to find out.

You hate to see your children find out about the harsh realities of life. I said, well, Bennett, a slave is somebody that's owned by somebody else, and the slave has to do whatever the slave master says. And little Bennett sat there drinking his lemonade, and he thought about it for a moment, and he said, I belong to you, and I have to do whatever you say. I said, no, no, Bennett, it's totally different with a slave. See, a slave, a slave, if they don't do what the master says, the master might beat that slave. Bennett said, sometimes, well, I'm not done right. You've spanked me, haven't you? I said, yeah, Bennett, it's different, it's different. And then I kind of mumbled a few things. I said, I need to go out and figure out what the difference is between a son and a slave.

And it came back to this really for me, if you were to sum it all up, it is that the son, the daughter is an heir. See, a slave will only work up to the point where they're no longer afraid of punishment. As soon as it's five o'clock, and I'm not going to get punished, you're not going to dock my pay, then I quit. Owners don't think like that. Owners do not think like that.

Owner, I'll tell you one thing, the owner of a business, he is not sitting there, he or she's not going, it's five o'clock, well, I'm just going to stop. I don't care how many people want to buy something right now. If it's your store and there are 10 people ready to buy something, you're going to keep your store open and sell it to them because it's your business. But somebody's acting like a slave, there could be 10 people, you've experienced this before, you're sitting there, you go up to cash register and it's like, I'm sorry, we're closed. Yeah, but I'm right here ready to buy it.

I'm sorry, we're closed. That's not the way an owner would think. And I began to realize one of the ways that we can help people to grow is to instill in them a sense of ownership in the way we treat them and still a sense of being an heir. And I wish I could say a lot more about that, but I move on to something that's so near and dear to my heart and this is the third way and maybe the primary way that we have been, I think, authorized by God to be able to help others grow and change and that is by the power of blessing. To bless someone is to envision in faith a positive future over their life and it is to announce such positive vision with faith and confidence and authority and it is to be actively in favor of seeing that positive vision come to pass. This is something that was an instruction to the Hebrew patriarchs of old that every week they were supposed to bless their children. At least once a week they'd speak blessings over their children.

You know, some have have theorized that this is one of the great secrets of the whole people of Israel of how they were able to endure so much. It's just the father speaking blessings to their children, just saying things to their children, just announcing things over their children's lives that were of positive vision. You know, this is one of the wonderful things that we can do in a very simple way is just announce positive things over our kids.

It's like a compliment on steroids. It's like it's something that I see that's really positive and I see it in faith and what happens is that our children and those that are under our authority, they hear these announcements over their lives and they rise to meet them. This goes exactly against the way the culture and the spirit of the age tempts us. What we're tempted to do is withhold affirmation because a lot of parents say, well, I don't want to tell them too much because, you know, it'll go to his head. I don't want to withhold some of the affirmation or else they may quit trying. And what the gospel says is exactly the opposite.

No, no, no, no. What happens is that when you bless people, when you affirm them, when you see the potential and you announce it in faith, people rise to meet it. We tend to believe about ourselves what the most important people in the world believe about us and blessing is so easy. Bless, do not curse, the scripture says. See, when a parent announces over a child's life, I've had it with you, you're going to be a failure, you never seem to get it right, you're just, it's announcing doom, it's curse. Don't ever announce the thing that you don't want to have happen. Don't ever call somebody what you don't want them to be, right? If you don't want somebody to be foolish all the time and be always messing up, don't call them a fool who messes up all the time. They just say, well, that must be what I am, I might as well do that. I was talking to a man one time who had a big struggle, a big pornography addiction struggle, and I said to him one time, I said, do you ever, do you ever, I'll call him John, I said, John, you ever have a moment where you're falling in that temptation, you say, you know, I just better not get involved in this because I'm going to feel so bad afterwards?

He said, no, I never think that. He says, I feel so bad about myself that I just decide I'll go ahead and do bad things. You don't want somebody feeling bad about themselves, you don't want somebody hating themselves, you don't want someone feeling cursed.

