Valuable Adversity [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. In the midst of our pain, there can be something God does that's wonderful.

It's not to say, though, that God's the author of evil. 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. Are you ready for some good news? When you go through the difficult times of life, the seasons of adversity, the fact that it's painful doesn't mean that God isn't with you. In fact, there is blessing in the midst of the difficult time.

And when you see it, you will have discovered the God moment of valuable adversity, the God moment of valuable adversity. I have several texts I'm going to be referring to today, but I want to first reference Leviticus chapter 23. Leviticus chapter 23 at verse 33. And the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the people of Israel, saying on the 15th day of this seventh month and for seven days is the feast of booths to the Lord. And then later at verse 41, you shall celebrate it as a feast to the Lord for seven days in the year. It is a statute forever throughout your generations.

You shall celebrate it in the seventh month. You shall dwell in booths for seven days. All native Israelites shall dwell in booths that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.

I am the Lord your God. So one of the seven feasts of Israel was the feast of booths, these leafy huts that the people would make and go and live in each year for a period of time to remember the time in which they were in the desert and they didn't have houses. They didn't have plenty, but the Lord provided. He provided manna. He provided sustaining quail to them.

He was with them. It's a time for remembering adversities. Charles Spurgeon wrote, it is a delightful and profitable occupation to mark the hand of God in the lives of ancient saints and to observe His goodness in delivering them, His mercy in pardoning them and His faithfulness in keeping His covenant with them. But would it not be even more interesting and profitable for us to remark the hand of God in our own lives? Ought we not to look upon our own history as being at least as full of God, as full of His goodness and of His truth, as much a proof of His faithfulness and veracity as the lives of any of the saints who have gone before.

Let us review our own lives. Surely in these we may discover some happy incidents, refreshing to ourselves and glorifying to God. That's largely what we're learning in the study of what I call God moments, remembering God in your past, is that so often we tend to look at what God's done in some other great saint's life, some character in the Bible or someone else that we know and we listen to others' testimonies. But what we're learning about is that God has been in your life since before you were born and God has been there at every moment of your life and today we're going to talk about what may be the most important kind of God moment for you to recognize and that is the God moment of valuable adversity when you are in trials, tough times, difficult situations, painful incidences in your life. God hasn't brought about any evil towards you, but whatever it is that you're facing, God is with you in it and it might be the most important discovery you could ever make is to look back over your life and see where it was that when you might have most thought, wow, where's God?

He's not here, that you go back and find, no, He was there and something good has come from it. Maybe some of you heard me tell this years ago, I'm always talking about golf and Golf Digest and golf magazines, all these things. They always just basically are promising golfers that will tell you how to hit it longer and how to hit it straighter. But sometime back in 2010, I think it was, Golf Digest ran a series of articles entitled Golf Saved My Life and it was people who wrote in about how much golf had meant to them and maybe what it had done in a relationship between a father and a son or something like that, but none could top the story of Kathleen Murphy who was 58 years old at the time of the drama that she told. Kathleen was a 31 handicapper and she enjoyed getting out and walking the course at their country club in Illinois. Her oldest son was going to be married in about eight weeks and with all the preparation for the wedding, she hadn't played golf all spring. So one morning she decided she just had to take a break from all the wedding plans and all the busyness and so she and a couple of the ladies went out to enjoy four delicious hours of golf. When they came to the long par, 4 16th, all the ladies hit their drives into about the same section of the fairway and Kathleen was the first to play. So she takes out her trusty three wood and she hit it pretty well, about pin high, but to the right of the green and it settled down in the rough and seeing her ball was in the rough, she decided in order to save time, she'd step to the side and she'd start moving forward to go look for her ball while the other ladies hit. The next shot in her group was played by Lois Burns. She pulled out her three wood, not so trusty, and she shanked it hard right and it struck Kathleen directly, squarely in the back of the head.

Now just, I'll just let you envision that for just a moment. She said, Kathleen said, it felt like an explosion in her head, stunned, excruciating pain. She just stood there at first and cried fortuitously. The hospital was just down the street from the golf course, so Kathleen's playing partners delivered her to the emergency room via a golf cart. The CAT scan and the MRI showed, thankfully, there was no fracture in her skull, but the doctors began asking puzzling questions. Have you not been having headaches?

Have you not been feeling dizzy? The doctors summoned her children, her husband to the hospital and they told Kathleen that on the right side of her brain, there was an apple-sized tumor, which they estimated had been growing for about 15 years. As a result, her brain stem was off-center and they were amazed that she had not suffered a stroke and they thought a stroke would be imminent. Kathleen underwent surgery, about eight hours of surgery. The tumor was successfully removed. She recuperated enough to walk down the aisle and take her rightful seat at her son's wedding. Eight weeks later, she was 58 at the time and she told this story five years later.

According to the article, she's fully recovered. Expect to live a long, full, and healthy life, which makes you just go, isn't God good? But also you have to say, isn't God strange?

Because life is like that sometimes. Imagine if Kathleen ... Look at it this way. If she'd been told before she'd planned that golf outing that at the 16th hole, she was going to stand over in the right rough and get hit in the back of the head with a golf ball going 100 miles an hour and be taken to the hospital. You think she'd have gone to play golf that day?

