The God Moments of Your Life [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. Any moment can be a God moment. The ordinary becomes extraordinary.

The mundane becomes supernatural. 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. And then there are times in your life where you were attracted to something that was holy, right, pure, good, and noble and true. Why were you attracted?

Your sin nature was not attracted to that. God attracted you. I call it God Moments of holy attraction. And there are times in which you're just blessings that come in your life. May I tell you some of the happiest people you'll ever meet in your life are the people that understand they have God Moments of unearned blessing.

People that just go, I am so blessed and I don't deserve it, but man, I'm blessed. Those people realize God has done something and it just makes you a different kind of person. And there's a kind of a God Moment also when you realize that God led you. God spoke to you. God revealed something to you. I call it a God Moment of revealed truth. And then also is a God Moment. In the very darkest of times, God is still with you. And sometimes in your life, have you ever had this? You look back and there's an adversity that you've been through. While you were going through it, just everything within you almost had to battle to go, where could God even be in this? Only later did you realize something like what Joseph realized when he said you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. There can be valuable adversity.

And every week we're going to celebrate some testimonies. It's almost like when someone tells a story like that, it's something that's spiritual that takes place. It's like by osmosis there's something palpable that begins to happen inside of you. Faith. It's supernatural.

Something begins to happen. This is what happens when you make the connection and you see and you tell and you commemorate and you remember, you remember, you remember. If there's any figure in Scripture that needed to find out that God was actually in his life, it was Jacob. If you ever heard me preach somewhere along the line, you know I'm going to work in Jacob.

I love Jacob. I'm so identified with Jacob, the struggler, the conniver, the deceiver, who was far more blessed than he knew. And his whole life was a process of him finally discovering that he had already been prophesied over, already had been declared that he was going to be blessed.

It just took him his whole life to quit struggling so much to earn a blessing that had already been given to him. And I want to begin by pointing you in Genesis chapter 27 and 28 to a moment that happened in Jacob's life that changed a lot of things for him. After this moment, he still struggled some, but this was the beginning point of transformation for Jacob. What had happened is that Jacob had connived and deceived and tricked his brother before, but now he really pulled it off and he went and he deceived his aged father, his blinded father Isaac, into blessing Jacob rather than Esau.

Esau was the older one. He was the one who deserved it. Jacob stole it. And in the Hebrew world, they understood the power of words. So instead of the father saying, well, I blessed the wrong son, he said, I've blessed Jacob and indeed he'll be blessed.

He spoke it out. Jacob was going to get double portion of the inheritance. Jacob was going to be the preeminently blessed one. And Esau was so hurt by this and so furious that Esau wanted to kill his brother.

We pick up reading in Genesis 27 verse 41. Now Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him. And Esau said to himself, the days of mourning for my father are approaching, then I will kill my brother Jacob. But the words of Esau, her older son, were told to Rebekah. So she sent and called Jacob, her younger son, and said to him, behold, your brother Esau comforts himself about you by planning to kill you. Now therefore, my son, obey my voice, arise and flee to Laban, my brother in Haran, and stay with him a while until your brother's fury turns away. And so I set the context that Jacob, though he has stolen this blessing, his life is in turmoil. He is now having to flee from his own brother for fear of being murdered by him.

And though he has been declared to be blessed, he's going to be away from his father and he's going to be now like an exile. And this is what happens en route at Genesis 28 verse 10. Jacob left Beersheba and went towards Haran, and he came to a certain place and stayed there that night because the sun had set.

Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep, and he dreamed. And behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord, the God of Abraham, your father, and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie, I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and the north and the south. And in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land.

For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised. Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it. And he was afraid, and he said, How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. So early in the morning, Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel. Surely God is in this place, I just didn't know it. I was seeing my life incorrectly.

You ever had a time in your life where you just, you were seeing it totally wrong? I heard a great story this week at New Canis Society from my friend Chris Welch. And he said that he and his wife Cherie recently went to visit the Linville Caverns. And he said it hadn't been there in 40 years to go into this cave and see all the beautiful stalactites and stalagmites and whatever is in the cavern. He said as they came into it, they had to be given some warning or information or some disclosure about the possibility of a disease that is somehow related to bats that might be in the cave. And so that was a little foreboding. It was enough that when they came out of the caverns they were asked to, I think he said, stand into some sort of disinfectant. He said, I'm just glad I didn't have sandals on. Later in the day they decided to take a little walk, a little hike on a path.

And they found that the path was all covered with brambles and they had to work their way through a lot of brush and so forth in the day. And at the end of this long day they were just at home and Chris said Cherie put her feet up and he looked down near her ankle and he said, honey, what is that? He said there was a big red circle and in the middle of it a bright red dot about the size of a wooden match tip. And radiating out from that bright red dot were just some spidery like red lines, vein like, and the whole circle was flush looking.

