Naked Power [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

Because there are counterfeits, you never really stop to think that maybe the reason there's such a thing as counterfeit $20 bills is because a real $20 bill exists and people go to great measures to try to come up with something that looks like it. 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. Are you ready for some good news? God shares His power with His children.

Somebody should have shouted about right there. I said, God shares His own power, the creator of the cosmos, the power, Paul described it, that raised Jesus from the dead. Whatever that power is that can take the lifeless body of Jesus and resurrect it to never die again, to revitalize and reorganize cellular structure and to devise a spiritual body and to glorify the Lord Jesus and one day to do the same for everyone in Christ. That power of resurrection, that creative force of God that was seen emanating from the Most High, when in the beginning He said, let there be light.

And light began traveling at 186,000 miles per second throughout the cosmos permanently, consistently. The power of God, He shares with us. It's mind bending. We come today to a story that is about power and an emphasis. There was a lot of magic and a lot of attempts to look powerful without really being powerful.

And there was an effort to try to be powerful no matter the means. And we see an incredible story, miraculous story. We see something that's also ironic and really almost humorous that happens that teaches us a lot about how God wants His power used. It's Acts chapter 19 verse 11. And God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick and their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them. Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits saying, I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims. Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this, but the evil spirit answered them, Jesus I know and Paul I recognize, but who are you? And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them and overpowered them so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. And this became known to all the residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks and fear fell upon them all. And the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled. Also many of those who were now believers came confessing and divulging their practices and a number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all. And they counted the value of them and found it came to 50,000 pieces of silver.

It is possible that this was a piece of silver that was understood to be the value of a day's wage, 50,000 days wages or maybe even more. So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily. Acts is the sequel to Luke, as you remember, and Luke's gospel ends with Jesus saying to the disciples, wait in Jerusalem until you're clothed with power. And in Acts chapter one, they're promised they will receive power. The word's dunamis.

We actually don't see that word dunamis occur again until Acts chapter 19. We've seen evidence of God's power all the way through the book of Acts, but here the word occurs again. And it's in this ironic story with a humorous twist where people want to show themselves powerful, but then they are overpowered and get beat up and run out of the house half naked. When we say naked power, we use that phrase to mean using power without regard for who it's impacting. But I use it today in an ironic sense of those that wanted to use naked power ended up powerless and running naked. So I present to you today naked power. I have to confess to you that there's a series of movies that I should not like.

I'm sorry, I should not like it. The hero of the story is sexist and promiscuous and sneaky, and he's a killer. His life is built on deception. He often uses people to his advantage.

He gambles, he drinks way too much, and he is not a good steward of his toys. But I have to forgive him all of that because in every movie he saves the world. I'm speaking, of course, of Bond, James Bond.

I'm a sucker for James Bond because all the gadgets, if you've ever seen the James Bond movie, he meets with Q, who is the gadget guru at the beginning of every movie, and he introduces him to the gadgets that Bond will need to save the world in that particular movie. And in the early years of Bond, now looking back on it, the gadgets are not that impressive, you know. I mean, a knife that comes out of a shoe, that's a, yeah, or I got tickled at this, a small reel-to-reel tape recorder hidden inside of a camera.

Can you imagine that? A recording device and a camera all in one device. But at the time these things were amazing gadgets and they're always a fancy wristwatch, a Rolex that once was equipped with a laser beam that could cut through stuff. Another had a powerful electromagnet that was enough to actually repel a bullet. And my favorite, the Rolex that had a bezel around the outside of it that was a circular saw that could cut through rope that had tied him up. He always was getting cool watches and finally he got one that could actually see images and hear sounds on it.

Could you imagine that? So that's why I've got an Apple Watch. But it doesn't even go into all the cool cars he has and all of that. Now there's a couple things you need to know about James Bond and his gadgets. Number one, he's supposed to take good care of them and return them. He never does. He uses them one time and they're, you know, they're gone.

But the other thing is he's supposed to get some instruction and training on how to use them. But he always interrupts Q and just grabs it and starts using it and he never because Bond doesn't need instructions. He is James Bond and he works alone. In fact, one of the themes of all the spy movies is the spy.

Have you ever noticed? Never is supposed to have a good close relationship with anybody. Spy is not going to be in loving relationships because we all know love makes you vulnerable and instead we have that spy has special gadgets that make the spy powerful. But you want to keep that spy separate from the messiness of actual relationships.

