The Connection Keystone [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

Have your eyes open to see your past differently and make connections where you hadn't seen connections so that you would be able to say like Jacob, surely God was in this place, I just didn't know it. And when you discover the presence of the Heavenly Father where you previously assumed yourself to be alone, you are now into making the deepest kind of connection of reality because your life is actually one where you have been loved by your Father who has always longed to have you close to Him. 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 God Moments as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina.

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's Pastor Alan's book by the same title, God Moments, and 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 a copy of Pastor Alan's book, God Moments, our special offer today. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org or call 877-544-4860.

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

Here is Alan Wright. Well, are you ready for some good news? God is with you every day. He's at work in the big miracles of your life, but He's also at work in the everyday moments of grace. And in order to build your faith in joy, you don't have to try to move God to be with you. He's already with you. You don't have to try to move God to be for you. He's already utterly for you. But what you have to do is recognize how much He always has been with you. We're talking about God Moments, and today we're going to talk about what I call the connection keystone, making connections all throughout your life of where God has been.

Maybe you didn't recognize it. Now, I want to start today in Exodus chapter 11, where we go back to the story of the Passover, which has been so important for our whole study of God Moments, because this is one of the principle commemorative feasts of Israel, wherein the Lord wants them to remember what He did when He delivered them out of their bondage in Egypt. And He wanted the parents to teach their children, so He gave them a lasting ordinance.

And we've been learning some about the feasts, and how each one of the feasts in one way or another is helping the individual and collective memory of Israel, and how that's a symbol for us about how God wants us to remember all of our God Moments. So going back to this, Exodus chapter 11, beginning at verse 4. So Moses said, Thus says the Lord, About midnight I will go out in the midst of Egypt, and every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die. From the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl, who is behind the hand mill, and the firstborn of the cattle, there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there has never been, nor ever will be again. But not a dog shall growl against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast, that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel. And that's what I want you to see, that you may know, that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.

And then in the following chapter, I pick up reading at verse 12, Exodus 12 verse 12. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast. And on all the gods of Egypt, I will execute judgments.

I am the Lord. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I'll pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord throughout your generations as a statute forever.

You shall keep it as a feast. And what I wanted you to see here, right in the middle of this text in chapter 12, the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. So two things that I'm highlighting, God wanted to make a distinction between Israel and Egypt, and he wanted his people to see it. And when God speaks of the sign of the blood that would be over the doorposts of the Hebrew homes, it wasn't a sign for God. God knew where they were.

It was a sign for the people. In other words, what is God doing? He is making a connection between his glorious grace, the power of his redemption, and their moments in their actual history.

In other words, when God moves, God not only wants to set us free, but he wants us to make the connection of what he's doing redemptively in our life with each moment that we see him at work. So we're going to talk some today about our memory. The old saying isn't always true. Hindsight isn't always 20-20. When we say, oh, hindsight's 20-20, what we mean is that knowing what I know now, I can see perfectly clearly how things should have been done differently.

But I'd like to kind of turn the phrase on its head today. And by saying hindsight isn't 20-20, when we look at our past, so often we don't see our past accurately because we don't see enough connection with God. And the reason that God implemented the Passover for his people is so that they would always connect their freedom with his grace and power. If the people look back on their history without acknowledging the way that God brought them out of slavery, then they would be absolutely blurred about the reality of their past. In other words, isn't it possible that you could be seeing your past incorrectly? There's something about our nature in this fallen world that we're prone to have our memories distorted or filtered. And as I'm going to show you today, there's a body of psychological research that explains some of the ways that we miss read our own past. But primarily, I want to speak to you about the spiritual principle that's involved here.

God put it on display in the Passover. God loves you. And he has always been marvelously at work in your life. And he wants you to know it. He wants you to make the connection. I'm talking about the connection keystone of the whole God moment principle. Let's start with this. If God is there and you don't make the connection, then how are you going to give him the glory?

