Here is Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing—a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. I bless you to stay under the blood on the woeful night of judgment upon all the wickedness of Egypt. Everywhere that blood was painted on the doorframes, the destroyer passed over. The saving grace shown the Hebrew slaves had nothing to do with their personal merits. It had only to do with the blood of the lamb, the unblemished, innocent lamb.
Once the blood was applied, the Hebrews were given only one command: None of you shall go out of the door of his house until morning (Exodus 12:22). Stay under the blood. When all of Egypt is wailing, stay under the blood. When you are full of fear, stay under the blood. You have no other part of this great saving act; just this one thing: stay under the blood of Jesus.
Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Allen Wright. They were already in the image of God, but they wanted to know everything that God knows. To want to know every single thing that God knows is another way of saying you want to be God.
So, from one angle, the origin of human sin was wanting to know everything God knows, and therefore to be God and to be in the place 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 "Gateways to Grace" as presented at Renolda Church in North Carolina.
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More on all of this later in the program, but right now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Allen Wright. Are you ready for some good news? Anyone can have a wonderful life because anyone can have a life full of wonder. Wonderful.
It means full of wonder. Remember, old George Bailey knew exactly what he was going to do when the time was right. He was going to kick the dust off his feet and get out of that crummy old town of Bedford Falls. He was going to see the world, pack his bags, travel everywhere, see the sights, and all the wonders that there to be seen in the world. But something always happened.
Whether it was his father's stroke that made George come back into working the family bank business, or his brother got married and went and moved off.
So George had to stay around Bedford Falls, and when things got really bad at the bank and everything turned south, he finally got so focused on everything he was missing out on that he stood on a bridge thinking about ending it all. Until Clarence, the angel, came. Oh, Clarence had an idea. To take George Bailey out of the scene and let him see Bedford Falls and see his family and see everything as if. As if he had never existed.
If you get to the point and think we'd be better off that I didn't even exist, then maybe you ought to see what this world would have been like without you. And so he gets to see it, and through this process of getting a whole different vision of his life, George Bailey not only had his body saved by Clarence, but his soul, his way of thinking becomes restored, and the simple beauties and the The love and relationship, and the small gifts that we tend to miss out on and ignore—all of these things become well wonders to him, and he can't wait to be alive again. Thus, its beautiful, unforgettable title. It's a wonderful life, wonder. It is when the soul is enamored, wrapped in consideration of that which is above us, or beautiful, or delightful.
It is like curiosity, but more, because it is not merely the intellect trying to figure something out. It is the soul. Meditating upon that which is marvelous, and Paul, after eleven chapters in Romans, of explaining under the unction of the Holy Spirit the gospel. As clearly and powerfully and winsomely as you could ever imagine, a great intellectual exposition—the inspired word of God through His pen—that explains the problem of the world that had fallen into disobedience, and how God brought forth a people named Israel, and He demonstrated His grace through them, and brought forth a Messiah, and showed how anyone who would trust in Him would have this great exchange. Take place where the one who knew no sin would become for us an atonement, but become for us sin itself, such that we would no longer be slaves to sin, but would be slaves to righteousness.
And how it was possible, therefore, that through the unmerited favor of God, that anyone who accepts Jesus's work and calls upon His name would be saved.
So much so that you could come to a place of the. Of Romans chapter eight and become convinced with Paul that there's nothing that could separate you from the love of God that's in Jesus Christ. And in chapters nine through eleven, he then begins to expose this tricky kind of thinking about Israel and their standing and place and how it is that actually Christians are now engrafted into that and become the true Israel. And explains some of this mystery. And he does all of this for eleven.
Chapters before chapter twelve, where he's going to turn all this to here. Therefore, is how we're supposed to live, and what he comes to here in Romans eleven is really just an eruption of wonder at it all. What I'm saying is one of the most brilliant men who ever lived, who has just penned under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit the greatest exposition of what the gospel is. Comes to the end of it, and what happens is a doxology of wonder. Romans eleven thirty three, Oh, the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.
How unsearchable are his judgments, and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor, or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him, and through him, and to him are all things. To him be glory forever.
Amen. Just saying, I wonder at it all. I marvel at it all because it's marvelous and beyond me. I've explained everything I know to explain, and now all I can do is just say, "Wow! Oh, the depth of the riches of God.
