The Good News in the Bad News [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. God, if He gives you a warning that saves your life, then that's a blessing. There can be a good news to a warning, and normally the warnings are so that you can escape danger. But there is a kind of warning, and I think that's what's going on here.

There is a kind of a warning that is not designed and given to you so that you can avoid the difficulty, but so you can be strong to face 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. Okay, beloved brothers and sisters, friends, holy ones, saints of God, are you ready for some good news? Sometimes the bad news is, in a strange way, the good news.

We're going to see today a story and some interactions between the Christians and Paul. The different pieces of it is troubling, and at first reading, maybe even a little confusing. So much so that, to be honest with you, several times this week I thought, I'm going to swap this text out for another one. But I felt like this had been assigned to me. The Lord had led me to it, and so I said, I'm going to stick with it because I felt like there was something here for us, and I think the Lord has showed me.

This is Paul in two different scenes where Christians have gathered around him to encourage him, give him prophetic words, pray for him, and say goodbye to him as he heads to Jerusalem. It is not a text that, at first glance, you go, oh, I can clearly see where the good news is in that. So we're going to dig into it. You know, when you study the Scriptures, I think the first thing you do is whatever reading type plan or however you can organize time in the Word. Some people follow reading plans. Some like to read the Bible through. Maybe you choose a book of the Bible and I'm going to focus on this is going to be my devotional time for a period of time. Take a section of Scripture. The goal is not just to read it and say, hey, I read the Bible.

You know, take that section of Scripture. The first thing that I do is I look at that passage. I say, what's blessing me in this text? What's the blessing? But I want to also say that the more that I've studied Scripture over the years, I think a second question is valid also, and that is what bothers me about this text? Because sometimes it's in the being bothered that you become like Jacob who wrestled with an angel all night long, and eventually he said to the angel, I will not let you go until you bless me. And I wrestled with this text this week, and I was like, text, I'm not going to let you go until you bless me.

And so now here I am to share it with you. We're in two different scenes in Acts chapter 21. The first is a scene that takes place in the village of Tyre, T-Y-R-E. Luke is writing at verse four of Acts 21. Having sought out the disciples, we, including Luke, stayed there for seven days and through the Spirit, they were telling Paul not to go on to Jerusalem. And when our days there were ended, we departed and went on our journey, and they all with wives and children accompanied us until we were outside the city. And kneeling down on the beach, we prayed and said farewell to one another.

Then we went on board the ship and they returned home. Next scene is verse 10. While we were staying for many days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea, and coming to us, he took Paul's belt and bound his own feet and hands and said, Thus says the Holy Spirit, this is how the Jews at Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles. When we heard this, we and the people there urged him not to go up to Jerusalem. So you notice this thing, they're all just pleading with Paul, don't go to Jerusalem, bad things are going to happen there. Verse 13. Then Paul answered, What are you doing? Weeping and breaking my heart, for I am ready not only to be in prison, but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus. And since he would not be persuaded, we ceased and said, Let the will of the Lord be done.

And after these days, we got ready and went up to Jerusalem. So in life, in reality, the bad news and the good news are often closer to one another than we would like. So we make jokes about it.

That's one of the things we do in our culture when there are things that really bother us, we just make jokes about it. So there's a whole bunch of I got bad news and good news. Which one do you want first? The famous one for the golfers is the angel comes to a golfer and says, I got good news and bad news.

What do you want first? The golfer said, give me the good news. The angel said, well, the good news is there's going to be golf in heaven.

The golfer is like, yes. What's the bad news? Angel said, bad news is you got a tee time tomorrow at 10 a.m. Yeah, yeah. Are there a lot of them about doctors, you know, the doctor who is called up his patient and said, I got good news and bad news.

What do you want first? Patient said, give me the good news. The doctor said, well, the good news is that you got 24 hours to live. The patient was like, well, that's the good news. What could possibly be the bad news? He said, the bad news is I've been trying to call you for a day. Yeah. You know, we the good news and bad news are often closer together.

And it's good. It's good for a Christian to become a positive person. Look for every silver lining you can find, you know. I mean, I try to do that and everything like Darren, even during pandemic, every little thing you can find. People are asking me, so, pastor, where's your glasses? Well, this is one of the tiny benefits of pandemic is that I is so tired of my glasses fogging up while the mask is on. Glasses wearers can right here and amen. You can't see anything.

You wonder why we're stumbling around. It's because we can't see our glasses are fogged up. And the more we talk to you, the more they fog up. So I had my regular eye exam a couple of weeks ago. I said, are there any contacts that are better than what I used to wear because they're not comfortable? So I'm trying some new contacts. They seem to be doing pretty well. So, you know, a little silver lining.

