Seeing As Jesus Sees [Part 28]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. It's a tool. It's a spiritual practice.

It's not magic. It's real tools spiritually by which you can pause from your busyness, then connect with Christ, and then now you let him open your spiritual eyes, which means you're going to be willing to take a fresh look at things. 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 here with Pastor Alan in the studio today as we are excited about this brand new book that's out now.

It's Seeing as Jesus Sees How a New Perspective Can Defeat the Darkness and Awaken Joy. We're moving into a new section of the book today. Before we get to it, I want to remind you that if you've bought the book, let us know this month only when you let us know that you've already purchased the book somewhere. We'll send you a free video series and a companion daily reading guide plus a group study guide. All in this bundle is our thank you for supporting the launch of Pastor Alan's new book and the important message here. It's an over $100 value and it's yours simply when you buy the book at your favorite retailer and then let us know you've done so at seeingasjesussees.org, seeingasjesussees.org. The author of the book is sitting with me today, Seeing as Jesus Sees How a New Perspective Can Defeat the Darkness and Awaken Joy. Of course, this book now has been out for several days and we're excited to see how the Lord is using it, already hearing great stories. Pastor Alan, it's good to be with you as we dive into our discussion today.

The topic is practicing. You have a chapter by that same title that we're going to unpack some themes from. As you talk about the practical steps taken to get to the ultimate goal of this book to see as Jesus sees, you have one that talks about pause from denying. Would you say this is just a moment to be honest, to look at the situation and call it for what it is and then take that to the Lord? I just really feel like the model we have of this prayer to get Jesus's viewpoint, this model from the Emmaus Road disciples in Luke 24 is so helpful because the text tells us that not only were they standing still, but they were looking sad. They were devastated.

They couldn't hide it. And I just really like Daniel that Jesus did not hurry them into the celebration. He allowed them to talk and they said, we'd hoped he was the one to redeem Israel.

That's Luke 24, verse 21. We had hoped, you know, that's who hasn't had that feeling. We had hoped it's the voice of discouragement.

It's a voice of angst. Who among us doesn't have a long, we had hoped list. And I think that it's really important that we not be in denial about the disappointments that we've had. I don't think Jesus hurries us past the expression of our pain and every single effective type of psychological therapy, no matter what it is, it has to lead to a greater self-awareness in the first place.

And I think this is biblical. If you're angry, the first thing to admit is, okay, I'm feeling angry. If you're afraid, the first thing is admit I'm feeling afraid. I'm feeling anxious.

That's why my heart's beating faster. You know, we're tempted to deny those feelings. We're tempted to, and even as Christians, sometimes we're thinking like, well, I should just, I should just be okay. Praise the Lord. You know, I don't think God's that way. And so, uh, a pause, a pause for those disciples and same thing for us, pause from distraction, pause from all the doing, but also pause from the denying. There's not a shortcut to glory. And when you pause like this, you're connecting up, you're giving yourself the chance to connect with him.

Pause before you can connect. The book by Pastor Alan Wright, which by the way is out now, it's Seeing as Jesus Sees, and that's our topic today here in the studio. It's how a new perspective can defeat the darkness and awaken joy. And in the days that have followed the release of the book or even leading up to the book, I'm sure Pastor Alan, you've been asked a bunch of questions, either in interviews or by people in your church or whatnot, who found out that, Hey, there's a new book here that you've written.

And they kind of probably want to cut through all the chapters and get down to the chase. Okay. And in these five minutes that we have to talk, uh, boil it down.

What, what do I do? And that's really what we're talking about are the practical points of this. And we've come through really a few discussion points on pausing and, uh, and you have some others here like connecting and attuning.

Well, so think of it as three steps. The Jesus, how do you see this prayer causes a pause and then enables us to connect and then enables to look in a new way. So pause and connect and look, and we're taking our model from the Emmaus road disciples who had is as clear of any story in the new Testament, where someone's eyes are open.

It's those disciples who were depressed. And then their eyes were opened to see everything from the perspective of the risen Messiah and everything changed. So the first, first step that I think the prayer itself leads you into as a pause, but to say, Jesus, how do you see this? As soon as you say, Jesus, and I deliberately, as we've spoken about an earlier broadcast, I really felt like that, you know, though it is beautiful and appropriate to pray to God as father, because he's our father. Sometimes we can speak to the spirit, the spirit of the living God fall afresh on me. But I think for this, for this, it's helped me to, to speak this to Jesus.