The whole of the Word of God is replete with expressions and calls to wonder." Exodus fifteen eleven. Who's like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who's like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders? Psalm eight, just to think about the creation and think about our place. And when I look at your heavens and the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you've set into place, what is man that you're mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?
I wonder about that. The word of God itself is a call for wonder. Psalm one nineteen: Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. Psalm forty, verse five: You have multiplied, O Lord, my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts towards us; none can compare with you. I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told.
The practice of wonder may not appear in your usual list of the classic spiritual disciplines, but as we are talking about what I'm calling gateways of grace. The spiritual disciplines are not the thing themselves, and they aren't laws, but they're like gates that open up the huge meadow of grace that's in front of you, and God wants you to have. And so, we're talking about building rhythms in our lives and space in our lives. And I feel like that the practice of wonder needs to be in this because I think we need it every day. There's such a problem when we lose our wonder, and there's so much power when we're full of wonder that it's worth thinking about the practice of it.
So the problem of little wonder, the power of much wonder, and the practice of wonder in our daily lives. I think maybe humanity lost wonder. Because of eating of this unique tree that was forbidden, the tree of the knowledge of the good and evil. Genesis two sixteen. The Lord commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die." So, being discontent.
And not satisfied with all that God had given them, these creatures that were already made in the image of God are tempted by the devil to eat of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Because the promise from the serpent was, "Then you'll be like God." They were already in the image of God, but they wanted to know everything that God knows. To want to know every single thing that God knows is another way of saying you want to be God.
So, from one angle, the origin of human sin was wanting to know everything God knows, and therefore to be God and to be in the place of God. And as soon as they ate of this. It's like wonder was gone, like the loss of innocence, like a child who's grown up too fast and lost the wonder. I was thinking about many Christmases ago. My oldest brother, and then the check on his three-year-old, our niece Courtney, and she wasn't in bed.
And he frantically ran around the house looking for her, and then found her where he didn't expect her in the living room, where the Christmas tree was still glowing, presents wrapped underneath it, and the toddler had sprawled herself on her tummy and was sucking her thumb, and was rubbing her blanket and staring at the tree. That's wonder. I don't know what's in the presence, and I don't understand how it works. And she couldn't tell you whether it was a Fraser fir or Scotch pine, or anything else about Christmas, except this is beautiful, and I want to gaze upon it. That's what wonder is.
But I think sometimes we're like children that grew up too fast and lost the wonder. And instead of going, "What's that? What's that? Wow!" we're acting like, "Been there, done that, seen that. I know it all." We're kind of like kids who snuck around the house and peered in parents' closets and found our Christmas presents before they were wrapped up, and then when they were wrapped, we already knew what was in it.
We're like, "Oh, I'm just waiting to get it," you know. But little children are different. They they have an amazing capacity to be wide-eyed with wonder at almost anything. We lose so much when we lose our wonder. There's something inside us that loses touch of what it is just to worship God.
I've always loved this verse from Psalm 96: Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Tremble before Him, all the earth. You don't need a reason to worship Him other than He's beautiful, you know, and other than His holiness is. Worth wondering about for the rest of your life, gazing upon him. If we don't see something resplendent in God, then we'll make idols that seem resplendent to us.
When the wonder dies, we become a lot like George Bailey, tired, uninspired. The energy leaves when wonder leaves, and with it, the joy leaves. André Gide, who is a French. Author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature describes a time when he was a youth, and it was in a science class, and he got to behold a moth emerging from the chrysalis. And in his joy at seeing such a sight, goes to the teacher, and the teacher says, "Well, don't you know every moth comes out of a chrysalis?
It's perfectly natural," and downplayed it all, and he said. He just remembered the heart-sinking disillusionment of that moment, of someone stealing his wonder. And later, the Nobel winner said, "I knew my natural history as well, perhaps better than he. But because it was natural, could he not see that it was marvelous? We become." Bored in life when we lose our capacity to wonder, so we're always looking for something to stimulate us.
Went to the fair yesterday with the family. You know, I'm glad they don't have the freak show anymore. There, you know, that was cruel. I'm so glad they got rid of that. You know, you go in and you pay a dollar to see the world's smallest woman or whatever, and they had the snake lady and all these things like that.