I found some contact lenses that seem to be working during the during the pandemic. I always want to be that positive person, you know, I mean, kind of like the little boy that was seen shoveling out at a big pile of manure. And a man came and said, what are you doing?

And the little boy said, well, with all this here, I've got to be a pony in here somewhere. It's good to be positive. But sometimes, isn't it true, you go through things that are so deep and they're so difficult.

And here we are in a pandemic. It's not enough to just say, well, give me little pieces of silver lining. Give me a couple little good things in the midst of it. And sometimes we got to wrestle down deeper than that and find how God is able to take the very thing that seems like the bad news. And in it, we see his goodness. And that's what this story is about is a story that is at first disturbing to me. And I had to wrestle with it. Here's what bothers me about the text.

I'm going to be upfront with you. The things I wrestled with first, it's a text that's mainly about a warning for Paul, a warning of being arrested and having troubles in Jerusalem. And warnings aren't fun.

I like to announce good news, not warnings. Secondly, I struggled with this text a lot because, as I'll show you in some detail, the text shows well-meaning, wonderful Christians, New Testament Christians, just like us, gathering around Paul and exercising spiritual gifts, praying for him and prophesying him. In the New Testament, prophecy is for encouragement and edification and comfort, and they prophesy to strengthen him. But their prophecies, as we'll see today, are imperfect and to some degree inaccurate. How could there possibly be good news in a text that's about warnings and about imperfect prophecies? And then the other thing I wrestled with is that Paul is going to face trouble in Jerusalem, and he knows it. And as we'll see, usually the Spirit will warn you of danger so you could avoid it. But in this case, he's headed right into the teeth of it.

How could it possibly be good news that Paul is headed for persecution? I want to talk about those things. That's what I've been wrestling with. Let's start with this. The good news of a warning. 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. There was a man who was standing on the side of the road, looked like one of those crazy street preachers, had a big sign that said, Turn around while there's still time. A driver passed by, rolled his eyes at the street preacher, another one of those crazy people.

And a few moments later, there was the sound of screeching brakes. And a few moments later, the driver came back by, rolled his window down and said to the preacher, I wish your sign had just said, The bridge is out up ahead. Because if you're getting ready to drive into a cliff and didn't know it, if somebody told you the bridge is out and you need to turn around or else you'll fall in the cliff, it may not be fun news, but it is good news to you because of the warning. I'm a good news person, and so I don't preach hellfire and brimstone.

I think there's a better way that people are drawn in by grace more than being scared by the warning. Will Willimon, who used to be the dean of the chapel at Duke, is witty and insightful and an author. And he and his wife, he said many years ago, went to a funeral at a country church.

And the preacher did one of those hellfire brimstone messages at the funeral using the occasion. You know, a whole bunch of it's too late for old Fred here. He's dead. But it's not too late for you. You need to get saved today or else if you don't know Jesus, you're going to hell. Too late for Fred.

Not too late for you. You better turn around today because you might walk out this building, step across the street, get hit by a bus today. And if you don't know Jesus, you'll go straight to hell. And, you know, it's one of those whole deals. And they got in the car and Willimon turned to his wife and said, honey, can you believe that? How disgusting, how inappropriate, insensitive and inappropriate to use a funeral to say all of those things. Can you believe all those things, he said. And his wife was quiet for a moment. She said, yeah. And you know the worst thing about it? He said, what?

She said it was all true. We don't like warnings, but there's good news in a warning if it lets you know of a coming trap that the enemy has set. Some of you have been following. I got to see last week the saga of the elusive groundhog in our yard. I told you last week, he's just walking around the traps and smugly just going right by him, too smart for us. So some of you must have been in the spirit with me on this because on Monday morning with a trap in a different location, we out tricked him. There he is. He has now been safely relocated to a happy place in the country.

That's what my mother told me when our dog went away when I was little. But the bad news, the bad news is that no sooner was he removed and relocated than I called my wildlife man. I said, there's another one roaming around who is still eluding all of our captures. The thing about trapping something is you don't want it to know that it's getting into a trap.

That's the whole point of it, right? If you know it's a trap, you don't go into it. So if the devil is at work setting traps, we'd like to know if there's a trap and not just walk blindly willy-nilly into them. So warnings can be blessings when it tells us how to avoid a trap, and that's normally what happens. Normally, it is that God warns so that we can avoid the danger. You know, we're going to be reading the Christmas stories here.

Can you believe it in just a couple of weeks? And we'll see again, Matthew chapter 2 jumped to mind because the Magi, verse 12, being warned in a dream not to return to Herod. They departed to their own country by another way. And then in the next verse, Joseph gets warned. When they departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.

He said, rise, take the child as mother, flee to Egypt, remain there till I tell you, for Herod's about to search for the child to destroy him. In fact, all throughout the book of Acts, I've been noticing this often. The Lord will just warn either through people, discernment or direct prophetic words.

