You're a Child of the Light [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. There was nobody that could keep the covenant.

The whole history of the people of this world is of covenant unfaithfulness to the covenantal God who loved them from the beginning. 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. Most people tend to think, they think the Bible is like a rule book or a set of instructions or like the owner's manual that you keep in your glove compartment for the car. But that's not what the Bible is at all. The Bible instead miraculously by the supervision of the Holy Spirit is all different eras of time and different pens that have put down under the divine inspiration, have put down the Word of God in many different centuries. And there are many different genres of literature in the Bible, and yet all together is one canon of Scripture. What you have here, whether it be in poetic literature, whether it be in prophetic literature, whether it be in historical narrative, whether it be in an epistle like Ephesians, whatever it is, it's part of the big point.

And the big point of the Bible is one overarching story of God who reveals himself to be the lover of all people and who had a plan wherein by the greatest sacrifice imaginable and beyond our imagination, he would send his only son to come and do a redeeming work that would be so thorough that he would absolutely save us both from the consequences of our sins and to save us from the dominion of our sins so that we could have our fellowship with God restored forever and reign with him for all eternity. It's one big story, okay? So every single thing in the Bible is pointing to that story.

It all points in one way or another. If you're reading Leviticus, it's part of that story. It's not the whole story. It's part of the story. If you're reading the book of Genesis chapter 3, it's part of the story.

It will prefigure so much of the story, but it's not the whole story. And so what you have in the Bible really is a progressive revelation of who God is, and then he comes in the full revelation of himself in the person of Jesus. So in other words, all of the Bible is pointing to Jesus. And when Jesus was walking with the disciples on the Emmaus road after the resurrection and he began to explain the scriptures to them, it says he explained all the scriptures and how they concerned himself. See, what a real Bible study is is discovering, oh, this is where this story, this is where this exhortation, this is where this ethical implication, this is where this fits in to the whole big story, right? So when you read Ephesians 5, verse 5, or any of this stuff, and you go, man, that sounds kind of tough.

Oh no, I might not have an inheritance. You have to look at it in the context of Ephesians itself and everything that Paul's been saying. And what he's been saying is that who you are in Christ, that this means that because of what Christ has done for you, in chapter 1, he just starts and says that you've been blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ. And then he contrasts in chapter 2, he contrasts the sons of disobedience who are those that walk in darkness. He says you used to be like that, but he's saying you're not like that anymore.

That's not who you are now. And what he's saying here again in Ephesians 5, he's saying you're not children of darkness. Those are in Christ, you're children of light. So when he is speaking of those who have no inheritance, he's referring here as he was in chapter 2 to the sons of disobedience, which are those that are apart from Christ. But you understand Ephesians itself in light of the whole big story of the redemption of God.

Let me see if I illustrate it this way. Imagine you're just reading a story like Cinderella. How silly it would be to choose out one part of the story and say I'm going to study this part and then you're going to decide what the story's about based on that. Like if you would read Cinderella and all you did was just read and study the part where Cinderella is dressed in rags and scrubbing the floors and she is persecuted by her stepsisters and stepmother. And if you were to say well what's Cinderella all about? If that's the story you read, if that's the only part you saw, you say well this is a story about how rough life is, about how unfair treatment people receive, and she had a good attitude and remained a hard worker even during such difficult times of persecution.

And the motto therefore or the moral of the story must be that you too should just keep a good attitude even when people are being cruel to you. That you would say that's what Cinderella is about. Well that's not what Cinderella is about. That'd be a huge mistake if you said that's what the story of Cinderella is about. Or you could just read towards the end of the story. You could read where the clock strikes midnight and she has to flee from the royal ball and her beautiful gown turns back to rags and the beautiful carriage chariot turns back to a pumpkin.

And you'd say oh what this story is about is you better watch out because the clock will strike and at some point it's all going to be taken away from you and so you better be ready because that day is coming. And that's not what the story is about. You'd miss the whole story if you only focused on that. If you say well what's Cinderella about? Well Cinderella is a romance. Cinderella is a love story. Cinderella is about a prince who loves a woman and it is about destiny and it's about happily ever after that therefore makes sense of all the other adversities, right? It's that kind of story. It's a redemption story.

It's Cinderella. So each part of the story is important to it, right? So the part of the story of the gospel that is all about the law in the Old Testament is very important because the law was a good gift.

But the law was something that people never could keep. And so it's part of the story. It's a very important part of the story because what the law proved and the law still proves this is that we need a savior because nobody can keep the law. So read the Bible in the context of the whole story and that's what you want to do with Ephesians chapter 5. So you want to say well what is Paul referring to here? Because the whole nature of God is that God is a God who is merciful and slow to anger and yet here he speaks of the of the wrath of God against the sons of disobedience.