And won't you rob your soul of so much delight and faith? My nephew, Zach, a child of Catherine and Kevin, was very, very close. Our family is very tight. And Zach is pretty severe on the autism spectrum. And he is so precious. And he's been going through some really difficult times in recent months and become much, much more difficult to try to understand what's going on with him, what might be hurting, what might be bothering him. And his behavior has been a lot harder for his parents to manage. And so they took him down to the Duke Children's Hospital where they discovered that the shunts that he'd had surgically implanted years ago have failed at his brain. And he had to have some neurosurgery.

And that surgery has been accomplished. And yet, he still continued to have some erratic behavior that's been very difficult. And so it's been very tough on my brother and sister-in-law and Catherine, my sister-in-law who we prayed for just this past weekend because they needed to go back down to Duke and have another CAT scan there at the Duke Children's Hospital. And it's been weighing on her. It's been tough.

And sometimes you just need little signs in the midst of these kinds of seasons of your life and sometimes we just ask God, give us your sustaining grace. Well one of the things that you need to know about Zach and perhaps if you know anything about autism you might be aware of this is because of some of the mysteries of the sensory overload that the child may be experiencing, often it helps if someone on the autism spectrum is able to have kind of something to fiddle with with the hands or chew on with the mouth and for Zach it's a little rubbery coil loop that he can pull and stretch and twist, chew on if he wants. And so Catherine and Kevin are always making sure that Zach has this.

Well one of the things that happens is it always gets all twisted up. And every day, one day or another, I'm sure Catherine has so many hundreds and hundreds of times untwisted that they got it back to him when it gets too twisted up. Well it came this past week, the morning where Catherine and Kevin were going to take Zach down to Duke to get the CAT scan and she was really dreading it because it was very hard on Zach.

He doesn't understand what's going on. And if ever there was a moment, just needed a little grace to help you through, it was that day. Well before I tell you what happened, let me just say that this coming January the whole family is going to Disney World and it's a place that Zach loves and everybody loves, Disney World and Magic Kingdom and Mickey Mouse. Well on this morning where Catherine is getting ready to take Zach to get his CAT scan, she looks down and there is his little rubbery coil chew tube device and there it is all twisted up again. She goes over to untwist it and looks down and sees it lying there. It has been formed into the perfect shape of a Mickey Mouse head. Now Zach is just randomly twisting it but somehow it became a perfect Mickey Mouse complete with the ears. Now you can say well it's completely random but what Catherine knew was the Lord spoke to her in just that moment.

Like saying that today you're going to go get a CAT scan but in January you're going to Disney World. And remember that I'm the author of very happy things and I'm with you. And so for her and what most people would say, well that was just a random little twisting of the tube, she saw a connection and the Spirit really, really spoke to her. And that's the way it works when you make a connection because if you had just not been, if she had not been noticing, not been seeing it, it wouldn't have nourished her. But instead she stopped, she noticed. It warmed her heart. She sent us a picture, a text and we all rejoice because we who have been with Zach so much and know how he loves Disney World and we know how troublesome these times are, we know God speaking through that. It's just making a connection sometimes.

That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. God's always been there. In every moment you narrowly escaped from danger. In every moment you were surprised by a blessing.

In every moment you just knew the direction to take. God was there. Your life is defined by countless moments of God's grace. Perhaps they've been covered by the sands of time or have just gone unnoticed in the rush of life, but your life is full of God moments. When you make a gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's heart-stirring book God Moments that will lead you on a spiritual treasure hunt to uncover your God moments. It's Alan Wright's timeless book God Moments.

Discover your God moments in the past and be filled with fresh faith today. 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. Earlier in our series we talked about Jacob, and Jacob was a man who was unaware that his life had been connected to heaven. He was a clever guy, but he was a deceiver.

He always came out somehow ahead. He was a winner, but he never knew the source of his success. He had stolen his father's blessing, but he had no idea how deep the blessing of God really would run in his life.

