Why Wouldn't Everyone Want the Gifts of the Spirit? [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. Laughing, joy, gladness of heart, joy. This comes from the Holy Spirit.

Well, guess what? When you have peace and you have joy, everything, especially your mind, works way better. 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 this series filled as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. 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 today. 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.

That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. Encouragement literally means to put courage in. God does not promise you a trouble-free life. In fact, in this world, you will have trouble. I quote Jesus. You will go through wilderness times, you will go through uncertainties, and you will face adversities. That's not a bad confession. That's just reality.

And God is absolutely committed and has promised to never leave you and never forsake you and never allow you to go through something that He will not give you the strength to make it through. But we are bombarded by messages from the world that tell us we can't do it and it's probably not going to turn out well. It's just hard to even watch TV. And since I like to watch golf, that's even the worst because all the commercials are geared towards aging people who are having medical problems and I don't like watching them. I mean, you've got to put it on pause, you know, just to not start going, well, maybe I do have that ailment.

I did feel a little bit of an ache right now. You're bombarded with messages that say bad things are coming and you're probably not going to be able to make it unless you get whatever we're selling. Well, we need to know that we know that we know God is for you, not against you. And if you get a genuine prophetic word that's shared with you, what Paul says is that people go, God's in the house.

He's here. Because in the prophetic, it's not telling you what you got to do or telling you what your future is, but it is letting you know that God sees you, God is with you. God's not going to forsake you. God's going to carry you through. He's going to give you the wisdom for it. And something inside of you gets strengthened by this. When you get a word from God, you know it's from God. This is very important. You don't have to receive just some prophetic word somebody comes and gives you.

You need to weigh it. Does it witness to your spirit? Does it bring you encouragement? Does it make you feel uplifted? Does it bond with something inside of you that already knew it to be true?

You ever have something like that? You're like, I knew it, but I just was having a hard time believing it. That's what the prophetic does. It's just, it's a beautiful, beautiful gift. And I know there have been abuses with the prophetic. So much so, even in the first century, Paul had to say, don't despise the gift of prophecy.

The reason he had to say that, because people were already despising the gift, because people had misused it. I remember some years ago I was in India, Pastor Hank Keating was there, Elder Jeff Deaton was there with me, and we were, I had been teaching that day to Bible students at Pastor Sam Chelladura's church who's planted over 150 churches. And these young men, most of whom were converted from Hinduism were learning the Bible and learning how to be pastors, but we had to help them learn quick because there's nobody to plant the churches. And so they'd have crusades and people become Christian and somebody had to shepherd them.

And so these young men who don't have much training, and so we're trying to help train them. And I remember one day after the teaching, Pastor Hank's praying for individual needs, and Jeff and I went to speak prophetic encouragement to them. I said, Pastor Sam, is this all right? What I want to do is just, I want to encourage them.

Maybe the Lord will give us some words that would encourage them. And he said, yes. He said, that's great. He said, you do need to know, however, that there's abuse in India in people that call themselves prophets and just wind up trying to tell people what to do. And I said, oh, we're not, we don't do that at all. That's not what we're talking about. And so we got there, started speaking and they started, it was so precious because, you know, in America, we give some personal space to people that are receiving ministry. You know, we've got our little personal space like, you know, we do, we set little music and try to figure out different stations and stuff like that.

It's not that way in other parts of the world. We got an idea of what it must have been like for Jesus when it said the crowds pressed in upon him because we start, we got up and started, and it's so, if you've never seen Jeff Deaton minister in the prophetic, it's one of the most beautiful things you'll ever see. He feels what people feel and he begins to get words and he started sharing and it was clear God was moving. And so the very first young man we started, we started ministering to and, and, and all the other students, they're all, they're all leaning up about hitting them in the chin, you know, because they're leaning over to hear everything that's being said, pressing in. And after hours of ministering like this, Jeff and I finally said to each other, I think they're going to the back of the line and just coming back through and we don't recognize them. And because it just went for hours, maybe close to three hours, I think that we stood there ministering because people are so hungry. And that day I realized if I had had either a bad theology or any wrong fleshly motivation in this, these young men were coming with prayer requests and things saying like, I don't know what to do. My entire family has turned against me because I've converted to Christianity and the pressure is so great. Some days I feel like returning to Hinduism and yet I'm pastoring this little, it's that depth and they're like, what do I do? And I realize the fancy white preacher from America, I could have told them what to do and they'd have thought that's what they're supposed to do.

