Daily Blessing Compilation #10

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. May God let your city be rebuilt on the ruins, and may it be as though you've forgotten all your troubles.

May God make you like Manasseh. 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 be with us today in the studio with our special blessing broadcast with Pastor Alan. And it's good to be with you, Pastor Alan. I've enjoyed these times together where we can dig deeper on what blessing really means for the believer.

Daniel, it is so special. Of course, we always love being able to broadcast messages that have been preached, but there's something about the freshness of sitting down with you and really in some ways digging deeper into this amazing concept of blessing. As I've told you before, our son Bennett, I was talking to him about the book, The Power to Bless that's out now. And he said, dad, I think it's a good book.

I said, oh, it's great. I said, you know, I said, he said, it's like the game of chess blessing is. He says, you can learn to play chess in 10 minutes. You learn what the different pieces do and start playing. And then you can spend the rest of your life learning the nuances of the game.

And it's sort of like that with The Power of Blessing. And these give us a chance to go beyond just here's how the pieces move and really get into some more depth. And so what a joy it is to be with you in studio again. Well, 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 discussion, 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. Of course, we'll have more on this later in the program. But now as we get started with Pastor Alan and today's discussion, what blessing means for your life, we'll rewind real quickly and go back to some of the basics of this. And it's coming from a book by Pastor Alan called The Power to Bless. It's available everywhere.

Good books are sold right now. And the Ephraim and Manasseh blessing, I think you say it's been going on for almost 4,000 years. And yet it's something that most of us, if we've heard of it, okay, that's maybe step one, but we probably couldn't tell you much else about it. So Ephraim and Manasseh, who were they and why did so many fathers over so many years take time every week to bless their own children? It's an amazing story in Genesis chapter 48 when Joseph rushes his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, to Jacob, to Joseph's father, who's nearing his death because he wants Jacob to bless those grandsons. He wants their blessing. That's how much the world of the Bible, you read these stories, how much they understood there's a mystical significance to these positive words of vision spoken over these lives that are filled with faith. And they understood it to be releasing something in their lives.

They understood it to be one of the ways that real grace and power was coming in their lives. So this is what Joseph wanted. He wanted to get those boys to Jacob as soon as he knew his father's death was imminent. And he wanted Jacob to bless his boys. And it's a remarkable and beautiful story that's all about Jacob crossing his arms and taking the strong right hand of blessing that's supposed to be the symbol of the higher blessing, the more significant blessing that should be reserved according to social protocol, should be reserved for the firstborn. Manasseh was Joseph's firstborn.

Ephraim was the second born. And so Joseph had positioned them with Manasseh under Jacob's right hand and Ephraim under Jacob's left hand. But Jacob crossed his arms and he put the right hand on the younger, on Ephraim's head and the left hand on Manasseh's head. And Joseph tried to correct him but Jacob said, no, I know what I'm doing.

And he left his hands there. And the Bible says thus he put Ephraim ahead of Manasseh. For 3700 years Jewish dads, because of Genesis 48, where it says thus you shall speak to the people, you know, may God make you as Ephraim and Manasseh. Because of that at the Sabbath for 3700 years Jewish dads have been blessing their kids, may God make you as Ephraim and Manasseh. It's the most important family blessing in the Bible and yet nobody seems to know why. I've read all the Jewish rabbis I could read and there were some various explanations but they weren't good explanations, you know. Ephraim and Manasseh, nobody's heard of him hardly.

And so we've been looking at some of that. But to answer the question, the idea of Ephraim being before Manasseh doesn't reduce the significance of that name Manasseh. Ephraim means twice fruitful and Manasseh means forgotten all my troubles. Joseph had been through so much and he'd been promoted by God in Egypt after all the suffering that Joseph had been through. I mean Daniel, he had been through so much. He had been hated by his brothers, sold into slavery, falsely accused, thrown into prison, forgotten seemingly, separated from his family and it was as hard as it gets. And then he was promoted in Egypt, second in command and God was clearly using him in a providential way and he had this son Manasseh.