He had no idea of what it really meant to be eternally linked to the purposes of God. So what had happened in Jacob's life was after stealing his older brother's blessing from their father, Jacob fled from his brother's wrath and Rebekah, Jacob's mother and co-conspirator, she urged her favorite boy to leave town until Esau's fury subsided. As far as Jacob knew, he was on his way. It was an ordinary, necessary trip just to get away from his angry brother.

Nothing more, nothing less was on his mind. When he stopped at nightfall and he put a stone under his head and he looked up the stars and he fell asleep, and he wasn't expecting anything more than just hoping to get some sleep that night, but instead his life got changed forever by a dream. Have you ever noticed, by the way, that sometimes the most powerful revelations of our lives just sneak up on us in the midst of ordinary activity? I mean, God just loves to catch us by surprise when we're in the middle of a third load of laundry or in the hallway conversation at work or a frustrating toddler says something irresistibly cute and God just speaks or a child's chew device suddenly looks like a Mickey Mouse and God just speaks right in the middle of the Monday. It was that kind of thing that happened to Jacob on an ordinary night.

Here's what happened. He saw, according to Genesis 28 verse 12, a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it and there above it stood the Lord and he said, I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham, the God of Isaac and I'll give you and your descendants the land on which you're lying and God goes on to say, I will not leave you until I've done what I've promised to you. It's just one of those moments and God spoke to Jacob. Jacob thought he was on an ordinary journey, but he found out that it was extraordinary.

He thought he was just treading on commonplace turf, but he found it was holy ground. He thought he had cleverly grasped his brother's inheritance, but he learned that he'd actually been inseparably grasped by almighty Jehovah's enduring promises and he saw this stairway stretching from earth to heaven and angels of God ascending and descending and suddenly Jacob stricken with this transforming revelation. His earthly existence was invisibly linked with heaven. He was connected to God.

That's what this ladder meant. It's like you are much more connected to God than you realize. The life events that he'd experienced, these were part of God's purposes. He'd only been seeing the earthly side of it and his eyes were suddenly open to a whole new heavenly world. Genesis 28 16, one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible. When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, surely the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it. That's what I want, the journey I want to be taking you on, beloved, is just that you would have your eyes open to see your past differently and make connections where you hadn't seen connections so that you would be able to say like Jacob, surely God was in this place.

I just didn't know it. When you discover the presence of the Heavenly Father where you previously assumed yourself to be alone, you are now into making the deepest kind of connection of reality because your life is actually one where you have been loved with an everlasting love by your Father who has always longed to have you close to him. Beautiful story, years ago, a dear parishioner named Hannah had just returned from her father's funeral and she sat in my study with bewildered tears and a very soft soul. Hannah at the time was not married. She was an attorney, a very bright lady. I had prayed with her before about life and dreams, but this day I could tell it was really different. There was something that had happened to her.

I knew that she was wrestling with something deep. I got a phone call, pastor, and the voice said, is this Hannah? Yes, this is Hannah, she said. The voice on the other end of the line said, I'm sorry to tell you your father's dead. It was just that plain, pastor, that's what Hannah told me, just that quick. The caller didn't elaborate. She gave me no details, just wham. Nobody's with me. I didn't know what to think or do.

I was just stunned. Hannah paused and she shifted a little in her chair and continued. At least I had spoken with him recently.

And Mr. Tears, Hannah shared this with me. Pastor, my father left home when I was little and he hated my mother. He really hated her and he didn't want anything to do with me either. When my parents split up, neither of them wanted me. And she just said, pastor, I've always believed my father hated me. Let me just pause here to say, could you just please take a moment and imagine that pain?

