You're Rooted and Grounded in Love [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

When you were a little child and you messed up, and your parents, or your teachers, or your coaches, or your preacher sort of turned away in disgust, like I'm not going to love you until you get your act together, what developed inside of you was a mentality that is at enmity with the very nature of the love of God. 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 called Ephesians as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program today, 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. So as you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer.

Contact us at PastorAlan.org, that's PastorAlan.org, or call 877-544-4860. More on this later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. You cannot manufacture faith. Faith is something that happens as a gift that follows the revelation of the goodness of God all the time at every point before you're ever born and for all eternity towards you in Jesus Christ.

Hallelujah. We love, John said, because he first loved us. This prayer is so important because if you are going to love anyone at any point, it is only possible because God has first loved you.

You cannot love without having been loved. And John says that perfect love casts out fear. You can't just cast out fear. You can't just cast out fear like a demon.

You have a process that takes place that displaces fear. And it is the love of God. And it is the perfect love of God.

Because wherever there is an imperfect love, there is always a question mark. What if I'm not loved tomorrow? What if I do something today that causes me to not be loved? But the gospel announces a perfect love that has been perfectly manifest in Jesus through a legal transaction on a cross wherein the God who is love put his only begotten Son in your place so that you would be absolutely assured that at every point in your life, whether you're having a good day or a bad day, whether you feel full of faith or you feel full of doubt, this you can count on. God loves you and it will never change. All of this and more is why Paul is making this his prayer. It is simply put to say that other than knowing Christ himself, knowing the love of God is the most important thing that you can know in your life.

And if you know everything else but you do not know the love of God, then you are missing it all. So this is the heart and the prayer of Paul and this is what matters most. God's love.

He loves you so much. The reason that Paul prays is not just because it's important to the infinite degree, but the reason he's praying is also because there must be something supernatural that happens in order for you to comprehend this love. See, if there were no need for God to intervene, if there were no need for something supernatural to take place, then why even pray about it? Instead, he prays that you would have power, might, strength. This is the Greek word dunamis.

This is the same word that Jesus used when he told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until Pentecost had come because they would be clothed with dunamis. This is the word for power, the power of God. And what Paul is praying here is that there would be a power, the power of the Holy Spirit at work in your inner being, in your spirit man, inside of you, in your deepest place, that born-again place within you that has the capacity to receive revelation from God, that you would have the dunamis and the power of the Holy Spirit at work within you. Why is there a need for power? Because there is more to God than you can understand in your mind.

And so there needs to be a power at work. If you're going to comprehend what can't be comprehended, if you're going to be seized with a great affection that cannot be aptly described with human words, something spiritual happens. Anybody that's ever walked with God at all knows that the more that you know God, the more you know that you don't know God. Anyone who's ever learned anything knows that the more that you learn, the more you find out what you don't know. The smartest people in the world are the ones that know that they don't know that much.

It's true. I was sitting at lunch talking to my son Bennett, who finished his freshman year, and he is doing lots of math for his major, his engineering major, and so he's got lots of math. It would make me cringe to do so much math. And I said, so Bennett, I said, when we were young and we knew two plus two equals four, we didn't know enough to know that algebra existed.

Right? You're just excited you know two plus two equals four. You don't even know enough to know that algebra even exists, much less conceive of doing algebra. And then when you do algebra and you're excited that you're doing some algebra, you don't even know enough to know that calculus exists. When I did algebra, I didn't even know calculus existed. I didn't know what it was.

I'd heard the name. I didn't even know what it was. I took one calculus course in college and that was the end of math for me for the rest of my life. And I didn't know what was beyond it. So I was sitting there talking to Bennett because he just finished calculus three. And I said, so he's got this semester, excuse me if I need to run out here and throw up, but he's taking three math courses this coming.

And I was like, you got three math courses in one semester coming up. I said, so let me ask you this. If we didn't know that algebra existed when two plus two was four, I said, now you've taken calculus three. I said, what is it at this point that you don't even know exists?

And you just sat there quietly. And I said, aha, that proves my point right there. You don't even know what you don't know because there's no point at which that you know enough that you know it all. Instead, the more that we learn, the more we learn that we don't know. And God is infinite and his love is greater than you can comprehend in your mind. And the beautiful thing of walking with God is the more of the love of God that you experience, the more of the love of God there is to experience. And so you need the power of the Holy Spirit to reveal this to you. Flesh and blood cannot reveal this to you. So Paul's praying. If it's something flesh and blood could reveal, there's no point in praying about it. This is something that requires prayer. Pray about this. So Paul's praying that we have dunamis, but he's also praying that we'd have dunamis, the power of the Holy Spirit at work.