You could see how it could be abused. Let me just say this other thing about prophecy that's been so abused is people claim to be prophets telling us when Jesus is coming back. Now this is the silliest thing that anybody should ever buy a book telling you when Jesus is coming back when this is the one thing the Bible says even Jesus didn't know when Jesus was coming back. We are explicitly told nobody knows when He'll come.

He'll come like a thief in the night and we got millionaires out there who have sold 10 million books telling us when He's gonna come back. So that's not prophecy. Prophecy is the encouragement of the Holy Spirit who speaks to us and we say surely God is in this place.

All right, more I could say about that of course. But the next one I've listed here, the gift of helps or serving or ministry. One of the most essential gifts of the Holy Spirit. Everybody is called to serve in the body of Christ. Everybody is called to serve but those who have this gift take a special joy and delight and diligence in helping the ministry happen.

And it's marvelous to see this work. In fact, you need more people with this gift than any other gift in the body of Christ because the stuff of ministry is happening often behind the scene. It's often the stuff that makes ministry possible. It just, you know I was talking about Lonnie Crenshaw earlier, just you have no idea the thing, there have been times where the cord's getting connected right 10 seconds before you know it starts.

I mean this is what's happening. Mickey likes, our executive director likes to call this the bowels of ministry. I've seen him in his head inside the copy machine and he's like I'm in the bowels of ministry today and he takes joy in that. He likes getting into that stuff, you know.

Nobody's going to see it maybe. Nobody's going to exalt that person but this is essential to the body. And here's how you know you've got a spiritual gift in this, you don't begrudge doing it. As soon as you're sitting there going, you know, as soon as you're sitting there handing out the bulletin or trimming the hedges and you go why am I having to do this, why couldn't so and so, you know, then you don't have the gift.

Ask God to give you that gift. We need you. That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Thankfully, God has never expected you to live the Christian life by your own strength. He has sent a helper and every single Christian is invited to live a supernaturally empowered life through the continual infilling of the Holy Spirit. In a special bundle alongside the audio teaching, Pastor Alan has also written a booklet. Both the audio and the booklet not only explain the infilling of the Holy Spirit, but will nourish, inspire and draw you nearer to the God who longs to immerse you in His love and power.

Discover how to be filled with the Spirit and get ready for your life to be filled with fresh love, joy and power. 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, pastoralan.org.

Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. Mickey likes, our executive director likes to call this the bowels of ministry. I've seen him in his head inside the copy machine and he's like, I'm in the bowels of ministry today. And he takes joy in that.

He likes getting into that stuff, you know. Nobody's gonna see it maybe. Nobody's gonna exalt that person. But this is essential to the body. And here's how you know you got a spiritual gift in this. You don't begrudge doing it. As soon as you're sitting there going, you know, as soon as you're sitting there handing out the bulletin or trimming the hedges and you go, why am I having to do this? Why couldn't so and so? You know.

Then you don't have the gift. Ask God to give you that gift. We need you. We need you. We need to be able to say in the body of Christ, somebody needs to clean up after Wednesday night supper and have people say, I'll find great joy in doing that.

We need you. The ministry of teaching is more than just being an educated or well organized teacher. In the same way that there are people that have an ability to teach physics, there is an unction of the Holy Spirit for teaching spiritual things. Spiritual things and principles of the kingdom of God do not come by natural understanding. In fact, the carnal mind doesn't understand these things. And what happens for the person who gets a teaching gift in the body of Christ is that it doesn't mean that they're the most flamboyant or necessarily always the most intelligent about it, but they have a way in which spiritual things make sense to people. They go, oh, yeah, I see.

That makes sense. The gift of exhorting, exhortation. This might rightly better be translated as the gift of encouragement because I think people confuse the word exhortation.

I've heard over the years this word used like the people need to be exhorted. And what they mean by that is that you need to rebuke them a little bit. And I know people that are kind of mean and they'll say, well, I just got the gift of exhortation. And, you know, we just need to say, no, no, you're just mean. You're just mean. You're just mean. Don't come be mean to the body of Christ and say, well, I just got the gift of exhortation. What I'm supposed to do is stand up and just thunderously rebuke everybody for, no, just shut up.