It's biblical to do that. And when you say Jesus, you you've not only paused from all the distraction and doing of life, but now you're letting your soul be connected to him. You are in this sense, getting out of self and you're saying, I, I want to be connected to you.

And a word for this is being attuned, attuned, as you mentioned. So one, one day, uh, just by way of illustration, and one day, um, some years ago, I remember, and I, we, we love walking on the beach whenever we're at the beach, just love taking a long walk and we're walking and she's real good at finding shark's teeth. It all the little tiny black specks you can see in the sand. I hardly ever find them. She finds them.

I don't. So she's looking down, finding sharks too. Then I look, and there's a several people that are out staring at the ocean and they're pointing. So I know they're seeing something and so I said, and look, they're seeing something. So we come over and we pause.

Okay. There's the first step. We, and what do we do? We step up next to them. Yeah. If you want to see what someone else is seeing, you got to stop from what you're looking at.

Yeah. And then you got to find some way to connect up with them. So now we're shoulder to shoulder with them and they're pointing. And what we're doing in that sense is we're trying to relate to what they're seeing. And this is what I think happens with us and Jesus. So we, we pause to connect and then we're beginning to attune with him.

That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Wondering what you need to do to find more freedom, wonder, and joy. What if you don't need to do more as much as see more? What if victorious breakthrough and enduring transformation comes not by striving, but by seeing. For years, Pastor Alan Wright has been practicing a new spiritual discipline, a simple prayer. Jesus, how do you see this?

It's brief enough for a single breath, but deep enough for lasting life change. It's a prayer Christ loves to honor because the savior came to open blind and blurred eyes. Jesus is after all the light of the world. In his new groundbreaking book, Seeing as Jesus Sees, Alan Wright leads readers into a fresh kind of Bible study where they're invited in close side by side with the savior to see themselves, others in the world through Jesus's eyes. There's good news on every page because divine revelation and spirit-filled living is a reserve for the spiritually elite. Every Christian can live with wide-eyed wonder and spirit revealed vision. For a limited time, when you ordered a book from Amazon or your favorite retailer, you'll receive over $100 of bonus resources. To order the book, visit SeeingAsJesusSeas.org or come to our website, PastorAlan.org, and you'll also receive a free six-week Seeing as Jesus Sees companion video series from Pastor Alan, along with a study guide and a daily reading plan.

So place your order today with your favorite online book retailer and visit our website for instructions on receiving all the extra resources. Christ's Call to Discipleship isn't an invitation to strive to do what Jesus would do, but to come and see what Jesus sees. So pre-order your copy of Alan Wright's newest book and discover and start seeing yourself, others, and the world through Jesus's eyes.

I care preeminently about you and your feelings and your perspective or what really matter to me. It's kind of like, you know, tuning in on the radio. It's like saying, I want to be on your frequency. So that's part of this prayer. Jesus, how do you see this? What you're saying is I want to be tuned in to what you're seeing, what's important for your heart right now, Christ in this situation. And so we are in this sense, before we look with Jesus, we're looking to Jesus. We're looking to the author and finisher of our faith because we're like, I want to see how he's looking. And now I'm standing with you.

That's the image in mine. So, uh, a tuning, but, but then what follows from that is, is now we are, and this is a spiritual thing, but to use a term that sociologists and psychologists use is attaching to Christ so that we're connecting by being sensitive to what Jesus has to show us. And then we're allowing ourselves by pausing and connecting with him, we're allowing ourselves to experience a real attachment to God himself. Seeing as Jesus sees, and that's really, well, the practical steps behind it to see as Jesus sees. This new perspective can really defeat the darkness and awaken joy. This is coming from the pages of a brand new book from Pastor Alan Wright. And we're talking about it today and we're into the practical nature of it all as we're going through. I want to say kind of page by page, but we're really leaving a lot behind.