And I point all this out to say, here's the myth, not just in a James Bond movie, but in our culture. The myth, the false ideology is that power flows strongest apart from relationship. As if power were something that you just tap into apart from love. But the truth that we see today's story is that power in God's design is meant to flow only in relationship through loving attachments. I want to tell you more about that today.

That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Unlock the power of blessing your life. Discover God's 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. God's always been there. In every moment you narrowly escaped from danger. In every moment you were surprised by a blessing.

In every moment you just knew the direction to take. God was there. Your life is defined by countless moments of God's grace. Perhaps they've been covered by the sands of time or have just gone unnoticed in the rush of life, but your life is full of God moments. When you make a gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's heart-stirring book, God Moments, that will lead you on a spiritual treasure hunt to uncover your God moments. It's Alan Wright's timeless book, God Moments.

Discover your God moments in the past and be filled with fresh faith today. 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. So let's look at the story. Ephesus was a place where there was a lot of power displays going on, people trying to practice magic and political powers, religious powers. It was one of the most reconstructed archeological sites in the world. In fact, if you had the luxury to be able to travel to see biblical places, other than, of course, if you had a chance, go first to Jerusalem and Galilee and such. But if you were going to choose another place, I'd probably say go to Ephesus because you can stand in places where the story that we're reading today, you know if for sure it took place. You can go there today and you can see the old street, the marble way, they called it.

It leads from, if we look back this way, big amphitheater, I'll show you in a moment, all the way down to the library. It is there in Ephesus that one of the three largest libraries in the world was there. The largest was in Alexandria, but here's some reconstruction of the ancient ruins of the library in Ephesus. The temple of Diana was the centerpiece.

We don't have much of that actually reconstructed. We know this was the site, but they know what the design was and the reconstruction of models of it show it to have been a majestic centerpiece devoted to the goddess Diana, the goddess of the hunt. There was also in Ephesus this stadium that seats 25,000 people that's largely intact and you can go and stand down here and speak out and see how good the acoustics are there. We're not going to read it today, but the scene that follows the scene we read today, there's a riot that takes place in that amphitheater because so many people are giving up their idolatry that the silversmiths are running out of business on making their little silver icons and stuff to Diana.

So there's a riot and Paul comes and addresses the crowd right here. It is a city that was the cultural sort of capital and there was a lot of attention on Ephesus, a huge appeal as I said to magic and essentially all kinds of charlatans and people that all the time trying to look like that they were powerful. And so there were these itinerant exorcists that I think largely were just charlatans that would go around trying to look powerful in the eyes of others that they could somehow show themselves to have special powers. A famous magician died this week, James Randi, the amazing Randi. He died this week in his old age. He was an illusionist and a skeptic and an atheist. And he had performed such feats early on after he dropped out of high school and joined the carnival. He went on to escape from a coffin submerged in the water. He escaped from a straitjacket while being dangled over Niagara Falls. But in his ongoing years, he devoted himself to exposing charlatans and exposing people that claim to have supernatural powers.

Most famously, there was an Israeli illusionist who claimed to have supernatural powers that he was able to see things and do things like use his mind to bend spoons. His name was Uri Geller. In 1972, interestingly, the amazing Randi teamed up with Johnny Carson because Uri Geller was going to come on and show his supernatural abilities to bend spoons with his mind. Amazing Randi knew it was all just a show. So shortly before Uri Geller came on to the show, the amazing Randi made sure that the spoons and all the props were subbed in as just regular spoons. And it kind of ended up being a pretty humiliating moment for this Israeli guy who sat there and he was like, he couldn't bend the spoons, you know, because it wasn't his stuff.

And he said, I don't feel very strong tonight. So amazing Randi went on to spend his life trying to expose anybody that he thought was a charlatan because he said there is no such thing as supernatural. Famously, he exposed someone who purported to be a healing evangelist, TV. He exposed, he found out that the phony evangelist was using an earpiece to get fed information about people in the audience so that he looked like he was getting words of knowledge and calling out names and stuff like that.

And so of course the media loved finding that out, you know. The only problem was with James Randi, he made a terrible mistake. He made an assumption that because there are counterfeits, that the real doesn't exist. He never really stopped to think that maybe the reason there's such a thing as counterfeit $20 bills is because a real $20 bill exists and people go to great measures to try to come up with something that looks like it. That maybe in the first place that there were itinerant Jewish exorcists that were wandering around in the first century trying to look like they had special power was that everybody knew there were powers that were at work. Our rationalistic minds in America and Western culture in modern times, we tend to think that the material things are real, but the spirit things, that's just all that, you know. That's not the case in the first century and still in most parts of the world in the global South and in much of the Eastern world, people assume that no, there's a spiritual realm and there are angels and demons. And you know, let me just say this with regard to demons.