He'll warn them. They escape all kinds of peril. There are many times that Peter or Paul or others are about to be stoned. The Lord gets them out safely. Same thing happened with Jesus during his ministry until the fullness of time had arrived. Like, for example, Acts chapter 14, verse 5, when an attempt was made by both Gentiles and Jews with their rulers to mistreat them and stone them, they learned of it.

We don't know if they learned by discernment or by the body of Christ, but then they fled. That warnings are for the purpose most of the time of you avoiding the danger. I remember one time my brother David, his little boy was little at the time, many years ago, and they had just pulled into a fast food parking lot. They were going to go in. He was going to get some kid's meal thing, you know, and then would leave. And David said he just pulled in the parking lot. And as they were getting ready to get out of the car, it was just, he just felt, just felt it.

You know, people hear from the Lord in different ways. He just said, he just, everything within him said, get out of here. They just pulled back out. And as he was pulling back out into the street, shots were fired inside the fast food restaurant. And somebody was shot.

There was some kind of robbery or something. So God, if he gives you a warning that saves your life, then that's a blessing. There can be a good news to a warning. And normally the warnings are so that you can, you can escape danger. But there is a kind of warning.

And I think that's what's going on here. There is a kind of a warning that is not designed and given to you so that you can avoid the difficulty, but so you can be strong to face it. So an example, I was thinking like in college, often a professor who teaches the same class year after year, the exams would be, you know, somewhat similar, at least in their scope and in difficulty and so forth. So what we'd often do is you'd say, hey, you took this course last semester. What was the second midterm like? Is it hard? And the person said, oh yeah, it's really hard.

Let me tell you, you need to not only know the French Revolution, you better know some dates and you're going to know these names. And whatever you do, don't think that you just need to know what's in the textbook. You better, better pay attention to what he says in class.

And this is really important to him. You better study this, blah, blah, blah. Well, your spirit's kind of, you know, that doesn't sound like good news to me. That means I got to study harder than I had hoped to. But the fact that you were forewarned that it was going to be challenging put something into you to be prepared for the challenge.

Those of you that like sports, you understand this. Part of the job of a coach is to tell his team if they're favored in a contest and the other team's the underdog, to help them understand that you've still got to try. In other words, if you think that it's going to be easy, then you'll be ill-prepared for the challenge. When the people of God were delivered from their bondage, they were to go in and take a promised land. And spies went in and they saw the peoples there and they said, oh, they're giants in the land.

And they scared everybody else so they didn't go in. And what they misunderstood was they thought the promised land, when they finally got there to a land flowing of milk and honey, they thought that meant we're not going to have conflict there. We're not going to have to fight battles there.

They didn't understand that your promised land is your battleground. And just because you're facing battles does not mean that somehow you're outside the will of God. In fact, in the will of God, every day, you'll need to get up and put on his full armor.

In fact, the days that you think that somehow life is going to be easy and there's no spiritual battle anymore is when you're most vulnerable. Alan Wright, in our good news message today, the good news in the bad news from the series Unlimited. Pastor Alan is back here in just a moment sharing a part in good news thought for all of us for the day.

Stick with us. 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 escape 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 now with Pastor Alan and our parting good news thought for the day. You pointed out if the Lord has prepared you for something difficult, the good news is that He will go with you.

He's never going to have a time where there's a challenge in front of you that may be difficult, that He's not also going to be with you. And so sometimes what, well, it feels like bad news, carries with it some of the best news, the very presence of God with you. Back here with Pastor Alan and our parting good news thought for the day. Pastor Alan, what would you say where to find the good news and whatever bad news that somebody listening right now has been dealing with lately?

Is there a secret? I can find some good news in the middle of all this bad? Well, I do think that part of it is that the longer you walk with God, you can cultivate a skill, really. A habit of instead of assuming that there can't be good news in this, you begin to look for it because you just know the character of God. And you know that God can be there in the midst of it. So that's part of it. But I think the other thing that is so reassuring to me is to just remember that promise of God that is in Romans 8. He really is able to take all things, work it together for our good.

And that means that you may not be seeing it right now. And I know as Christians, we talk about that often. It can almost become cliched. But it really is the way of God that sometimes the very thing that the enemy made for evil, God ends up turning it for good. And I think just the longer I walk with the Lord, the more history I have where I can look back and say, oh, that seems so dire at the time.

But now I see how that will end up. And I think you learn over time. So learn and cultivate and ask God to help you to look for the good and then to cultivate the fruit of patience.

Because one day I think you'll see. You only caught part of today's teaching. Not only can you listen again online, but also get a daily e-mail devotional that matches today's teaching delivered right to your e-mail 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.