Of course not. And while she's standing there in the rough with the exploding searing pain in the back of her head and radiating through her whole body, if you told her, don't worry, I'm sure it's a blessing in disguise, she'd called you crazy. And she might've taken that three-wood and wrapped you over the head. It's very difficult to convince somebody in pain that maybe there's a blessing that's going on.

It's both puzzling and amazing that something could be so bad and yet so good at the same time. But that was true for Kathleen, and it was also true for Lois Burns, whose shot that day was probably the worst shot she'd ever hit, and strangely also the best shot she ever hit. She hit her friend in the back of the head with a golf ball and saved her life. Kathleen wrote later she received a present from Lois that Christmas. It was a golf trophy, a Waterford vase adorned with the very golf ball that had beamed Kathleen in the head.

That ball had become a trophy of grace to her, and Kathleen said she didn't play golf again until the next summer when she finally walked down the 16th hole to the same place with the same hillsides and bunkers. The sun was beginning to set, and she just stood there and cried for gratitude. In the midst of our pain, there can be something God does that's wonderful. It's not to say, though, that God's the author of evil. Wayne Grudem, one of the most reliable and articulate Reformed theologians of our day in his great systematic theology says, but we must remember that in all these passages, it is very clear that scripture nowhere shows God is directly doing anything evil. Moreover, scripture never blames God for evil or shows God is taking pleasure in evil, and scripture never excuses human beings for the wrong they do. However, we understand God's relationship to evil. We must never come to the point where we think that we are not responsible for the evil that we do or that God takes pleasure in evil or is to be blamed for it. Such a conclusion is clearly contrary to scripture. So it's first and foremost important theologically lay out that to say that something good can come out of something bad doesn't mean that God authors that which is bad.

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. 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. There's something that God is saying to us in all of the feasts of Israel that he was putting into the regular rhythm of the life of Israel a reminder of something important about his nature, something important for human beings to remember. Now, in the new covenant, we're not under any requirement to keep these feasts, but instead all of this has been a shadow that's pointing to even greater spiritual reality for us to live by the presence of the Holy Spirit bringing to our mind all of the ways that God has been at work when we have been humbled or when we have been hurting. So when he established this feast of booze and the Lord said that what you're going to do is you're going to celebrate this.

Remember, it's a celebration. There's all these feasts. There's a celebration of a feast unto the Lord, but he says you live in these booths for seven days, and they would literally go out and they'd make these leafy huts.

This was the final feast of Israel during the calendar year. It took its name from the Hebrew word sukkot that describes these leafy three-sided huts that God's people inhabited for those seven days. The construction and the occupation of the booths reminded the Hebrew families that once upon a time they lived in the wilderness. They were in the desert, so the humble lodgings compelled them to acknowledge that they traveled through a desert in order to reach a promised land.

Like the wilderness originals, these mandated festival huts were humble, temporary dwellings symbolizing the humility and the adversity of desert times. Yet, at the same time, these unpretentious dwellings reminded them that God cared for His people deeply and practically while they wandered in their wilderness. The Lord provided for His people. He rained manna on the ground. He gave them daily bread.

He issued drink from the rock. It was like living water. And though they endured all this adversity in the desert, God was with them. And so because of this, the feast of the tabernacles was a celebration. It was an occasion for joy. Because the final harvest had been gathered, the festival was sometimes referred to as the feast of the end gathering. It eventually became known, interestingly, as the feast or the season of our joy.

That's what it's a picture of. It's like the hearty laughter at a party on a Friday night after a long week's work. The final feast was celebrated with lightheartedness of laborers who were at rest. And the whole feast of tabernacles or booths, it took place amidst the prosperity of that abundant final harvest. So do you see the irony of this?

Do you see the impact of this? When life was at its richest and easiest, all the Israelites were required to abandon the comfort of their fine homes, crowd into temporary leafy huts. When life presented its least adversity, when it seemed like it was the easiest, every Hebrew family had to move out into a blatantly adverse circumstance.

That's what it was all about. And once the Hebrew family entered the booth, they then would take time to reflect on the nature of that little hut that would be their home for that particular holiday. As it developed into a liturgy, the Jewish father would remind his children, quote, a man must not put his trust in the size or strength or salutary conveniences of his house, even though it be filled with the best of everything. Nor should he rely upon the help of any man, even though he be the Lord of the land. But let him put his trust in him whose word called the universe into being. See, the hut symbolized that our security is in God.

In Him we live and we move and we have our being. Beloved, the blessedness of your life is not measured by the wealth that you've acquired. The safety of your life is not defined by the extravagance of your house. The hope of your life is not rooted in the comfort of your circumstances. The joy of your life is not founded on the ease of your situation. Your blessing is in God. Your security is in God. Your hope is in God.

Your joy is in God. And when they would make this conscious choice to go and remember the season of humility and remember and live in these simple huts, they experienced a community that was rich and wonderful. Some years ago, many, many years ago I was living in a different city in Durham, North Carolina and a hurricane, a horrible storm came through the neighborhood, tore up everything. Huge trees were down everywhere. Power was out. The roads were blocked. And people that you never met all started coming out of their houses and helping one another.