So that's why he named him. They said it's like God has made me to forget all my troubles. So when you bless people, may God make you as Ephraim and Manasseh, you're invoking the name Manasseh which means may God make you like one who has forgotten all his troubles, which I think all blessing does that. See, curse is always bringing up the past, always bringing up because of this mistake you're doomed. Because this happened, you know, that's who the devil is.

He's an accuser, wants to take things in the past and condemn us with it for today. Well, blessing does its opposite. You could live, you know, from now on and I think that's a big part of what it means to bless someone to be like Manasseh. That's a good explanation and back to the part about how you studied and you couldn't find a really good answer as to why. Why Ephraim and Manasseh? How did this tradition start?

But more importantly, why did it continue? And to me, that's it. It's like, okay, well, it's a wonderful story.

It's a great light bulb moment. And of course, bless me like Ephraim. But the Manasseh part was a little bit curious. Like, so now, well, what about this guy Manasseh? Why would you want to, because it's make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.

And so that's what we're talking about today is the Manasseh part of this, which might be a little more curious in this instance now that we're diving into it. By the way, Pastor Alan's book is The Power to Bless. It's available wherever good books are sold, in stores, online.

Of course, you can get an audiobook version and your e-reader on your tablet. So do you have a story? Because your book is filled with good stories.

And I think a lot of times we take theology and doctrine and it lives longer in our mind when it's paired with a good story. Well, there's so many stories that illustrate this, but from our lives, Daniel, one that I included in the book was of little Abigail. Abbie, our second born, we had decided long before we even knew we were going to have a girl that if we did, we wanted her to be named Abigail. Abigail means my father's joy. And the idea of having a little daughter was such a joyful thought to me. And Abigail was David's wife. And the text says of her, she was an intelligent and beautiful woman. And we thought, well, what a beautiful name. I just loved the name Abigail. And so we knew we would name her that. Oh, Daniel, I tell you, you know, we had had during the season when Bennett was born, so much joy had come in my life. We had just been all, you know, Lord had been not just blessing us in our circumstances, but just blessing us with a fresh, just a fresh touch of the Holy Spirit. Our lives were just so Bennett was born into a home of great laughter and joy. We would just belly laugh together, roll on the carpet. And I can remember just he would love it.

Like if I take my nose and put it down into his tummy, you know, and he would just giggle like a tickling woman. You know, that was the way he was born. Abby came into a different world. Before Abby was born, Anne's sister, her little sister Mary had a cough that was persistent. She was so young. She had three little children.

She'd never smoked a cigarette. So people thought, well, it was just one of those nagging cases of bronchitis. And then she began to have a lot of pain. And when Abby was born, I can remember Mary thinking, well, maybe I won't. She came to the hospital.

She said, maybe I won't hold her because I've been coughing still. And so Abby was born and her aunt Mary didn't want to hold her because she was coughing. And then Mary started hurting and they thought it was fibromyalgia.

They weren't thinking that it could be a lung cancer that had spread to her bones, but that it was. And so it was a year of trying to do everything we could to help Mary live and survive it. And I can't even tell you how much I love Mary and how much she was. She was my wife's best friend. We lived in the same town and the cancer eventually took her life. And so that's the world that Abby was born into. It's very interesting. We go back and look at baby pictures, pictures of the first two years of life for Abby.

I can't find any pictures with her smiling. And it's because she was nursed in the arms of a sobbing mother who we wanted her to taste joy. But there was so much sadness and so much grief and so much. And there were other things, Daniel, that were going on.

I know our listeners can identify sometimes life, when it gets hard, it gets really hard. And it was hard also. Ministry was hard.

Church was understaffed. Difficult things happened. My wife had some health issue scares. There was a terrible car accident.