Why? Because there's a battle going on. If anything that I have said today is true, even if only part of it were true, that love is that important, the love of God and knowing the love of God, then you can count on this that there's a huge spiritual battle that is waging right now to keep you from knowing the love of God. You need the power of the Holy Spirit to be at work in your inner being because there is a battle that is going on to keep you from the love of God. You think that the battle is all about your little fleshly sins and you think that the battle is all about whether you're going to be in a good mood or feel like a mighty man of faith today or what? No, the battle is about the love of God being revealed in your heart. And it's such a battle that he is saying, I pray that you have the power of the Holy Spirit. This is deep.

This is big. This is earnest. This requires the power of God. May you have this power at work within you, Paul says, because there are many obstacles to receiving the love of God. There are many obstacles that stand in the way. There is a battle that wages in our minds trying to block us from receiving the love of God. People often ask, what is it that's keeping me from really receiving the love of God more deeply? And I could point to many different obstacles, but let me highlight three of them, the three really big ones.

Number one obstacle, performance-based mentalities, shame. That even to a small degree, that if you have through life experiences, through parental teaching, through world views, whatever wounds have happened, whatever causes us to begin to think this way, that if you think, even in a small degree, that the capacity to be loved depends upon your ability to perform, it'll be very difficult to receive God's love. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series.

How you see yourself determines how you live. In an 11 message series, Pastor Alan Wright takes you on a thrilling journey through the letter to the Ephesians. It'll flood your soul with good news and empower you to discover who you are in Christ. When you make your donation to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll not only send you the digital downloads of the entire transformational Ephesian series, but we'll also send you a printable copy of Pastor Alan's booklet, highlighting the most important scriptures about your identity in Christ. Make your gift today and discover a whole new way of seeing your life.

Isn't it time to finally find out who you really are? PastorAlan.org. was a mentality that is at enmity with the very nature of the love of God, because God, who is love, never turns away. Instead, He came to us when we are at our worst. The performance mentality can lead us into believing all the wrong things about life, because friends, life is about love. It's about relationship. That's what life is about. That's what matters.

I promise you, I guarantee you. I've had the privilege of being by many, many people as they made their transition to heaven, and I'm telling you right now, absolutely, and you know this too, all that matters is love. It's all that matters. You see, people get wrapped up in a performance mentality.

You think that it's not about the relationship. It's just about doing it right or winning. So the men had a cornhole tournament on Sunday. The huddle men's group sponsored the cornhole, and so I came with Bennett.

We play a lot of cornhole, and I came with Bennett. We came as a team. We came to win the cornhole, and we didn't win. We did well. We came in third place. There was a cash prize. I didn't realize a cash prize was going to be so big to the winner. I might have tried even harder, but we had this event to have fellowship for men.

Pastor Barrett Johnson said it best. He said, we're going to have a cookout and a cornhole tournament because men like to eat hamburgers and hot dogs and throw a bean bag through a hole. That's just, you know, a fun thing for men to do. So what we're really doing is we're talking to one another, getting to know other men, and having a good time, but the guys that won it were aliens. They came in from Mount Airy. They weren't even part of our church. If you're here this morning, you're listening to me, we love you, and just ignore this illustration, but they came in. They were nice guys, but they came in. They're professional cornholers. I mean, they were. They came in.

One guy, I think he had sponsorship, you know? I mean, and they just had gotten up and scoured Facebook and found, you know, an advertisement for a cornhole tournament. So they came down, and they beat us bad. And in fact, Gene Francis, worship leader at Union Cross, was playing with my nephew. They got beat 21 to nothing by these guys, and they won, and they took home 120 bucks. And the night before, we found out they'd been in another cornhole tournament and won 130 bucks. They made 250 bucks just playing cornhole for the weekend, and they weren't even part of our church. They weren't even part of the fellowship. And so, you know, I was there by the side, be nice to them, everybody. But I'll just make this silly point to say they weren't there to develop any friendships with us.

We'll probably never see them again. If you're here in church this morning, God bless you. Welcome to our church. But if every time I've seen them, every time I tell a story like this, the people will usually be right there, so they probably will be today. And I loved meeting you guys wherever you are. But anyway, the point of this illustration is that why were they there? They were there to come win a cornhole tournament. Why was I there?

I kind of wanted to, you know, do well, but I wanted to be around the guys. I'm just saying that in life, there are many things God has you in it to win it, and there are many, many ways that God has called you to very important tasks in life. But I just want to say that performance mentality stands in opposition to love because love does not at any point depend upon the performance of the other or else it is not love.

So life's about relationship. And Christianity is about relationship with God who loves us. So when life becomes painful and bad things happen, if you have a performance mentality, a shame-based way of thinking, if something difficult starts happening without a revelation of God's love, what you begin to think is, God doesn't love me as much. Why has God left me now? And so what some people do with that is they just try harder to be a better Christian or others just say, who would want to love a God like that?