And his wife, Cherie, a very, very bright lady, a doctor, neonatal doctor here in town, a graduate of Stanford Medical School, beautiful, very smart lady, Cherie. And she said, oh my, that could be symptomatic of Lyme disease. And so she started researching the symptoms of Lyme disease, got on the phone, talked to a colleague or two about what this might be and described what her situation was. And all this is going on and Chris said that he realized that he probably would be wise to quit watching the taped golf tournament that he had been watching and maybe pay a little more attention. And so he came back and said, honey, let me look at that a little closer. And he got down real close to it and he took his thumb and licked it and he started rubbing the place. She said, what are you doing? He said, give me just a second. He rubbed it and all of a sudden all the redness was gone. And she looked and she said, I don't understand.

Well, see, Chris has recently finished going to seminary later in his life and he said, well, I think since I went to seminary my spit has become holy water and I'm fine now. She said, I don't understand. What has happened here? And she said, honey, when you got home and you showered today after our hike, did you shave?

It looked like you might have nicked yourself a little bit. And she's like, oh, yeah, I think that's what that was. You ever had a moment like that where it's just like you just made all these connections between the bats and the brambles and the Lyme disease and everything else and you realize that wasn't the right connection at all. You see, you can have an entire paradigm shift in your thinking if just the veil that's over your eyes gets lifted and you see something for what it really is. That's what happened to Jacob on this day. See, Jacob was this guy who thought that he was not blessed and he had to manipulate and control and strive every day of his life in order to make himself be more blessed. And what God was trying to get through to him is, Jacob, Jacob, Jacob, you don't have to climb up to heaven. Let me show you this. Your life is already intimately, intricately connected to heaven at every point.

You just haven't seen it. And so what happened in Jacob's life is he began to make a connection that he hadn't made before. He began to see the power of how God in his life could be actually connected to the events, even if he didn't feel like that God was there, that God was there.

So notice this. Jacob, it wasn't that he didn't believe in God. It was just he hadn't seen God.

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. 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. It wasn't that he didn't believe that God existed and that God was maybe on his throne for all of Israel. It's just he hadn't seen a connection between his life and God.

See, most people in America say they believe in God. But most people just haven't seen how beautifully, wonderfully loved they are by God and how intimately their life is connected with God. See, God is in your life whether you know it or not.

If you don't believe in God, if you don't believe in Christ, it doesn't change the fact that God's in your life. I think every breath you breathe is because of God's grace. It is about our consciousness, how much we see him. So Jacob is struggling, is struggling for a blessing that he assumed that he already missed rather than seeing the blessing that had already been promised. And God's saying, I want you to see that you are blessed. But God wanted to see more than that.

He wanted him to see not only you are blessed, but every blessing that comes in your life, God is saying, comes from me. See this connection. God's at the top of this ladder and these messengers of God, angels are going up and down. There is stuff of life that's rising up to me and my stuff is descending to the earth and there is an ongoing dialogue and a communication and an intercession. And there's something going on in the invisible realm that you haven't seen.

And I'm going to pull back the curtain for just a moment, Jacob, and I'll let you see it. Notice this about this God moment. It just came in an unexpected time, just when you think it wouldn't happen. When he's tired, he's on a journey, he's just laying down to go to bed.

Have you ever noticed that? It's so often these moments with God come like in the laundry room or a frustrated parent who is just about worn out for the day and then your three-year-old says something so irresistibly cute, you just fall over laughing and God speaks to you through it. Or just, I don't know, you're in the shower and suddenly a thought comes or a conversation with an old friend and the light bulb turns on and you see something you hadn't seen before about what God is doing in your life or some surprising little piece of mail that arrives. Any moment can be a God moment.

The ordinary becomes extraordinary, the mundane becomes supernatural. And it left Jacob, the text says he was fearful. God doesn't want you to be fearful of him, but he does want you to be in awe. Jacob just didn't know what to do with this. He didn't know that this, he still didn't understand this was his invitation to be drawn into the mercies of God. He just realized, wow, everything stands still in this kind of moment, these transcendent moments where everything you thought, you're just going about your business in a very ordinary way and then this transcendent glorious God you realize is right in the midst of it and it arrests your attention and there's something in the soul that is overawed at this. The ground that you think is ordinary is extraordinary. And Jacob who thought that he was the one who had grasped at the inheritance starts to realize instead he'd been grasped by God.

And what does God do in the midst of this? He affirms what he spoke to Abraham. He affirms my word is sure, my promises are real. He affirms that what was spoken to your grandfather Abraham is valid for you. He's saying this isn't just something for someone else, Jacob. This is for you and this is for your family. It's not somebody else through whom I'm going to work my promises.

It's going to be you. And seeing all of this, Jacob says, surely God's in this place. I just didn't know it. And he names this place Beth El, the house of God. And what happens for us as Christians is that when you accept Christ, you become the house of God.