Our nephew was born with special needs. It was just one thing after the other. And that was the world that Abby was born into. But her name was Joy. Her name was my father's joy. She had it in her name, but she didn't have it in her heart. Well, over time, by the grace of God, our aunt and I, our smile returned, and we began to laugh again, never the same without our sweet Mary. But it didn't happen for Abby. And so what to do with that situation, right?

What to do? Well, what we didn't do was say, well, I guess Abby is just going to be our melancholy child. We didn't say that. We said, no, that's not who God made her to be. She's her father's joy. She's made for joy. And so, Daniel, we began to bless her. We blessed her that the words of who she is, if she would smile even a little bit, we'd smile bigger.

If she would laugh just a little bit, we'd laugh even bigger. We kept speaking to her about the oil of gladness. We kept speaking to her about the joy of the Lord and how she was made for this. And we would bless, and I would sing songs to her, and we would celebrate every good thing in her life. In other words, we oriented ourselves from now on that she can become a child of joy.

And I think that's what we do. That's part of what it means to be a Manasseh is that we're all going to go through difficult things in this life. And I pray for our listeners. I pray that you won't go through that kind of grief that we went through.

I don't want anybody to experience those kind of grief, but we do grieve in this world. And what I think to bless someone to be like Manasseh is to say, may it be that you're like one who has forgotten troubles in this sense, that you begin to learn to live from now on, that the restoration of God is at work in your life. So when we're blessing Abby to be a child of joy, we weren't like trying to steer her towards something that wasn't her identity. We're actually blessing her towards her true destiny.

We're doing spiritual warfare through the power of blessing. And that's what I want to encourage our listeners towards is that in your own life and in others that you know, when you've been through dark valleys and difficult times, the devil wants to always harken back to that, as if you're going to try to make you live in the past or feel doomed about your future because of that past. But what blessing does is says you got a fresh start today. It can be, it is possible, it can be that you live as if you hadn't been through all those troubles.

You have been through them, but you can live with a sense of restoration and newness that makes it as if you hadn't been. In other words, you can live as one who is loved and one who has hope for the future. The Power to Bless by Pastor Alan Wright. And by the way, this new book is available wherever good books are sold. And Pastor Alan is in the studio with us now as we're unpacking more principles and lessons from this book. And if you need more information about it, we can certainly connect you at PastorAlan.org, PastorAlan.org online.

So fresh beginnings, often at a new year, the change of a new year, we look forward to whether we call them resolutions or just take a deep breath and know we're beginning something new. It's central to the gospel and it is for you. And we hope you receive that. But in the Power to Bless, there is found practical teaching on how you can bless others, literally give others a fresh start through what God has done for them in Christ Jesus and the practicality of it. Even I'll dare say a step-by-step plan is outlined in your new book, Pastor Alan. And that's really encouraging. And it's real simple.

It's real simple. Anybody can do it. Well, I think that what I really wanted to do in the book, Daniel, was to inspire and nourish so that when you read the book, what people tell me is that I have experienced blessing. I feel blessed for having read it, but I also want it to be equipping.

And so I hope that it does both. Anyone can learn to bless. So we can help people to see that there are possibilities in front of them. People need that from us.

The whole world's always dredging up all the reasons that you can't do it. But blessing is all about, through God's grace, that there are positive possibilities in front of you. And I think when we speak that, it's a beautiful thing. One of the images, Daniel, that you and I have talked about before that is so beautiful about the idea of restoration. God makes promises after promise. Even when the people are in exile in Old Testament times, He promises that, I will restore.

I will restore. And I love the prophecy of Jeremiah, the city will be rebuilt on her ruins. And that's a beautiful image because often in ancient times, when a city was destroyed, maybe by marauders who come through and leave it in rubble, burn the city, the walls are down, the buildings are down.

