Daily Blessing Compilation #14

Alan Wright, pastor, Bible teacher, and author of his latest book, The Power to Bless.

The unmerited favor of God is the thing that opens doors, that it's the unmerited favor of God that changes their lives and moves them forward in fruitfulness and success. And when you see your life like that, you say, it changes everything. 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 our discussion today as we step away from the pulpit teaching and in our special blessing broadcast, where Pastor Alan is sitting with us today and we're able to spend time with the author as we dive deeper into the power to bless these great truths. And I think you're in for a good treat as we flip through the pages and in particular chapter seven, as you listen to our discussion today, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. And we want to make sure you know how to get this resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

Contact us at pastoralan.org, that's pastoralan.org, or call 877-544-4860, 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program, but right now let's get started with today's discussion. There is so much good news that we've covered, a lot of good ground that we've covered.

Earlier in the beginning of the book, we talk a lot about Ephraim and Manasseh and the crossing of hands. And so we're going to recap a bit of that as we journey through these pages together. Well, Daniel, I love these days in the studio with you where we just get to take a deep dive into the truth of what blessing is all about, some of the heart issues that were in my own heart that led to this book. And it's been so exciting opportunities to talk with people around the nation, to be in various interviews, radio and TV, and talk about this.

And everywhere that I go, I get the same response that people say, boy, I wish I'd understood this much earlier. We've laughed about one man who runs a business, a Christian business, a large organization. And he got so taken by it that he decided to give every employee a free book that wanted one in the time that I learned about it a few weeks back, given over 60 away already. But he told his staff, he said a book made him mad and we're like, well, it made you mad.

And he said, yeah, I was just mad. Nobody told me about this 30 years ago. So the blessing is a fundamental like prayer. It is fundamental like scripture reading.

It's just a huge, beautiful theme, runs all the way through the scripture. And we're talking about speaking a positive vision over someone's life that's rooted in faith, spoken in accord with God's word and this mystical impartation of grace that takes place. And the good news, of course, we've been learning and what we talk about in the book is that anyone can learn to do this. And you can start now. You can start today.

That's right. And it's not something that you got to take a master course and two years from now you might be spiritual enough to bless somebody. You could literally today learn some things, but help you bless someone.

And in the book, there's actually a worksheet. It'll lead you almost fill in the blank wise to come and think of someone you love, how you could speak blessing to their lives. And so we've been talking a lot about, and of course, if we lay this out in the book, well, what is the essence of blessing? What are we imparting?

What are the gifts that are being given when we bless? And as the foundation for the book, for the power to bless, I came into fascination with Genesis chapter 48. If you listen with this regularly, you've heard me talk some point about Ephraim and Manasseh. Well, this is a mysterious story.

It is a powerful story. It is intriguing because Joseph has these boys, Ephraim and Manasseh. Manasseh is the firstborn, Ephraim the second, and when he learns, when Joseph learns that his father, Jacob, is dying, he rushes to his father's bedside.

He wants more than anything else for Jacob to bless Joseph's sons, for Jacob to bless his grandsons, Manasseh and Ephraim. And so he brings them, and it's customary, Daniel, that the firstborn son would receive a very special blessing. And I'm the third of three boys in my family, so I often joke and say, listen, I understand this.

My older brother has been such a successful student and every other endeavor of life. And I'm like, well, yeah, because when he was a baby, everybody read to him. You know, by the time the third came around, they're like, is there a book left for Alan here? You get to scraps.

You get to scraps. So any of you that are my listeners, right, any of you that are the firstborn, listen, we understand you. You're probably leading a company or something right now.

And of course, I also laughed and said, but I think they might populate the counselor's office with all the drivenness issues. But you know, the firstborn, there's all this expectation, Daniel, that is on that firstborn. And in that culture, in the ancient Middle Eastern culture, the firstborn would be expected to, you know, carry on the family estate. And so they would usually get a double portion of the inheritance and they have a very special blessing spoken over their lives. In fact, that is, we won't talk about it today, but that's what the drama of Isaac and Jacob and blessing Jacob instead of Esau and that whole story is about, Jacob was the second born and the firstborn gets the special blessing.