And so you have to first start with the whole gospel is a story about the lengths that God went to in order to save people. And if you don't read that and keep that at the heart of everything that you know to be true then you can misread other texts. So the first thing you want to not do is don't misread this text and say well God must be anger. No, God is love. In fact the Bible says that God is slow to anger.

This is who God is. He's slow to anger. He hates all evil but he's slow to anger. You know anybody that's slow to anger? I've got a father-in-law who's slow to anger. My father-in-law Graham Lynch and I've been in the family over 30 years and I've only seen him get angry one time. And it was the only time I ever saw him get angry.

He's out of town today is why I can tell stories like this. It was like two weeks before our wedding and it should be such a joyful time. You know how a wedding starts getting really stressful and there was something going on and the ladies were all talking about some nitpicking what a flower arrangement was going to look like or something like that. And there was stress in the house and I saw for one it's only time in 30 years I saw my father and go dad gummit let's just get along about this or something like that.

That was it. It lasts about 10 seconds. In other words he is slow to anger. And if somebody is slow to anger you know what that means?

You've got to do something really really bad for a long time before he gets angry. This God is slow to anger. Well a lot of people protest and they say well how could God be angry about him? He's God and our sins they seem so small. How could there be such a thing as people being separated from God for all eternity?

It seems like punishment is way too big for the smallness of our crime. Well see again you must understand this in the context of the whole big story that God is perfect love and perfect holiness. And he made this world out of the overflow of his goodness. And he gave Adam and Eve paradise. And he said I do give you choice though.

The choice you have is of all the fruit of all the trees just don't eat of the one in the middle. Because you're just they were just rebellious of that one thing. And ever since people been born in sin you say well yeah but I'm not that bad of a sinner.

So you must understand they're really that we know that there's egregious sin and they're horrible genocide and things and then they're our little covetousness and our little gossip and our little but but you must learn to God to God there's not really a scale. And it can't wrap your mind around this except to say that a little offense becomes much greater when it's against that which is of infinite value. Right if you took some spray paint and went downtown and spray painted graffiti on the side of an old abandoned building that nobody hardly cared about it would still be vandalism and you could still get in trouble and it was still wrong. But that's of no comparison if you snuck into the Louvre and spray painted the Mona Lisa. You could use the same can of paint and the same amount of spray and the crime is way different isn't it? Simply because who it is or what it is perpetrated against. Imagine therefore what seems to be the small offense but it's not against the Mona Lisa. It's against God.