We don't have time to cover everything here on the radio. So we do encourage you to pick up the book for yourself. You can even make a part of a small group Bible study to go through with Pastor Alan. And we have those resources available for you as well, if you'd like to do that with a group and parallel it with the Scriptures. So Pastor Alan, as we've talked about the different practical, and this is a chapter on practicing, it's as simple as that breath prayer. I keep coming back to that because it is utterly simple to get started.

And I love that the cookies are on the lower shelf on this, but there are ways to really, I guess, take this to the master's level of putting it in a practice. So it's so simple that you could, I mean, I don't want our listeners to do this. Don't do this. Don't just say, oh, I got it. I'll start praying that prayer.

Get the book and learn about this. But we're unpacking. We're unpacking a single breath prayer. Jesus, how do you see this?

And what we're saying is that in practice, three things are happening. When you pray this, you pause. You pause from distractions. You pause from all the doing. And you pause sometimes from denying the pain that you're in. You pause. Jesus, how do you, you can't stop and pray that prayer without a little miniature Sabbath. You take a breath. You say, okay, I need to see better. And you pray it.

That's a pause. But then what happens when you ask the Lord for something like this? You're letting your life be, as he said, we abide in him.

He abides in us. But you're letting your sensory perceptions spiritually be shaped by a connection with him. And so connecting has to do with attuning.

And then as I mentioned, Daniel has to do with attaching. And that really is a huge concept now that in many ways, a lot of theologians as well as counselors are exploring what this means and what it means to be attached, not just like a baby attached to a mother, but us attached to God. Because from our first cry to our final breath, we crave attachment. We are made for deep attachment.

We'll never be fulfilled. And so just think about these disciples on the Mayas road. They had not recognized him, but before they recognized him, they were beginning to be connected to him.

They had dinner with him. They said, stay with us, Luke 24 29. Their hearts were attaching to him.

They were made for love. And we need it. So all throughout the days, you pause and say, Jesus, how do you see this? We're saying to the Savior, being with you matters to me more than anything. And we're giving ourselves the space.

We're giving you, Jesus, the permission to attach. And when you, when you do, now you're really experiencing a kind of deep spiritual connection with Jesus that enables us to come to the third step. And that is to look, look, look with fresh eyes. So pause, connect, and look.

The book is, Seeing as Jesus Sees How a New Perspective Can Defeat the Darkness and Awaken Joy. And as we're talking about the practical steps, and Pastor Alan, I hear you say that the first big step is to take that breath, to pause. And I think that possibly, at least in the American culture, that may be the most difficult first step for us to take. Because if we could tackle that, then we've got the space then to say, okay, what's next? And that brief Sabbath, as you mentioned there, could then say, oh yeah, these are the next steps that we're talking about here. And the perspective part of your subtitle is where we're at now about looking. We're attuned, and that goes hand in hand with looking, I think, right?

Yeah. So once you've paused, once you've connected with Christ, and I'm suggesting that this little prayer does this for us, right? It's a tool. It's a spiritual practice.

It's not magic. It's real tools, spiritually, by which you can pause from your busyness, then connect with Christ. And then now you let him open your spiritual eyes, which means you're going to be willing to take a fresh look at things, which means maybe I didn't see it properly before. And to look at it anew, like these Emmaus Road disciples, Luke 24, verse 31, one of the most hopeful and beautiful phrases in all the Bible, their eyes were opened. So once they had new eyes, they looked at everything differently. And I think part of what I'm saying is I like praying this little prayer because it empowers me to be willing to look differently at things. And, and I think sometimes spiritual revelation, it takes some getting, it takes some getting used to it sort of rocks your work. Rocks your world, but you gotta be willing to look, look again, right? Pause connect, but then look, really look again.

Okay. And trust Jesus is going to show that to me. While I was writing a chapter on this, I came upon an article about a boy that was born blind in Northern India, and they had no resources for eye specialists until he was a teenager. And he was invited to a charity hospital in New Delhi and a surgeon, uh, excised the cataract covered lenses that had made him blind from, from birth. And he replaced them with some synthetic ones and the bandages were removed, you know, and he could see light and images, but his brain couldn't understand all the visual stimuli. It took months for his brain to make sense of it.