Well, over time, as the winds would blow, the sands and sediment of time would blow through and get captured in that rubble and eventually fill in all the nooks and crannies. And what you'd be left with after many years is a big hill that is called a tell, a tell. And what happened is that oftentimes people would build their new cities atop of one of these tells, which was basically a big mound that was formed from the city that had been destroyed maybe even centuries before that. And one of the most famous cities most would know is Tel Aviv, right? Tel Aviv, which interestingly is not actually on a tell. So I don't know why they call it, but you'll hear the name, you'll hear the word tell, Tel Aviv, you'll hear places.

And so all these tells spotted all over. And what happens when you build on a big hill like that is you have a strategic position in which now you have a better in which now you have a better vista. You can build your wall around that and now you have a more secure, right?

You have a strategic position in warfare if you're higher, you got that. Also, a lot of times a lot of the building blocks for the new city were there amidst the rubble. So you could incorporate that. It was an ancient recycling program. And sometimes the waterworks from the prior city were still available.

So they would build those cities near sources of water. So that made sense to rebuild there. So a point of all this is think of think of this on say to our listeners, you know, maybe you feel like your life is in a, it feels like it's full of rubble, you can look back over the ruins of your life. Well, God says, you can take that rubble, and it can become to you a new vantage point.

That God says, I restore things and the city will be rebuilt on the ruins. And your life can be not only one that is spared from the ruins of the past, it's not just to say, okay, we'll just make a fresh break and start afresh today. It might be that what God wants to do is to take the disappointments and the heartache and the failures and the take all of that, and put it together in a way that now gives you a new foundation for a life of greater fruitfulness than you'd imagined before, a place of new strategy for the good that you're going to bring in the world, and the joy of your own life with a whole new perspective.

So I just think that's a beautiful image. God wants you to live from now on. He wants you to live with a sense of being restored and on the new vista. All of this, I think, Daniel, is part of what we're doing when we say, may God make you like Manasseh. Blessing paints a positive picture of what's possible by God's grace in accord with God's word about how there is hope for the future. And even though Joseph was in the midst of Egypt, separated from his family, he began to sense God's really doing something special in my life, so he named that son Manasseh.

It means forgotten all my troubles. 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. The Power to Bless written by Pastor Alan Wright is available wherever good books are sold, and it builds on the blessing. May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh. And today we've been talking a lot about Manasseh and having that fresh start and having the power to bless someone. And with every blessing, I think it's woven in there that the rebuilding and the fresh start that you can have in your life even today. And I got to say that rebuilding from the ruins, that blessing in particular is one of my first introductions to what Pastor Alan brought to your home congregation in a blessing service every new year and was quite transformational and new to me.

And so if I could be so bold, could you leave us with that particular blessing today, Pastor Alan? Well, this is what the Lord says, I will restore. The words of Jeremiah, this is what the Lord says, I will restore. And part of this is to say that the palace will stand in its proper place again, and the city will be rebuilt on her ruins. Meaning that proper order, the rule of God, despite what you see with your eyes, that his promise is that he is providentially caring for the whole world.

And so the palace will stand in its proper place and the city will be rebuilt on her ruins. God promises through Jeremiah to restore the fortunes of Israel's tents, that the dwelling, your life, that the original destiny that you have, that he intends for that to be lived out in you. And so to each of our listeners today, this is the way I just want to bless you that no matter what you've been through in your life, no matter how dark the valleys or how deep the rubble or how much feels like it's been ruined, it's in God's heart to restore. He loves to restore.

He's a father. And when his children have something taken from them or something that's broken, his commitment, his heart, his delight is not to leave it in ruins, but to restore it to the way that it's supposed to be. And not just to restore, but to enable it to be such that you can forget as if you've forgotten the troubles even existed. So you can really live from this moment on. So I'm just blessing, in a sense, the rubble of your life to become the foundation of a whole new season in which you have greater security, greater strategic advantage in the spiritual battle, and a greater story to tell. May God let your city be rebuilt on the ruins. And may it be as though you've forgotten all your troubles. May God make you like Manasseh. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.