So here we are. Now Jacob is dying. Joseph has brought his sons, Ephraim the second born, Manasseh the firstborn. And we expect that Jacob will, according to custom, take his right hand, the strong hand that symbolizes the stronger blessing, put it on the firstborn's head, Manasseh, and then take the left hand and put it on Ephraim's head. And that's the way that Joseph brings these two boys to Jacob. He brings them forward, he puts Manasseh under Jacob's right hand and Ephraim under Jacob's left hand. And then Jacob does a strange thing. He crosses his arms, putting the right hand, the strong hand, the stronger blessing on the younger's head. And Joseph is very polite, but he says, no, no, my father, he said that this is Manasseh, he is the firstborn, and he tries to take Jacob's hand, his right hand, and put it on the firstborn, Manasseh, and put the left hand.

And Jacob, again, in a very strange, mysterious way, he says, I know my son, I know, and he crossed his arms again. And he took that right hand intentionally, put it on the younger son, Ephraim's head. And he said, and he blessed them. And the Bible says, thus he put Ephraim ahead of Manasseh. And that's where we're told in Genesis 48, thus you shall put my name, you shall bless the people of Israel this way, the Lord says, you shall bless your son, say, may God make you as Ephraim and Manasseh. So the heart of this blessing, the Ephraim and Manasseh blessing, is that the younger one got the blessing he didn't deserve.

And rabbi after rabbi of the century has talked about this, they have all these different ideas, why Ephraim and Manasseh, what is this all about? And Daniel, it doesn't make any sense until you see it through the glory of the gospel. Because the father, the heavenly father, had a firstborn son, Jesus is called the firstborn of all creation. And he came, he lived a sinless life, and he deserved nothing but his father's strong right hand of blessing. But in a very real way, when he hung on the cross, and Jesus cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, in a very real way, the father in the heavens crossed his arms.

And he took the right hand of blessing that should have been reserved for Jesus alone. And instead, through Jesus shed blood, he extended that blessing to all of us who believe, to the younger siblings of Jesus, to the ones who didn't deserve it. And it means, therefore, as much as it bends our minds, that we have received a share of the blessing that should have been reserved for Jesus because of his righteousness. And we're regarded, therefore, as if we're righteous, and the blessing of God comes on us. Well, in a word, what that is a picture of is favor. So when you bless somebody's life, you're blessing them. And if you say, may God make you his Ephraim and Manasseh, you're saying, may it be that your life is filled with favor. Favor means you didn't earn it, and you didn't necessarily deserve it. But there's a grace that is being shown you that gives you a means of moving forward in a way you wouldn't have otherwise.

It means that doors open that would not have opened otherwise. Favor means that blessings come that could not have come otherwise. Favor is more valuable than any personal skill because the favor of God is really without limit. And we are people, as Christians, we're people that live under the unmerited favor of God. That's who we are. We are people that we live by this, we are gifted, we are held in this, and we are promised eternity in it that we've received favor from God. So we're all the Ephraims who didn't deserve the right hand of blessing. And we got it just through simple childlike faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ. So that's a good point of discussion on this Friday that we want to bless people in a way that helps release favor into their lives and helps them see themselves as a blessed and favored people.

Because when people try to live only by their own merits and they try to live by just their own skill set, there's a limit on that, there's anxiety that's attached to it. But when you live according to the grace of God, then really it's unlimited what can happen in your life. So all that is to say a beautiful picture, the crossed arms of God, that then give us much, much to say about how much grace can be poured out through the sound of blessing over other's lives. Well, Pastor Alan Wright, and we're in the studio today. It's our special blessing broadcast sitting with the author of The Power to Bless and these great truths. And by the way, I think what you're talking about there, Alan, is there's power. That's part of the title. There's power that is unleashed when we bless others. And we've talked about the practicality.

We've set the stage with the Ephraim and Manasseh. And this book also has a lot of good stories, good personal stories scattered throughout that I think also helped to bring out the practical. There's one in particular involving Uncle Stanley. Uncle Stanley was so dear to us, my wife's uncle, older brother to my wife's mother. Billy Bennett was a missionary to Brazil, a church planter, a wonderful counselor. He had served also in a large megachurch in Los Angeles. He served two mountain churches in North Carolina. At one season of his life with Billy Graham's pastor, he was a fascinated human being. And he and his wife, Joella, meant so much to us. Well, he is full of stories, Stanley, who's in heaven now, but full of stories from his childhood growing up in York, South Carolina.