And they just leave them. But see, God's love transcends the things that we go through, the adversities in life, God's love transcends so that at all points what God wants you to know is his love. Here's the second obstacle, and that is that when we have been hurt, we have sinful reactions to those wounds. The wounds and the hurts that we've experienced is because of other sin, but then we respond to it in a sinful way either by believing the wrong things or holding unforgiveness, and our sinful responses end up being the very things that will hinder us from being able to openly receive love. And one of the things that needs to be highlighted here is that when we are hurt, and this is especially important to the matter of giving and receiving love, when we are hurt without God's grace and without forgiveness and without an awareness of God's presence in the midst of that hurt that can sustain us through, without that, we tend to develop unhealthy boundaries in one of two directions. We tend to either say, I've been abused and this must be why I exist, and so we have no boundary and people continue to use us and hurt us. Or we say, I've been hurt and we tend to put up a rigid boundary like a big wall to block everyone out, a boundary.

If you've ever been to our conference, then you have heard me use this illustration to describe what boundaries are. It is like the one time a year when in the city of Winston-Salem, our city services include one week where they will pick up large bulky items that you want to throw away and don't want to have to drive them to the dump yourself. So you can put your old broken gas grill and the old broken down lawnmower and any other large bulky items, you can put it out the curb and sometime that week they'll come by and they'll pick up your stuff and take it off for you. But it's so comical because what actually happens is that you put your stuff out of the curb and then people start cruising around in their pickup trucks and their Cadillacs and looking at other people's junk and they are just wanting to take something that somebody else has. And so what we actually do, I got a nice lampshade this way one year, but actually it's more of large items swap. And it's just really funny, I laugh about it all the time that people come out taking, you know, I've never actually seen the truck come by.

I don't think they do. I think we just, everybody else comes and takes your stuff. Well, one year I had gone out there and I'd put it the curbside and old broken down lawnmower. The engine still worked, but everything else, the handle was all broken over and it just, it's just better just to put it out there.

So I put it out there. I went back, I was getting some other bulky item to take out to the curb. And when I did, there was a lady out there looking at my lawnmower and she looked up at me and she said, does this lawnmower still run? I said, yes, it does. I said, the engine's still worth good on that lawnmower. And she said, it would still cut grass?

I said, yeah, the blades are still fine. And she looked at it. She said, I don't know. She said, this handle's really broken.

I was getting ready to say, well, you know, you could even have that thing soldered or maybe clamped or something like that. And I said, what am I talking about? I don't have to spend time selling you my trash. That's trash.

And she took the lawnmower. The point of this being, there's a large item pickup week. If you put something out the curb, the message is clear to anybody who passes by that is available for anybody to pick up.

Right? But if somebody came up in my yard and started to gather up my garden hose that connected to my faucet and I saw that, I'd have to say, hold on a minute. That is not available. The broken lawnmower at the curb available, garden hose, not available. And if they came back in my backyard, started getting my gas grill and started walking off with it. And I said, no, that's not available.

If they started, if they started taking my gas grill, I'd have to call the police, right? Do something about that. But you don't have to do that because it's very clear. You don't have to put a sign in your yard that says stuff at the curb available to anybody stuff, not on a curb, not available to anybody. It's just a, it's a boundary.

It's invisible, but it's very clear, right? That's what boundaries are like for the soul. And we have to have healthy boundaries.

We have healthy boundaries. This is, this is why people that have been really hurt and really abused have a really hard time with this. Because if someone has used you and hurt you, you could start thinking, this is why I exist.

Just anybody come and trample me. And then your heart is just damaged over and over again. That's, that's having no boundaries. God never meant for you to have no boundaries. He meant for you to know that you are priceless of infinite value. And therefore, no one has the right to come and abuse you, use you, hurt you.

You have a yes and you have a no. But there's another kind of unhealthy boundary that often happens when our hearts have been hurt. And that is just an over rigid, big, thick wall that we put around our heart.

This is what the Bible calls a heart of stone. 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. When you make your donation to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll not only send you the digital downloads of the entire transformational Ephesians series, but we'll also send you a printable copy of Pastor Alan's booklet, highlighting the most important scriptures about your identity in Christ. 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, as we're hearing this series and we'll come to the conclusion soon enough here, you're rooted and grounded in love. Sometimes I think in the here and now, we either don't feel loved or we're making decisions that don't have a loving touch to them. Is this about looking back and knowing before the foundation of the world that God loved you?

It's about two things, really. It is deeply immersing yourself in the gospel, wherein you let the good news of what God's done for you and Jesus convince you and bring your soul into alignment with the truth of this is what God's done for you. Therefore, you are not left out of God's love. But it also, Daniel, is an invitation to, by the very presence of God himself, by his Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus who takes up residence in your heart, to have the witness, the inward witness that bears witness to our spirit, to know the unknowable, to have the power of God. In other words, the work of the Holy Spirit to let us know the love of God. We're going to be learning some more as we wrap this up about how it is that we overcome these obstacles to receiving God's love. But one of them is that we have to reject all forms of self-hatred that would in some way distance God. More to learn about that, but it is to say this, you can know the love of God in a not only intellectual way, but in a heartfelt way. And this is what Paul prays for, so it must be possible. Today's Good News message is a listener-supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.