That is why the Bible says the wages of sin is death. 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 that'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 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. 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? 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. All of this begins with knowing that God is slow to anger and He is love and His very essence and yet God is righteous and people who want to speak of a world where everything is relative and want to and want to have a vision of God that is that God is love but He never has any wrath against sin or any judgment against unrighteousness I just don't think it makes sense in the end because we all want there to be some form of righteousness right I mean good be rewarded and sin evil be punished I mean come on right we've got we've got things going on in this world right now that are horrible right and and you can see the soul of the nation in America says no no there are things we're gonna say no to if there's the beginnings of genocide we gotta say no no you can't just look at genocide and go well you know it doesn't matter you know let's just love everybody Bennett was uh our son was uh one of the vacation bible school teachers this week and he had um I think uh third and fourth graders and um he said that uh one one kid we we did a good job at vacation bible school of reaching some families that don't don't have you know kids hadn't been raised in christian homes and uh so they don't they didn't all act nice and um and so you know it's like you want to reach the world and then the world comes in you're like man you're not acting like christians well they're not christians so anyway but uh there was one kid and he was being mean to another kid you know like a third grader being mean to another third grader and the one that it was that had the offense perpetrated against him and Bennett pulled him aside and he said now listen he said you know what the bible says that we do when people are mean to us like that and the kid said what then it said the bible says we're nice to them and the kid said well that's just stupid that was his that was his first his first response to turn the other cheek well that's just stupid uh and uh and so a minute just said he said well that's what we're gonna do anyway all right so uh but but to the to the natural mind my point is that if if you just say well um there's just a lot of evil in the world and here's what we're supposed to do about it just don't worry about it you know and this is the kind of god you have he just says uh well you know that is horrible people oppressing the poor racist uh genocide child abuse but you know hey it's not that big a deal no that's just stupid right that doesn't make sense now because of this most people this is what they do they either are going to form their own version of spirituality that would take away anything uncomfortable about the holiness of god but in so doing would sacrifice any sense of ultimate justice and righteousness in the world so they'd have a loving god but not a righteous god they'd have a loving god but not a righteous god but if god is not righteous is he loving no but what happens to many other people and this is the main issue with christians who think that god is mad at them still is that the idea that god could forgive your sin so completely that you would be utterly and completely forgiven that seems unbelievable because we know that sin should be punished right here in comes the wonder of the gospel the gospel is the redemptive answer to this dilemma years ago i was uh interested in watching an episode of the old old oprah winfrey talk show and because uh an author that i was interested in scott peck was on the show that day and i uh made a point to watch it it was many years ago and i can't find the transcript to it i've found other things that oprah has said since then but i i couldn't find the transcript this particular but i remember seeing this and going oh wow you know i i i need i wish i could speak to that because oprah and scott pecker talking and oprah said she said the thing that she said has bothered me so much and and began to make her you know really kind of move away from what we would say is an orthodox or evangelical christianity to some kind of a broader vision of spirituality where she said it bothered me so much to hear people talk about god as a jealous god and she's like why would god be jealous of of me or of anything and she said that's such a petty emotion well when she said that i i remember the time thinking oh it's such a misunderstanding there is a concept of jealousy which can be part of someone's wrath that is rooted in human insecurity right if you've ever been in a relationship with somebody that's insecure and one of the things they do is they tend to get jealous or even paranoid you know it's a very painful thing and jealousy can seem so petty right i mean this is where somebody's so insecure that they they won't even don't even want you to talk to somebody else or spend a five minutes with anybody else and what is that rooted in it's just rooted in i'm insecure and i'm just worried that if i don't have your constant attention then something is wrong and and and so forth that that's like that's kind of a petty jealousy right but isn't there a different kind of jealousy that's altogether different than that that's actually holy and right and pure and good and and this is this is a scenario where if there was a man and his wife were unfaithful to him if that man said well yeah she's been cheating on me but i don't think i should say anything because um you know she might leave me for good or something if i do i'm kind of worried about that we we'd say wake up man quit being so codependent what are you talking about you are valuable you are not a doormat right or on the other hand if the man said um well yeah my wife's been cheating on me but you know um i'm okay with that i can share her with with others and everything be fine we look at him like and you say you love her why because isn't there a part of love that if the covenant of love is violated that you feel good enough about yourself that you say i'm not taking that and there's another part of you that says i'm intensely jealous i'm not jealous of you i'm jealous for you i love you too much to share you with others all right this is the nature of god's love god is love the bible doesn't say god was so angry at the world that he sent his only begotten son it says god so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son the bible doesn't say god is anger the bible says god is slow to anger it says the bible says that god is love but in that love if he really loves and he's really righteous he will hate all that is evil the bottom line is this the issue is the covenant and god made a covenant with adam and eve and they broke it he had a covenant with this world that he created and the world rebelled against him and he made a covenant with a special people israel and they broke his covenant and what you see in a lot of the prophetic literature is that the response of a god who loves deeply like the response of anybody who loves deeply is going to be twofold i am grieved and i'm mad because i love you so much right the bible doesn't say don't be angry the bible says be angry but don't sin jesus came and jesus was the fullness of the expression of who god is and what happened when when he saw the covenant unfaithfulness and he saw how the religious aristocracy was lording it over like self-righteous hypocrites they were like whitewashed tombs full of dead men's bones and jesus jesus saw jerusalem who had betrayed the prophets and stoned those who'd come to give the message of good news and who would ultimately kill him and what did he do to respect he grieved over this and he was mad why because he loved the love the intensity of the love demands that there be wrath against all that is unrighteous the issue is that there was nobody that could keep the covenant the whole history of the people of this world is of covenant unfaithfulness to the covenantal god who loved them from the beginning and so what god said was i just need somebody on this earth that could keep the covenant if there could just be one person on the earth one human being that would keep the covenant and be faithful to me so that i could show the fullness of my love and never ever have to be grieved and never have to be jealous for him never have to be angry because there were never any sin if i could just do that with one representative i could pour out my real nature and that is to pour out only love and blessing and there was no one so god so loved the world that he came himself alan wright and that's a praise god moment right there it's from our teaching you're a child of the light in the series of ephishians and i encourage you to stay with us alan is here in the studio and we're back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and a final word 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 ephishians 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 ephishian 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 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 pastor alan.org alan for someone listening right now today and they're discouraged by the darkness and of course you have a lot of heavy stuff we're talking about in this particular teaching what's your word today you know we're we're leaving off today where we're leaving off today we needed god to make and bring about a covenant and to establish a covenant partner who could keep the covenant on our behalf and that that news never grows old to me because it is such wonderful news that that jesus became the covenant partner who was faithful for us so that god could do what he always wanted to do and that is pour out blessing upon humanity and here's the important point when you come to a tough text like this where paul's not diminishing the nature of the darkness all around us but god didn't overlook sin he crushed it he condemned sin in the flesh through the cross so he utterly defeated its power over us that's why when paul says you're a child of the light don't associate with the darkness it's not a curse like oh no you might not make it to heaven no if you're in christ you're guaranteed heaven but what he's saying is that you have a whole new way of living now a wise life not a fearful life and a life that's empowered by the holy spirit it's wonderful news today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Alan Wright Ministries you