And always one of my favorite is maybe one of the best pictures of grace and favor that I know of. Stanley Bennett was a wonderful, rambunctious kid. And his dad was the chief of police in York, South Carolina, a wonderful Christian mother, is the sixth of eighth children. One day he got bored, a little hungry, and so he and his brother Douglas, who we call Uncle Duddy, they snuck into the neighbor's yard to steal some apples off of her tree. They thought they had just skulked into the yard undetected, but Mrs. Correll, whose tree it was, she saw the whole thing. And she said, boys, I see you there.

You come in here this instant. And they had been caught red-handed with her green apples and tails between their legs. Stanley and Duddy slumped into Mrs. Correll's house with their red faces. And she said, boys, you just sit right there. And she directed them to these two dining room chairs.

She said, I'll be back in a moment. Well, Stanley just knew, Daniel, he knew what was going to happen. He knew she was going in there and calling Stanley's parents and his dad, who was the chief of police, and this was not going to go well for Stanley. He knew that those apples weren't the only thing going to be red that day, you know. And so he's thinking about, but instead, Mrs. Correll emerged from her pantry with a bowl of the biggest, reddest, shiniest apples that Stanley said he'd ever seen. And she said, boys, those green apples on my tree are sour and wormy. They aren't any good here.

Try these. And Stanley just said that he and Duddy sat there for a long time looking at those bright red apples. Stanley had never, he said he'd never eaten a store-bought apple in his life and he couldn't believe his eyes. And she just waited on him. You know, grace just isn't really grace unless it seems like it's too good to be true.

You know, if you don't wonder whether maybe a cruel trick's being played on you, you probably don't really know yet the unmerited favor of God because it's wild like that when you get something you don't deserve. So finally, Stanley said he took a bite and he said it was the best apple he'd ever tasted. He just started chomping down on it, let the juice just splatter all over the place, running down his face. And Mrs. Correll said, now boys, boys, I don't ever want to see you eating those bitter green apples in my backyard. I always have some good store-bought apples in my kitchen and I'd like you to come over here anytime that you're hungry, Mrs. Correll said. And Stanley looked up and he could see himself in Mrs. Correll's big wood-framed mirror and he said, I stared at my reflection in that mirror and he said, I think that's the day that I discovered the meaning of grace.

Sitting there looking at the apple juice running down his boyish chin. And that's a great picture of the way God is with us, Daniel. And I think when we bless people, we want to do the opposite of what so much of the world does. The world withholds blessing, affection and affirmation as a tool to try to motivate.

And it's always in one way or another saying, you know, life is about getting what you deserve and so wait until you deserve to be blessed, then you'll be blessed. And God is just the opposite of that. He is by his nature gracious. He loves grace. He loves to give the gift of his mercy and kindness to us when we haven't deserved it. And that's why Jesus came.

That's the whole coming of Jesus. So when you bless someone's life, what you want to think about is the grace of God that's extended towards them. You want them to know themselves loved and you want to simply bless them for favor to be poured out in their lives. You know, I think it's something we just blessed our kids with every single day of their life.

May God, you know, what was said of Jesus, and may God grow you in wisdom and stature and favor with God and with people all the days of your life. And we would, Daniel, we would point it out to the kids. I remember one time we were just out at a restaurant and just had a meal, you know, kids were little. And at the end of it, a man who'd been nearby came over and he said, I tell you, these are some fine children here. And I really enjoyed just sitting near you guys seeing these fine children and he pulled out. It might have been a silver dollar.

Maybe he just carried them around with his pipe. And he gave each of them one of these coins. Well, our kids were just completely wide eyed, you know, and something like that would happen. And they'd say, well, why did we get that? And we just say, well, you know how we bless you every day to have the favor of God on your life? And we say that's the favor of God. And I always just wanted them to think like that because life is such that, yeah, we can work hard and we should work hard.

And I have a hard work ethic and our kids do. But the best things in life you really can't earn. The best things in life come freely to you. And that's the way favor is. So maybe it was, you know, that old Jacob who had been conniving and striving his whole life. He finally understood grace there at his deathbed. And so when he blessed those boys, he crossed his arms and he put the younger in front of the older. He was essentially saying, I get it now, grace, unearned, unmerited favor. That's the greatest joy in life and that's the way God interacts with us. And so that's the way he blessed them.

Having bestow's favor on others, unearned, unmerited. But with the apples, there was abundance there, too. I think that's a good, good illustration. It's like, Mrs. Correll, it's always going to be here.