People with chainsaws and people with food for one another. I mean, just anybody that was in trouble, we all helped. And it was amazing, the spirit of community that emerged from this. And then as time went by and all the roads were cleared and electricity was back on and life was back to normal again, everybody closed back up in their houses and got isolated again. And my associate came in to church one day and joked and he said, boy, oh, if we could just have another hurricane.

Well, nobody's asking for a hurricane, but you see the point. There's a value in the days when it feels like everything's been stripped away, even to the point that Jesus says blessed are those that mourn for they will be comforted. It's not that we ever want to be in a place where we're mourning, but you can be assured that in the midst of it, the Holy Spirit is bringing treasure into your life by His presence. I think this God moment is especially important to learn to discover because we have been so trained in waiting to give our testimonies when the blessing is fully and finally in. But why do we have to wait until we're on the mountaintop before we can give testimony? Some years ago, our church would have every Thanksgiving Eve, the night before Thanksgiving, we'd have a little service and it was just informal.

It would give an opportunity for people to stand up and just share something that they are thankful for. And one year particularly was poignant. John Porter, he shared, he had been unconscious for many days, didn't look like he'd be able to live. And he miraculously woke up by the grace of God. He got up and shared about having his life back.

Laura Hall, who works with me, she got up and shared that night because it would have been that year that she'd survived a life threatening intestinal obstruction while out of the country. It could have taken her life but God provided a way and she was spared. James Wall was in heaven now but he was 80 or so at the time that he shared this testimony and he had just had a successful heart surgery.

All of these and many more trophies of praise for what God had done. But the fact of the matter is that most of the times in our life we haven't crossed the finish line, we're still in the race. And so I was so glad that Marion and Bridget Blackwell, dear friends and leaders in our church, got up that night long ago and they spoke.

But they were not on a mountaintop, they were in a desert. And so it was that Marion got up and spoke and said we've been there and we're still in the desert. And he said I want to thank God for what he's doing. He said as most of you know, my wife's been battling a life threatening kidney ailment and we've seen God at work and she's much better and thankfully she's not going to need a kidney transplant or regular dialysis. And he said we're still waiting for her complete healing but we're trusting God. Bridget was just as honest.

She said this hasn't been just any desert, it's been the Sahara. Sometimes she said it's been all I could do just to cry out son of David have mercy. But she said I felt the Lord's presence most near when I've been at my lowest. He's taken away my fear.

I've known his love and in the midst of it I've been deeply blessed. Then Marion spoke again and he said as many of you know six months ago I lost my job. I was downsized. But he said I was strangely prepared.

He said amazingly two nights before I was told about the downsizing. He said I actually had a vivid dream and in that dream I saw my boss call me into his office. I sat down and listened to him say Marion I have to let you go.

It's a corporate downsizing. And still in the dream Marion said in that dream he asked have I done anything wrong? And in the dream his boss said no you've done a great job. Marion said the dream ended. He woke up. Two days later Marion went to work he said as usual and he lived out that dream. He said his boss called him in.

He sat down. The boss said I have to let you go. And Marion said have I done anything wrong? And the boss said no it's a corporate downsizing. He said you've done a great job. And Marion said the dream had prepared me. He said I think my boss had a harder time with it than I did. I found myself reassuring him it's alright boss. I'm going to be just fine. And then Marion went on to say it's been six months now. My severance package is running out.

I still don't have a job. But I know God has a purpose behind all this. He has a great job for me somewhere and I'm sure he'll show it to me soon. And then Marion did something I'll never forget. He looked at his children on the third pew and his voice broke. And with unashamed emotion this really steady man of faith wept and he declared an astounding truth.

He said I can honestly say this has been the best year of my life. Alan Wright. Today's teaching. Valuable Adversity. Stay with us. Alan's back 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 Pastor Alan dot 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. Call us at 877-544-4860 that's 877-544-4860 or come to our website Pastor Alan dot org. Alan in the series of God moments here I mean obviously a lot of this is looking back and seeing where God was there and oftentimes this it's gonna be natural here this is gonna be through difficult times in our lives and we see God come in with a rescue or God come there with a steady hand or God coming and just being that peace and that storm but it's very important here that in this series and this teaching today especially that we're saying God is not the author of evil but as Andre Crouch says if I'd never had a problem I'd never know there was a God who could solve them right and that's the God that's an important God moment. I think it's so amazing about God Daniel I mean I just I just put it this way God's so smart and so good he is able to put his goodness and his wisdom together to bring about something yeah that this is the mystery something good in your life that could not have come about except for an adversity and yet he didn't author the evil but he incorporated it into his providential plan and it's so beautiful and every single one of us they're gonna have things in our life maybe not like the adversity that Joseph went through maybe not been in a dungeon maybe not been persecuted like that but all of us can identify in some way or another that we've been through difficult times and when you've been through those difficult times go back and ask the Holy Spirit to help you and look for it and you'll see that God was there in the midst of it he's brought value out of your adversities. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.