You become the inhabitation of the most high. The Holy Spirit comes and dwells in the heart of the believer. And he begins to make real to you that you are a child of God. We call it bearing witness to our spirit. Call it what you want, but it is God communicating to you like he did to Jacob. But he does this every day speaking to you and wanting to show you that your life is connected with God. And beloved, you can train your spiritual eyes to see him.

Yes, you can. You can train your spiritual eyes to see God. This doesn't have to just be something that you just sit around and hope, wishfully thinking that one day maybe I'll get to see God. No, you can learn to see him. He is there.

He is speaking, he is moving, he is acting. We go to the beach and one of the things we like to do is look for shark's teeth. And I rarely find a shark's tooth. I don't know if it's because my vision is worse.

I got glasses on. But my daughter Abigail walks on the beach and trips on shark's teeth. She looks down and she says, oh, a shark's tooth. Look, Dave.

And we'll just walk about ten minutes. Oh, another shark's tooth. My wife's the same way, but she's even better at finding four-leaf clovers. I don't think I've ever found a four-leaf clover.

You're going to be talking to my wife in the field. She'll be talking and say, oh, look at there, a four-leaf clover. How do you see these things? They're all green and they look the same. I said, how do you find the shark's teeth? She said, Daddy, just look for something totally black. I said, half the shells on the beach are totally black. Yeah, but look for something with a point.

I said, they all got a point on it. And after I bend down ten times and pick up something that's not a shark's tooth, bend down ten times and something that's not a four-leaf clover, I give up on it. One of the great instances of this is me flying with my friend at Eldar Church, Bob Roach, who's flown me so many different places and been a pilot for decades and decades, a very, very skilled pilot. Whenever we're flying and the radar shows that there is another plane in the vicinity, you always like to be able to identify and see that plane.

It's just an extra measure of security. You want to see the traffic. You're looking for it. Early on, Bob would say, okay, we're looking for a plane that's over at about 2 o'clock somewhere. And I said, let's look for the traffic.

So I'm looking for the traffic, looking for the traffic, looking for the traffic. He said, oh, there it is. I got it. And I said, I never saw it. He said, oh, yeah, it was right there. It was about a thousand feet below us, right on the 2 o'clock. I said, okay.

We did this for years. I'm just like, man, one day I want to be the one to see the traffic. Why can you see the traffic? I can't see the traffic.

I've never seen the traffic. He said, you just got to know where to look. You got to know where to look. With you starting today, let me take you on a spiritual treasure hunt. You could categorize in a different way, but I'd like to invite you to ask the question, has there ever been an amazing rescue in your life? Ever been a time in which there's something that could have undone you and you were spared?

Every one of us, probably in this room, every one of us. There's been a time you were sick and you were healed. It was God. Has there ever been a time in your life in which you were drawn towards something that was true and noble and right and pure? It wasn't your flesh leading you there, and it certainly wasn't the devil.

How were you drawn towards a good choice in the first place? It was God. Has there ever been a time in your life in which there's a blessing that came and you just know that you know, I had nothing to do with making that happen.

It's God. Ever a time in which you were led, a time in which you were spoken to, God still speaks. It was a God moment. Ever a time in your life where you went through something tough and later you look back and go, If I hadn't gone through that, then this good thing wouldn't have happened.

It's valuable adversity. It's a God moment. Surely God is in this place. And the Holy Spirit is in you to reveal to you how much God is with you. He'll never leave you. He'll never forsake you. He's in your life. Your life is eternally, intimately, intricately connected like a ladder between heaven and earth. And that is the gospel.

Alan Wright. That gives us hope looking back at the God moments of our lives. And that's today's teaching. Alan is back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and a final word.

Stay with us. 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. Alan, I know in this teaching we're going to learn a lot about how we can start today remembering the God moments in our lives that are going to happen, but also looking back and saying, even in this moment, Alan, if I've not kept good record, is there a way in my own mind I can go back very quickly and very on demand in a sense to say, here's how to remember?

Absolutely. And so what we're going to be learning, Daniel, is what I've identified, and there could be more, but identified when I was writing the book, five different kinds of God moments. And really this is to give the reader or the listener a category, a sort of a place to start looking. And so that's what we're going to learn. You start learning. You start saying, let me go back and think about times where I faced some great peril or danger, and yet I made it through.

How did I make it through? And you begin to reflect on this and realize, wait a minute, God was there. You begin to think about times where you had blessings that you didn't earn.

You could have never expected it. Where did it come from? It came from God.

You go as we were just talking about, adversities that at the time just felt painful, but now you realize good has come from it. God was in the midst of it. So it's a wonderful and nourishing journey to take a spiritual treasure hunt where you uncover yesterday's God moments. It's a beautiful and powerful thing for our faith today. This news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.