Mayhem, Miracles and Monday Morning [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. You can't let your mind get bogged down trying to understand what the mind can't understand. Instead, they just devoted themselves to prayer and rejoicing in the Lord and feeding on the Word of God. In other words, they built their lives on what they did understand.

They didn't build their lives on what they didn't understand. 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 Unlimited as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I'm going 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.

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That's 877-544-4860. Now, more on this later in the program. But right now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. Even though there are many causes for disappointment, go ahead and cloak yourself with freedom even though the gate hadn't swung open yet. This is the way God empowers His people. He wakes us up even as He has to shake us a little bit, and then He says, go ahead and put on the clothing of a person of Christ. The time has come. We're going to walk out this door, and don't walk out here in your pajamas.

Get ready. I like whoever said, be dancing when the spotlight hits you. Verse 8, the angel said, after you said put your cloak on, he said, follow me. It's a wonderful command from God because it simplifies life to just be His sheep, and you've got a good shepherd, and all you've got to do is follow Him.

See, here's the image. If you've got a huge warrior angel radiant in Shekinah glory who's got the capacity to unshackle you, to escort you out to freedom, isn't it a wonderful thing if all you've got to do is just follow Him? If He goes left, I'm behind you. If He goes right, you're the one with the blazing sword and the giant supernatural power, I'm going behind you. Follow me. How are we going to get out of this prison? Just follow Him.

How am I going to move through this next season of life when so much just follow Him? Verse 9, He went out and followed Him, and He did not know that what was being done by the angel was real. He thought He saw a scene of vision, and they passed the first and the second guard.

He's just walking past guards. He thought, this is not a vision. This is a dream. This is just like what I'm dreaming would happen, could happen, but it doesn't seem real.

He just, sometimes life's like that. It doesn't seem real at first. I wonder if they're just walking past these guards, what would happen? Had God made them invisible?

Had the angel blinded the guards temporarily? I don't know, but I do know this, when God wants to, He can just hide you from the enemy, which is by the way, a good thing to pray. I'm not one to think that you go and you spike the football in the face of the enemy soldiers.

Why do that? I don't think we're supposed to taunt the ones who imprisoned us. I don't think that we are the ones that are supposed to try to make a spectacle of the devil. Jesus did that on the cross. Let Jesus handle it. I think it's a much wiser strategy to say, God, just hide me from the enemy.

Put me under the shadow of your wings. I'm not looking for needless conflict. I'll face the conflicts that need to come, but Lord, don't want to have the needless ones. Jesus said it well, be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.

Don't go looking for trouble. At verse 11, or rather continuing verse nine and 10, they came to the iron gate leading into the city and it opened for them of its own accord and they went out along the street and immediately the angel left. I've got a scene and a movie in mind.

Could you just envision this? They get out, shackles have fallen off of his wrist. He was probably handcuffed to a soldier on his right, soldier on his left. Angel comes, shackles break off. They walk right past guards without the guards seeing them and then they get out and they're delivered and all of a sudden they stand and they see this huge iron gate. Historians think we know which prison this was and there was an enormous gate.

Some of these iron gates were so big that it would take multiple soldiers just to open them and this huge rusty old iron gate and there they stand and they're like, what are we going to do now? And all of a sudden it just starts moving. It's creaking open. It was a great scene in a movie, isn't it? And it just opens on its own and he walks out. And once he's out, once he's there, verse 11, he came to himself and said, now I'm sure the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me. Now he sees it. What he thought was a vision, he now realizes was real. You ever had something like that in your life where it wasn't until later reflection that you go, that really happened. That really happened and that was God.

Sometimes when you're in the middle of it, it seems too good to be true and later you realize it was real. Verse 12, what do you do after a miracle? Well when he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John, whose other name was Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying. This was the prayer hub. This was the house of prayer. This is where people had been praying nonstop that Peter would be released from that prison, that God would do a miracle.

Now this was exceedingly abundantly above and beyond what they could have imagined. I don't know if anybody said, Lord, send a mighty angel, unshackle him supernaturally, make the guards blind to see him, and then open the iron gate all by itself. I don't think anybody had the foresight to pray that.

I think they're saying, Lord, Lord, have mercy on him. Lord, get him out of there. Lord, we need Peter. Lord, the gospel is going forth.

We need Peter. Preach. He's preaching the gospel to God. They're just praying. They're praying. They're appealing to the word of God. It's Passover time. It's the Feast of Unleaven. They're remembering, Lord, you brought our people out of bondage in Egypt. You could bring Peter out. They're praying fervently. It's the prayer hub.

And that's where Peter goes, but look what happens. It's almost comical. It's sweet. It's beautiful. It's realistic.