And you know, honestly, if you've got a Mrs. Correll who wants to bless you with apples and you're favored with that, Stanley said he never stole another apple in his life. That's right. That's right. If she'd come in and say, now, you boys, you know, and gotten all of them and they got them disciplined at home, well, maybe that, but they'd have sure still been tempted. Right.

Yeah. When you see yourself as blessed and highly favored, it changes everything. That's Pastor Alan Wright in our special broadcast, and we'll have our final word today coming up in just a moment. We all need a positive, faith-filled vision spoken over our lives. Without it, we'll never rise to our God-given potential.

With it, we can let go of the past and move forward confidently under the favor of God. If you'd like to replace every curse with blessing in your life, and if you'd like to learn how to speak life and empower the people you love, contact us today to get Pastor Alan Wright's new Amazon bestselling book, The Power to Bless. And when you do, for a limited time, we'd like to send you four additional life-changing resources to help you discover the power to bless. We'll send you Pastor Alan's video masterclass and study guide called Speak Life. And we'll also include Pastor Alan's new video course, The Power to Bless, perfect for small groups or individual devotions.

It also comes with a study guide. Contact us today to get Alan Wright's beautiful hardcover book, The Power to Bless, and receive the four additional life-enriching resources. It's time to learn how blessed you are in Christ and to discover the power to bless.

Learn more at PastorAlan.org, that's PastorAlan.org, or call 877-544-4860. Back now with Pastor Alan, author of The Power to Bless, and as we put a conclusion here to this particular Friday special broadcast, our final word for today, and I think it's all about, Pastor Alan, I think it's all about what you've been talking about through this chapter in particular, this unmerited favor. And that's something that we can pay it forward, if you want to use that phrase, to others, right?

Absolutely. You know, I said to Stanley, sat there as a little boy looking at Mrs. Correll's mirror, and he saw apple juice running down his cheek, and he said, I think that's where I first understood grace. Well, he went on to be a preacher of grace. And many, many people were blessed by Stanley's life, all the way from California to North Carolina to Brazil. One of the people that he pastored was a man named Billy Graham in Montreat, North Carolina. You know, Billy Graham's story, when you think about it, you go, where did that amazing success come from?

Well, there were many beautiful qualities about Billy Graham. I mean, his faith and passion and hard work and all, but, you know, that whole thing got started in 1949, Los Angeles Revival, and at that arrival, it didn't start out nearly as well as they'd hoped. They weren't getting the kind of crowds that they wanted. And then a couple of things happened. One thing that happened was a warm spell of weather rolled across Los Angeles, and that was interesting. It ended up playing a part in it. And there was a well-known country singer named Stu Hamblin who accepted Christ after meeting with Billy Graham in a hotel, and he professed his faith publicly. And that ended up having a big impact. But a third thing, and most important, the local press had been not paying much attention to the revival meeting. But one night, Billy Graham found himself surrounded by all this media coverage.

Flash bulbs are going off, they're taking the pictures, asking questions. And one of the reporters said to Billy Graham, you've been kissed by William Randolph Hearst, the publishing mogul, had evidently for some reason said, Puff Graham, next thing you know, the place is just packed. And well, that's just, the rest is history, so to speak. Because I mean, most people would say it wasn't so much that Billy Graham was the best preacher ever or Billy Graham, it was just there was a favor of God on his life.

And I just think that we want to bless people so that they are like Ephraim and NASA in this sense, that the unmerited favor of God is the thing that opens doors, that it's the unmerited favor of God that changes their lives and moves them forward in fruitfulness and success. And when you see your life like that, you say, it changes everything. And I'll never forget Stanley saying that when Ms. Correll got older and she was going to move out of that old house in York, she wanted to get rid of her furniture and she called up the Bennett boys. And she said, y'all come, I want you to take anything you want.

And Stanley went over and he knew he only wanted one thing. It was that big wood framed mirror where he first saw his face dripping with the apple juice when he should have been punished and instead was shown favor. He got that mirror because that's where he looked into the face of real, real grace. And I think, Daniel, that once you see your life as one that's under the favor of God, then you never look back on it the same. You become expectant and you begin to be thankful and you walk in a sense of, hey, this life's not just all about what I can get. This life is about what God's done for me and Jesus Christ. You have the power to bless people and show them the favor of God. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.