So he had to learn to see by looking and then looking again and then looking again. So I think it's that way spiritually new sites in Christ don't necessarily register with our souls right away. We may be thrilled and, but for it to become a part of us, you see, we, we have to really allow it to become, this is our new way of seeing this is, this is our new way of thinking. So we're, we pause, we connect and we look. This is impactful, not only for your, your own life to see your own self, the way Jesus sees you, but also the trials that you face, or maybe it helps you see others and the troubles they're going through or the blessing that they are in your life or culture around us, whether it's a happy, joyous moment in life, or in many cases that we see today, more questions than we have answers. So it's impactful and applicable today.

And that's what we're talking about. The book, not only seeing as Jesus sees written by Pastor Alan Wright, but the practical nature of it all, how a new perspective can defeat the darkness and awaken joy with Pastor Alan Wright. And we've got a final closing inspiration coming for our broadcast here in just a moment. With good news from his latest book, seeing as Jesus sees, please stay with us. Pastor Alan's joining me back here in the studio, sharing a parting good news, inspiration to see as Jesus sees in just a moment. Wondering what you need to do to find more freedom, wonder, and joy.

What if you don't need to do more as much as see more? What if victorious breakthrough and enduring transformation comes not by striving, but by seeing? For years, Pastor Alan Wright has been practicing a new spiritual discipline, a simple prayer. Jesus, how do you see this?

It's brief enough for a single breath, but deep enough for lasting life change. It's a prayer Christ loves to honor because the savior came to open blind and blurred eyes. Jesus is after all the light of the world. In his new groundbreaking book, Seeing as Jesus Sees, Alan Wright leads readers into a fresh kind of Bible study where they're invited in close side by side with the savior to see themselves, others in the world through Jesus's eyes. There's good news on every page because divine revelation and spirit-filled living is a reserve for the spiritually elite.

Every Christian can live with wide-eyed wonder and spirit-revealed vision. For a limited time, when you order the book from Amazon or your favorite retailer, you'll receive over $100 of bonus resources. To order the book, visit SeeingAsJesusSees.org or come to our website, PastorAlan.org, and you'll also receive a free six-week Seeing As Jesus Sees companion video series from Pastor Alan, along with a study guide and a daily reading plan.

So place your order today with your favorite online book retailer and visit our website for instructions on receiving all the extra resources. Christ's call to discipleship isn't an invitation to strive to do what Jesus would do, but to come and see what Jesus sees. So pre-order your copy of Alan Wright's newest book and discover and start seeing yourself, others, and the world through Jesus's eyes.

Now with closing inspiration directly from the new book, Seeing As Jesus Sees, here's Pastor Alan Wright. When you pray, Jesus, how do you see this? You put into motion a three-step process, a pause. Pause from all the distractions and a pause from even the denying of our emotions.

It lets us get more in touch with that, and it's a pause from all the doing. So you pause, and then by saying, Jesus, how do you see this? You're saying what you see matters most to me, and our souls begin to attach to him, and we attune with him. And then what we do is we dare to look again. Maybe I haven't seen it right, and now by being connected with Christ, I'm going to see it differently. So that is an unpacking of an amazing process in which you are now repositioned to see everything in life differently.

And I just would say, Daniel, over time, as you practice this, I don't want all our listeners to know, you can become better and better at it. Some years ago, I received a big glossy magazine that I hadn't ordered. It was called Cigar Aficionado. Daniel, I'm pretty sure I had not subscribed because I've never had a cigar, and I didn't even know there was a magazine about cigars.

Sometime later, I was with a group of guys, and one of the fellows produced a box of pricey Cuban cigars, and he offered it to everyone, and the other guys were ecstatic. I said, I don't know. I said, but I do have a magazine on the subject.

I don't know anything about cigars, but there are a few things I do know about. I know some things about golf. You know, you can attest by too many golf illustrations, but that's what I play low.

I can tell you about, I can tell you about golf and degrees of loft on wedges and the grain on Bermuda greens and, and different golf ball compressions. You know, aficionados, they, they sacrifice a lot to pursue a particular interest. And because what you love most, you end up devoting to, and I want to invite all of our listeners into that sort of life. Jesus, how do you see this? You're saying I would be delighted to be an aficionado of the vision of Christ himself. So keep pausing, connecting, and looking, and you're on your way to being an aficionado of the wonders that Jesus promised you'd see. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at pastorallen.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 pastorallen.org. That's pastorallen.org. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.