I mean, we don't need that. What this really means is encouragement, again, related to the word parakaleo that means called alongside of. What this is like is like a coach. You've been watching any of the cross country skiing in the Olympics, those guys are skiing uphill.

Every now and then they get a small little slope, but they don't get to slide down hills. They're just cranking it and going for an hour and 15 minutes. They got to be fed food in the middle of their athletic event. And you see, lest they faint and the coaches come running alongside of them to give them food and they're talking to them and you can see them as they're running alongside them. And I don't know what they're saying, but I know what they're not saying.

They're not saying, oh, you look bad, man. I don't think you're going to make it. That's not exhortation. Exhortation is where like you can do this. You've been training for this. All right, your pace is about right. Pick it up just a little bit now.

You can make it. And there are people that God gives a supernatural gift to just encourage people and we need them because life is so discouraging. We've got a lady in our church that many of you know. She is the supreme example of the gift of encouragement.

Her name is Karen Rivets. And for all these years, nearly 14 years, Karen's been sending me and sending my children, my wife, sending us notes. She'll write encouraging things, scriptures encouraging just who we are in Christ, how much God loves us, how effective the ministry is.

And then she can just tell it's flowing out of her. So she goes on to the back of the card and then she writes up along the side and then this way and down this way. And I've thought before I thought, you know, she must really love us because we get a lot of these notes and maybe she writes it occasionally to other people. We celebrated her birthday not long ago and there was 200, 250 people here and people were telling her how much she meant to them. And somebody stood up and said, and how many of you have gotten one of her notes? And every one of the 250 people said, oh yeah, I've been getting them all, you know, for years. And I realized everybody she knows, she's sending, you know, these notes.

Well, that's a gift. And sometimes you want to look at that person and say, how do you do that? What about the days that you're discouraged? Who encourages you?

How can you just keep on encouraging people when there's so much bad news? Because it's a gift. It's a gift. You want to be an encourager? Ask God to supernaturally impart a gift of the Holy Spirit to you.

We need it, don't we? The gift of giving. This, every Christian is called to give. And every Christian is called to grow in giving because Paul said, let's excel in giving. Let's don't pick out prayer or Bible study or teaching or leadership and just pick out one of these and say, let's really excel in that but not excel in giving. Let's look on giving as if, you know, come up with the bare minimum. A lot of Christians think that giving, they look on it like a slave looks at the law. And they say, well, I've got to give this amount or else I'll probably be under a curse.

And then they start trying to figure out ways to give less. Well, you know, I think it's referring to, you know, post-tax. This is my adjusted gross income. And then after, you know, other deductions and so forth, my income is really here. I think that there are some people who tax shelter their stuff because they're trying to hide it from God so that they don't have to pay the tithe on that or whatever.

It's not like that. The New Testament teaches we should be growing in our giving. Everybody is called to give.

Everybody is called to grow in their giving but there are some people that get a supernatural gift of generosity. It's a remarkable thing. Many of you know, we had a man in this church who's with Jesus Now.

And you're nodding your head. Those of you who know him, I'm going to mention King Brown. I remember first time I met King Brown, we'd been here about two weeks. He decided to take us, my wife and I, some others out to a nice supper, the old steakhouse here near the church and a nice meal and we're meeting King. And somewhere towards the end of the meal, he said, Brother Pastor, that's what he called me, Brother Pastor. He said, what size suit coat do you wear? And I told him.

And I said, why? You mentioned, he said, well, Brother Pastor, he said, you see this jacket that guy, I don't have a fur into his nice tweed jacket we had on. I said, yeah, he said, I got this for two dollars at a Goodwill. He said, this thing is two dollars. He said, why would somebody need to spend a hundred or two hundred dollars on a jacket like this when I get it for two and send the other hundred to the missionary? And then he held up his foot and he said, see these shoes? He said, aren't they nice? I said, yeah, they are nice. He said, I got them for a dollar.