They're just too extreme. Some people act like they don't exist at all and there is no evil. And then there's another extreme, it's like there's a demon behind everything. And I think that for the Christian, the real place is in a dynamic balance of understanding that there's a spiritual battle that's going on, but we're not supposed to read the devil into everything or certainly not get fixated on the devil. But here they are in Ephesus and there's this counterfeit that's going on with these so-called sons of the high priest Sceva. You know, what's interesting is that Josephus, the Roman historian that we learn a lot about, we learned from him a lot about the first century and what Judaism looked like and what early Christianity looked like.

We learned from this historian Josephus and he listed somewhere in his writings, all the high priests of Israel and Sceva's never mentioned. So scholars are like, you know, Sceva wasn't really a high priest. It's like, I think these guys are going around and maybe they had some, maybe their father was some sort of priest or something, but they're just, I think they're laying claim to being the sons of a priest to make themselves, it sounds more spiritual. So what would happen is that people who charlatans, they would just try to use any kind of language that made them seem mystically strong. So they would often use references to names of stuff from the Hebrew scripture. Like we have at least one papyrus that has on there back from this era, somebody who's laying out how they would make an incantation of exorcism based on something using the name of the God of Abraham.

Solomon's name gets mentioned a lot. You know, just, they're just trying to mix in this, mix in that, anything to make them sound spiritual, powerful. They end up of course, not only just a silly way, having to run out of the house, but you kind of understand for Jewish men, in Judaism, modesty is very, very important.

And a Jewish man would never be seen even partially unclothed. And for them to run out unclothed is especially funny and humiliating. You know, it's like just for a moment, they got to experience, if you really want naked power, here's what it's actually like. So let me tell you about the major issues I think going on with them, the problems for the sons of Sceva, why they really, really messed up. And the first is that they thought this is a big, big problem. They thought that the source of the power didn't matter as long as it was power. They thought the source didn't matter.

And they found out it most certainly does. This is a story about people who wanted power just for power's sake, regardless of where it comes from, as if it didn't matter because all they cared about was being powerful, but they found out it really did matter. You know, this is a very unusual story, okay? It's a very unusual story. And one of the things that's really unusual, and it's important to know this, is that you don't see this kind of thing happening in the New Testament. I mean, there is an instance where the disciples come back to Jesus and they say, you know, there are some demons we couldn't seem to cast out. And Jesus talks to you and says, well, some go out through prayer and fasting. That's a different discussion. So we had a few instances where it's like some reason the demonic entity is stubborn and the Christian didn't seem to have full sway or power.

But normally, no, the whole point of the New Testament is the Christian has a whole different standing and different authority and power, and so demons are subject to Christians. That's our good news message today. It's naked power from the series Unlimited. And I encourage you to stay with us. Pastor Alan is back, joining us in the studio, sharing a parting good news thought for the day in just a moment. Unlock the power of blessing your life. Discover God's 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 Pastor Alan dot org. God's always been there in every moment you narrowly escaped from danger. In every moment you were surprised by a blessing.

In every moment you just knew the direction to take. God was there. Your life is defined by countless moments of God's grace. Perhaps they've been covered by the sands of time or have just gone unnoticed in the rush of life, but your life is full of God moments. When you make a gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's heart-stirring book, God Moments, that will lead you on a spiritual treasure hunt to uncover your God moments. It's Alan Wright's timeless book, God Moments.

Discover your God moments in the past and be filled with fresh faith today. 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 with us here, Pastor Alan's parting good news thought for the day. And you pointed out in this message that counterfeit money exists because a real one exists.

And I've been thinking a lot about that, but there's good news there. There really is. You know, sometimes when you see the counterfeit to what the gospel is, you could go, oh, well, there's just, you know, there's so many counterfeits and how could the gospel be?

Well, the other way of thinking about it is that, yeah, the reason counterfeits exist is because there is the real. And this is a story about the real, the real power of God. And, and it flows out of relationship with God.

It's not magic. It's not something that you just tap into is something that comes from God Himself. An incredible story. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at PastorAlan.org or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. If you only caught part of today's teaching, not only can you listen again online, but also get a daily email devotional that matches today's teaching delivered right to your email inbox free. Find out more about these and other resources at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.