They're so human. Verse 13, when Peter knocked at the door of the gateway, a servant girl named Rhoda. Interesting. They usually don't give the names of who the servants were, but in this case they do. Rhoda. It means rose. There was something fragrant about her life. Rhoda came to answer. Recognizing Peter's voice in her joy, she did not open the gate, but ran in and reported that Peter was standing at the gate. This little girl is a servant, and she heard Peter talking, and she said, that's Peter. And she was so excited that she forgot to let him in. She ran back to tell everybody else, and look what happened when she told them, Peter, the thing you all been praying for, for days, he's out there. And look at them. It's so human.

It's just like, it's just, I can identify with this. They said to her, verse 15, you're out of your mind. But it's what you've been praying for. And now the miracles happen. Yeah, you're crazy. They said, you're crazy. She kept insisting it was so, and they kept saying it's his angel. It's not really him.

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That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. I'm sort of encouraged in a strange way that other people, even in the first century, full of the Holy Spirit, ask God for huge things and then when he answers it are completely shocked. And God puts up with us. Verse 16, Peter kept knocking and when they opened, they saw him and were amazed. I just put down this note. Isn't it ironic that Peter had a much harder time getting into the gate of the church than he did getting out of the gate of the prison?

You run as far as you want to with that. Verse 17, Peter just starts telling them about it, motioning to them with his hand to be silent. He's like, everybody's so excited. They realize it really is Peter. It's Peter, it's Peter.

Let me tell you what happened. He described to them how the Lord had brought them out of the prison. He said, tell these things to James and to the brothers. That's an important part of the verse because this is James, the brother of Jesus. And most historians agree that James more or less from this point on took over leadership of the church in Jerusalem. Peter was essentially saying, you take over from here, James.

He's making a very practical decision. And then he says, the text just says he went to another place. We don't know where. It's not important. But I want you to note this.

This is what I'm talking about Monday morning, the practical side of life. Even though he just had this huge miracle, he didn't say, well, obviously God can deliver me no matter what. I'm going to just stand here.

Who cares about Agrippa? He was like, no, God delivered me. Now I need to go hide from King Herod because no point in letting him imprison me again. Wisdom, practicality, routine as part of life. You live your life out of the context of the miracles of God, but you live your life with wisdom and work and practicality and all of that's part of it.

Verse 18 is one of the great understatements in all the Bible. Now when day came, there was no little disturbance among the soldiers over what had become of Peter. I should say there was no little disturbance. He's gone. They looked around in the morning and he's like, where's our prisoner? We got about three gates here and we got four squads of soldiers and he's gone. Herod didn't take it well. You know how when losing to the triumphs of Jesus has no place to turn but against itself. Verse 19, after Herod searched for him and did not find him, he examined the sentries and ordered that they should be put to death and then he went down to Caesarea to his beachside cottage. He was furious. He'd been outwitted. He'd been outdone and he had to kill somebody.

So he killed his own soldiers who tried to serve him and then he went down to his beach house. What are we to make of all this? Incredible story. Well, there's so much here to say. Let me just highlight three things I feel like the Lord was showing me that are important as regards how it is that we handle the mystery, this particular mystery that there are so many miracles in the lives of God's people and yet there are also troubles and there's also the living out of a practical life. How do we hold all this together? Let me just make three observations.

You probably see a lot more than that in this text, but the first is this. When the church learned that James had been killed, they didn't stop expecting miracles. When they learned that for whatever reason God had not sent an angel to rescue James from the sword of Herod, they didn't stop praying that Peter would miraculously escape. So important.

That's so important. The devil would love nothing more than for us encountering disappointments, tragedies, and difficulties in life for us to say, well, prayer doesn't work and so I give up. That is not what happened to the early church. Instead, they were praying more fervently than ever for Peter. Don't stop praying.

When you go through a grief, you grieve it but not as those who have no hope and you keep praying and believing God for the next miracle. The second thing I know is that when Peter was delivered and James wasn't, they didn't become bogged down trying to explain it. Now we don't, you know, we can't speak from the silence of the Bible so we don't know what all conversations the Christians had. I'm sure they were saying to one another, I really thought God was going to save James.

I don't understand what happened. I'm sure they were saying some of that. I'm sure they were thinking those things. They're human just like we are, but what happened was we don't see the church getting bogged down and saying well James died and now Peter's in prison. We just have a convocation and sit here and figure this out doctrinally and write down some new statement about it. It's just you can't let your mind get bogged down trying to understand what the mind can't understand. Instead, they just devoted themselves to prayer and rejoicing in the Lord and feeding on the Word of God. In other words, they built their lives on what they did understand. They didn't build their lives on what they didn't understand.