People who have no hope are much more prone to continued error. It is when you are full of blessing, it is then that you are able to rise up. It was something that I just adopted early on in our family. Let me just tell you how easy this is. Let's just imagine a scene, my son Bennett plays a lot of golf, we've played a lot of golf together over the years, and I could just, I can think back of times when he was younger, and at least once a week, we'd just have a family meal, cut the TV off, just have a family meal and just enjoy talking each other, and at this time, they would know that Dad's going to speak some blessings over their lives. And it didn't have to be profound, it didn't have to be poetic, it didn't have to be, it didn't have to be something all written out, it's just so simple. It's just like this, it's like Bennett, you know, we're eating supper, and I say, you know, today when we play that nine holes of golf, and we got to hole number three, and you double bogeyed it, and I said, I know, you know, that I know how frustrating that is, because when it's only the third hole, and you're hoping to shoot somewhere around par that day, and yet you already double bogeyed a hole, and it's frustrating, you feel like you ruined your whole round, and you feel like throwing your clubs in the creek or whatever, and I said, but instead, you pulled it together. I saw you, it was hard, but I saw you kept some self-control. You kept your emotion in control, and instead of thinking I'm doomed, you thought, well, maybe I can get it back with a birdie the next hole, and I said, and you did. You birdied the next hole, and you end up with a really good round of golf today, and what I want to bless you with today, Bennett, is not so much how proud I was of a good round you played, because what I'm saying is I'm proud of you, because what I saw was you exercise self-control, and Bennett, it's been my experience in life that when a young man can learn self-control, that he can go far in this world, and I believe you're going to go far. God bless you for showing that self-control. I think you've got a lot of self-control. How long did that take? 60 seconds?

That took 60 seconds, but do you know the spiritual power of something like that? What goes into a young child's heart when he hears something like that? What he says, my daddy thinks I've got self-control. I'll go far if I have self-control. What does it make you want to do?

It makes you want to just aspire to be a person of self-control. You rise up to meet the blessing that is spoken over you. You can bless people in your life, even the people that you're mad at, because the scripture invites us, when people persecute you, bless them. Parents often say to say, well, what about when your children, when they're acting up and they need to be disciplined? I mean, what do you do? Bless them, even as you discipline.

My wife, she's got an excellent way with kids. When our kids were little, and you know you get that frustration like I just feel like right now just ringing somebody's neck, just calling them a name or something. And so what we trained ourselves to do, this was her idea, was you get to that point and one of the children's done something really dumb and you just say, God gave you an excellent brain, so use it. You see, that's actually a blessing.

Instead of saying you're a dumb kid, I expect you to fail, you say what I see you doing right now does not match who I know that you are and what I expect your life to be. So in the end, there are really three biblical ways, I think, that we can actually help people to grow and change. We can sow the seed that we want to see grow and harvest. We can treat people as heirs, instilling ownership in them, and we can cultivate the wonderful practice of blessing people. In the end, this is the way God has changed us.

He sowed a seed, an incorruptible seed, His own Son, who was the first fruits of many sons and daughters, and He is the one in His word that told us that we are co-heirs with Christ, and He is the one that despite all of my sin, despite all of our failings, never curses, but instead in Jesus Christ has blessed you with every spiritual blessing. Let's live the same way. That's the gospel. Alan Wright, today's teaching on good news, how to get people to change from our series Free Yourself, Be Yourself, and Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio sharing a part in good news thought for the day in just a moment. Can you imagine what it would be like to be accepted perfectly?

Envision it. Being free to be yourself with no fear of rejection. If you mess up, people don't roll their eyes, make fun of you, or love you less. Ever since the fall, the human heart has been riddled with shame.

It's a lie that says, until you measure up, you can't be truly acceptable. In his highly acclaimed book, Free Yourself, Be Yourself, Pastor Alan Wright not only exposes the lies of shame, he leads you into a revolution of God's love that heals your soul. Discover freedom, joy, and destiny as you shed performance-based living and let God take the shame off you for good. It's a life-changing, full-length book from Alan Wright.

Free yourself, be yourself. 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. Back in the studio now with Pastor Alan and how today's good news can really change your life. This subject that we were closing with on the power of blessing is one, of course, that's so dear to my heart and we have other resources and so excited about a new book that will be coming out in February. Might as well leak that out there, The Power to Bless.

God does want us to be useful in helping other people grow. It's just in our frustration, sometimes we think, well, grace isn't working, so let me try some shame. And I want to say to our listeners, don't give up on grace and don't ever start using the power of curse.

It will never help. It's the power of blessing. You can sow and reap and you can treat others for the heirs that they are. You can help instill an identity through the power of blessing and these things, Daniel, they really can empower other people to change. We don't need to use shame. We can do it God's way. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.