I got them for a dollar. He said, why would somebody need to spend $50 on a pair of shoes when you get one for a good pair for a dollar down at Goodwill and I can send $49 to the missionaries. And I didn't have the heart to tell him that my granddaddy was a men's clothing store owner and my grandmother roll over in the grade if I went and got me a two dollar jacket. But what I came to find out was that this retired mailman was one of the biggest givers in the body of Christ that I'd ever seen. And that his whole life he worked to try to give as much as he could. And that's what a gift of generosity do. You know what's interesting to me as I've been praying for people to receive gifts of the Holy Spirit now for at least two decades. Nobody has ever come and asked for the gift of generosity. I've had people ask for houses and cars and more income and I've never had anybody ask for the grace to be able to give more of it away. Why not? Because we idolize money. Wouldn't it be one of the most freeing things in your life to instead of your things managing you, you to manage your things. It's all monopoly money.

You'll turn it in at the end. Might as well have a gift of generosity. The gift of governing or ruling or leadership.

This is a really important gift. Especially you want your leaders and you want to have a number of this gift in operation. These people have an incredible capacity to see how something should be led. It's not just to say that they've got a charisma that people want to follow. Although that may be part of it. I think it more, by reflection of watching this gift operate in people, it more finds its root where these people often have a supernatural ability to see how something should fit together, the process should work, the program should be administered so that the whole thing can succeed. And people bear witness to that wisdom that comes from them.

And so this isn't kind of a natural charisma that people have. This is a supernatural unction that people have. I think one of the people on our staff that demonstrates this gift regularly and I'll look to is Pastor Chris. He just, we'll be in context and if I'm trying to think about how something should fit together, have you ever noticed how in life sometimes you're looking for a really big spiritual solution to something that just doesn't quite fit and then you'll later realize one adjustment in the logistics and it suddenly just opens up, you know? I mean like we're sitting here going, our church is full, what do we do? And Pastor Chris says, well maybe we'll do a video venue and I think we could see this kind of thing. And then we've had just in four weeks, our total attendance has gone up about 60 people just in the four weeks.

Just why did it open up some space? Well that's just, this is something insights from the Holy Spirit. We need this gift in the body so that we succeed in moving forward. The gift of mercy. This is one of the most precious gifts. Some of you have this gift. It is, when this gift drops in on you, you can feel literally what others are feeling. You may have this gift and don't know it because sometimes you'll just be almost overwhelmed with a sense of compassion for somebody and you don't even know why. But this gift is of extreme value because the Holy Spirit knows what somebody else is feeling and so He's in you and He can give you a gift to know what someone else is feeling. And people are so lonely that if there were just one person in this great big world that at least partially understood what they were feeling and going through, it would be transforming to them. But also if you could have this deep kind of compassion, the compassion that made Jesus weep over Jerusalem or weep next to Lazarus' tomb. What it does, it puts you in such a love connection with people that trust can be born in their hearts. And what it also fuels is the deepest intercession. The very best intercessors are one who have a gift of mercy that will drop into their spirit and they will not be able to do anything other than pray until finally there's a release, the gift of mercy. It is, it is the deepest, truest compassion.

Alan Wright. Why wouldn't everyone want the gifts of the Spirit? We read about it in Scripture. It's from the teaching in the series and filled and I encourage you to stay with us. Alan is back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and a final word.

Thankfully, God has never expected you to live the Christian life by your own strength. He has sent a helper and every single Christian is invited to live a supernaturally empowered life through the continual infilling of the Holy Spirit. In a special bundle alongside the audio teaching, Pastor Alan has also written a booklet. Both the audio and the booklet not only explain the infilling of the Holy Spirit, but will nourish, inspire, and draw you nearer to the God who longs to immerse you in His love and power.

You'll learn how to be filled with the Spirit and get ready for your life to be filled with fresh love, joy, and power. 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, PastorAlan.org. Alan, what do you say to the person who feels like they haven't served Jesus long enough or walked with Jesus long enough to be in a position to ask for the gifts?

Maybe they feel like a rookie. Well, I think that it's first and most important to realize that God doesn't put conditions of your own righteousness or honestly, in many ways, your own maturity before He does give gifts. Every Christian has gifts. Even baby Christians, you have gifts. Now, what happens is, as you grow, those gifts grow, right? So someone may have a gift of teaching and it might start out that it just feels like a seed. They have some interest and some passion, but that gift will get cultivated over the years. It might start out that you're going to provide leadership in a small group of three or four people. And it may be one day the Lord has you in a much bigger platform for teaching. But if you would eagerly desire the gifts of the Lord, even as a young Christian, even if you say, well, I don't feel like I'm spiritual enough or I know the Bible well enough, ask Him for these gifts because you'll grow and the gifts will grow in you. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.