Some of you maybe know that pain. Her whole life just thinking her father hated her, didn't want her, had no affection for her. It meant no memories of being tickled by a laughing dad, no warm recollection of gentle squeezes after bedtime stories, no father to confide in after a difficult day at school, no spiritual head to teach her how to pray, no remembrance of a tender warrior to defend her in her times of need, just the anguish I've always believed my father hated me. She just said, he never provided for me. Never, she said. She said, he couldn't save any money.

He never gave me or mom anything. And when I began making plans for his burial, I called his girlfriend to see if she knew of any provision that he had made for his own burial. But there wasn't any.

I was going to have to do it all by myself. And she said, it wasn't the money. It wasn't the money, pastor. She said, it was the pain of realizing that even in his death, he'd been selfish. It was like the final blow of rejection towards me, Hannah said.

He was hurting me from the grave, but he was my father and I needed to give him a proper burial. And here's where Hannah's voice changed, some new information about to emerge. She said, while I was making his burial preparations, I discovered that he had a safe deposit box at the bank. And after quite a bit of effort, I was allowed to check the contents of the box.

Hannah stopped and she just looked at me with this kind of frozen look of confusion of a strange new light. Pastor, she confided, dad had a little insurance policy, not a lot, but something. And I was the sole beneficiary. And he had several thousand dollars cash in the box. And with it, he left a note to me, the money was for me. As Hannah placed her hand over her heart, she said, for me, pastor, I don't understand. She said, he could have left that money to his girlfriend or someone else, but he left it for me.

I don't understand. And she said, and he had a coin collection that was his pride and joy. And that was in the box for me too. We just sat there silently pondering. And finally she said, what does this mean, pastor? I remember just sitting there and just praying for God's guidance and wanting to weigh my words carefully, but I really felt like I did have the answer. And I said, Hannah, I think it means your father loved you. Despite the way he seemed to you while he lived, in his death, your father revealed his heart. If he really hated you, he wouldn't have left you as treasures, would he have? He left you everything precious to him. It wasn't a lot, but it was all he had. People don't leave their treasures to people they hate.

They leave them to people they love. Hannah, he didn't know how to show it. Maybe he was so mad at your mother, he couldn't get close to you. Maybe he was hurting so badly inside that he couldn't find a way to let his love out towards you. But that lockbox means, that lockbox means that you are the last and most important thing on his mind. The lockbox means you're the most precious thing in his life. What it all means, Hannah, is that your father didn't hate you. He loved you. The father you thought to be so distant was invisibly connected to you.

She hardly even knew how to absorb it because it takes a while. If you have only known your father as distant or even someone who was against you, and suddenly you have to reinterpret all of your thoughts, it'll take a while to get used to it. Alan Wright, the Connection Keystone, today's teaching, and we've got Alan back here in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and a final word. 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. God's always been there. In every moment, you narrowly escaped from danger. In every moment, you were surprised by a blessing.

In every moment, you just knew the direction to take. God was there. Your life is defined by countless moments of God's grace. Perhaps they've been covered by the sands of time or have just gone unnoticed in the rush of life, but your life is full of God moments. When you make a gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's heart-stirring book, God Moments, that will lead you on a spiritual treasure hunt to uncover your God moments. It's Alan Wright's timeless book, God Moments.

Discover your God moments in the past and be filled with fresh faith today. 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. Alan, in today's teaching, and we'll pick back up with part two on this soon, is this some practicality that's coming here? Here's how you can make and connect the dots, make sense out of the things that have happened in your past. We're getting right down into the most practical meat of the God moment principle. And that is really, Daniel, what we're seeing is even if God's been there, but you can't make the connection to it, then it's as if for your faith, it hasn't really happened. And we just don't always remember our lives accurately. So we're learning about how to remember accurately and not rob ourselves of the delight and of the faith that comes when you make a connection and you see God where you hadn't seen Him, and you're able to give Him glory. We can also be learning about how memories can become filtered and distorted. And I think this is one of the gifts of God to us is to restore a right memory so that we can see God where we didn't see Him before. This Good News message is a listener-supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.