That's just so crazy. I did one year. I have to confess, I paid a dollar to see the world's smallest horse. It was small, but it wasn't that small.
So don't waste your money on the freak show. But What is that within us, right? You know, we want to see something that's different. There was somebody on stilts juggling, and I was like, "See there? You don't see that every day.
Somebody standing on stilts juggling—that's something right there." And you know, you just—we're looking for something that would capture our attention again, because without wonder, we're bored. And when we're bored, we're not at our best, are we? When we don't have true wonder, we look for the absurd or gravitate to the odd. Another symptom of the lack of wonder is just restlessness. We lose the capacity to appreciate the gifts we already have.
If you were to take nothing else from Why wonder is so important? It would be this: wonder is the capacity to notice with appreciation and delight gifts that are already at hand. And I really like this movie that starred Nicolas Cage and Taya Leone, called A Family Man. It's sort of like it's a Wonderful Life, in that there is this character named Jack, who has become this hugely wealthy financier and president of an investment firm with a huge office in Manhattan. He had been maybe engaged, or at least boyfriend girlfriend, with a character named Kate, played by Téa Leoni.
There's a scene in which they are young, and he's headed off to England where he's going to do an apprenticeship or something for a year, and it's a stepping stone in his in his career finance. And she says, "Don't go. I got a bad feeling about it." He said, "No, it'd just be a year." She said, "I'm worried about it." Off he went, and it was the end of their relationship. As he became a highly driven workaholic, and and and you see him in his fancy apartment. And yet, an empty lifestyle, and his only relationships were one-night flings, and he had no real meaning in his life.
And he worked all the time, even on Christmas Day. But this angelic figure appears suddenly. Jack is going to be given what the angel called a glimpse. Kind of, ah, la, it's a wonderful life, where he's going to get a glimpse of what would have been his life had instead he married the woman, and so suddenly he wakes up and he's not in his Manhattan penthouse; he's in a kind of small, messy bedroom in a New Jersey suburb. And in comes a toddler tugging at him to get up, and the baby that needs a diaper change.
And there's his wife, there's Kate, as if they had been married for 13 years. And he wakes up in this, and suddenly he's not a wealthy financier; he is a family man. And it just is delightful to watch him try to. Get used to this and hate it, and try to get back to his his previous life, until slowly but surely, he starts realizing the blessings that are in it. Pastor Alan Wright, our good news message, a wonderful life from the series The Gateways of Grace.
I encourage you to stay with us because Pastor Alan is back here in the studio sharing his parting good news thought for the day in just a moment. What if growing closer to God isn't about trying harder?
So often, we approach spiritual growth with a list of things we need to do: pray more, read more, be better. But what if the secret to spiritual transformation isn't found in greater effort, but in experiencing more of God's grace? In his book *The Gateways of Grace*, Pastor Alan Wright invites you to discover a fresh perspective on spiritual growth. Through timeless practices like scripture, prayer, meditation, wonder, and rest, you'll discover how to create space for the Holy Spirit to work in your life. These spiritual disciplines aren't obligations that earn God's favor.
They're gateways that open our hearts to experience more of God's goodness, peace, and transforming grace. When you give to Allen Wright Ministries, you help share the gospel with listeners around the world. And when you give today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's book, The Gateways of Grace, as our thanks. To discover these aren't just disciplines; they're gateways. Step through them and discover the grace that's been waiting for you.
The gospel is shared when you give to Allen 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 Allen Wright Ministries. Call us at eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty.
That's eight seven seven. Five four four forty eight sixty, or come to our website pastorallen dot org. Back here with Pastor Alan, and our parting good news thought for the day is we place the bookmark here on not just a wonderful life, but a wonderful emphasis on full wonderful life. Yeah, let's spell that wonder dash full like a life full of wonder. And as we just had in the introduction of that message, the.
Famous, wonder. It's a Wonderful Life, and George Bailey. But it's such a great picture because when life loses its wonder, it no longer is wonderful, and if it's void of all wonder at all, then despair sets in. And so, if you can feel your life with wonder, it fills your life with joy. Thanks for listening today.
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