And the third thing, and this might be most important of all, is they didn't let what God hadn't done keep them from rejoicing over what he had done. Let me just be prophetically clear with you about this. I believe that during this pandemic for six months now, we have needed to understand science. We need to continue to practice what is good for our safety.

We need to be respectful and obedient of what protocols are in place. We need to do that. And we need to grieve with those who grieve. We need to have a part of our hearts that lament what's going on with this and lamenting the racial division, unrest, and racism.

All of that is going on. It's not that we don't grieve, and it's not that we don't lament, and it's not that we ignore any of the science or the protocols, none of that. But what we mustn't do is to get so focused on what God hasn't done yet that we lose sight of the glory of what he has done. In other words, we keep on praising God, and the focus of our lives is not on the miracles that didn't happen.

The focus of our lives, Christians, listen to this, the focus of the Christian's life is on all of the God moments that have taken place in your life. What's the story of your life? Some people choose to frame their lives in the story of their disappointments.

It leads to despair because it is not the accurate story. No matter how many disappointments I might have faced, or tragedies that I've come up against, or difficulties and challenges that have seemed insurmountable, no matter how much of that I might have faced, my story is not defined by that. My story is defined by what God has done for me in Jesus Christ. That's my story, and that's your story. If you say, well, what's your story, Alan? I could tell you a lot of difficult things. I could tell you the difficult things, and that's part of the story, and I do tell the difficult things because I want to understand about the grace of God and the glory of God, but it's not the difficult thing. It's not the challenge.

It's not the disappointment. It's not James dying. It's Peter's escape that frames the whole narrative. My stories of somebody that came to Christ supernaturally, as my mom did, my stories of somebody who in college got the voice of God speaking in my ear spiritually loud enough that I heard and wept for hours and for weeks when he called me into the ministry. My story is about the miraculous infilling of the Holy Spirit when I didn't understand how I could get any closer to God, what he did for me. My story is about the supernatural protection that happened over my children and my call to ministry here. I love to tell the stories of the miracles because though not every day is Peter miraculously escaping from prison, that's the story that frames the whole narrative, and that's the narrative of our lives.

So it's like the centerpiece is the iron gate swung open by itself and a big angel led me out. That's my story. Well, what about James? He died.

Yeah, I don't understand that. We grieved that. We grieved that. We went and we grieved that with James' mother. We were close friends. We grieved that. Do you understand it?

No, I don't understand it. Well, what about all Monday morning? Peter had to go hide from Agrippa. Yeah, that seemed the wisest thing to do. We did that. Jesus' brother took over leadership in Jerusalem. We tried to figure out the best way to go in this direction and we set up some better structures in the church.

I was like, yeah, we did that too, but the story that I tell you about Peter. In other words, bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that's within me bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all of His benefits.

He who forgives your sins and heals your diseases and redeems your life from the pit. This is my story. This is my song, praising my Savior all the day long. That's our story, and that's the gospel. Alan Wright, today's good news message, Mayhem, Miracles in Monday Morning.

It's from our series we're in now titled Unlimited, and Pastor Alan is back with us here in the studio sharing his parting good news thought for the day for all of us in just a moment. Would you love a better marriage? You don't need more good advice.

You need more good news. Marriages, like people, aren't changed by human effort or even by applying principles. Marriages are changed by the gospel of grace. In six video sessions, Pastor Alan and his wife Anne lead you and your spouse into a fresh encounter with the God of grace. You'll learn a simple grace-filled process that makes great communication easy. You'll discover the freedom of forgiveness and the power of celebration. You'll also learn how to pray for your spouse and how to bless one another with a faith-filled vision for the future.

To help you grow, when you order the video series, we'll also send you two copies of the accompanying study guide. Whether your marriage is going through some special challenges or your marriage is in a season of health, you'll find powerful, transformational truth in good news for your marriage. Make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today and fill your marriage with the grace of God. 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. Back here in the studio to share Pastor Alan's parting good news thought for the day on this teaching here, Mayhem, Miracles, and Monday Morning. And again, if you know the context of when this was originally preached, I think this one makes a good pastor.

You're relevant. Mayhem, Miracles, and Monday Morning in a pandemic, that defined it, I think. That pretty much defined it. And I think that maybe in some segments of the church we're seeing some awakening. But I think so much as I'd talk about in this message, Daniel, what we've seen through the pandemic is just what I would call a spiritual malaise. You know, we can just, we can, we can be like, um, you feel like there's something a little bit asleep on the inside of us. And, um, and God's waking it up and let's believe together for there to be a great spiritual awakening all across the world. He can do those miracles. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.