The Big Setup [Part 3]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

He loves you, and God is able to work things for your good, even when it looks like it's really going bad. 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, More Than Conquerors, a study of Romans 8, 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 right now. 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. Just contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Or call 877-544-4860.

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

Here is Alan Wright. We had a dog named Recy. Abby, our daughter, was the greatest lover of the beagle. And so she fretted over that beagle, loved that beagle, played with that beagle more than anyone else. And when she was little, one day I get a call at the office on a Wednesday night, dark outside, wintry.

And she's hysterical. She's saying, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, I know we need you. We need you. So what's going on? She said, she said, Recy, Recy is back behind some bushes and trees and there's a raccoon or something that's hissing at it.

And I'm afraid it's going to hurt Recy. And we can't, we're calling him. We're doing everything. We don't know what to do.

And we can't go back there because we might get in the middle of the fight and get hurt. What are we going to do? I said, I'll be right there.

I closed up my office, only lived that time, five minutes away. And I go home and I've got some confidence that I'm going to be able to be the dad and I'm going to be able to fix this thing. I get back there and I think about all the things we might be able to do. I thought about getting the water hose and spraying, whatever the wild animal, the raccoon or whatever back there hissing and fighting and everything.

I thought about that. And I thought, but first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to go over here. I'm going to call this dog. And I go over there and I can hear all this. And I said, Recy, come. Well, nothing happened.

And they're like, dad, that's not going to work. You got, we've been calling and we've been calm. I just silenced the crowd. I said, Recy, come here. And then the barking quietened and slowly threw the bushes out of the dark corner of the yard. This beagle comes slinking towards me. And I reached down and grabbed him by the collar and I start leading them in the house while my family is sitting there stunned.

Ann, Bennett, Abby, everybody watching. And they're like, how did you do that? What did you do?

How? And I just walked proudly by them and I said, it just proves I am the alpha dog. And I went on to say, there is a kind of call that has an effect. And the effect of the call of God is calling you unto himself ultimately and calling you into a new destination. And the thing about the call of God is that it is not like so many of the human calls that are either wishy washy or powerless.

And it's not like a call that you respond to because you're afraid of the consequences. This is not like my mom. When I was a kid playing kick the can on Pine Top Road with the neighborhood kids and my mom calling in Alan, bedtime come in.

And I'll be, oh, just one more game, you know, and I just keep playing. Wouldn't want to listen to her, but eventually Alan, come on, changing her voice changing her voice because I knew that there was always the threat of the flyswatter. Yes, yes. I had a mother who was nearly perfect in every way, but really I got spanked with a flyswatter, had bug juice on it and stuff.

I do not spank your children with a flyswatter. Anyway, I have a little tinge of fear. So I'd come when my mother called eventually. That's not the call of God. No, God's call has saving and blessing power in it. And God's call is sort of like when He created things and He saw the darkness and darkness by itself is not good. And so He called the light forth. Let there be light. Oh, God was already light. I don't think He was inventing light. I think He was just saying, light, come over here.

Come over here. Put you in this sun right now. Let there be light. Jesus spoke like this. So He go to a tomb of a man who'd been dead for several days while people are weeping. He just said, Lazarus, come out.

And dead man came walking. I'm talking about the call of God has light and life in it. That's what we want. We want to have the call of God come down deep and resonate within us. So you know that God is your Abba, your Dada, who has superior intelligence and superior power and is using on your behalf and who He wants you and He tries to convince you through the presence of the Holy Spirit to be in His arms like a toddler is comfortable with a daddy, that you could enjoy Him and benefit from fellowship with Him and love Him.

And then He calls. So the blessing of being assured that God's at work to bring things together for good is for those that are believers, those that love Him and those that are called. That's what it means to be a believer.

There's no such thing to be a believer if you haven't been called by God. And it's for the good. He doesn't say that the things of this world are all good. Some things are bad. He doesn't say that this means that everything's good. He's saying that the world itself might have bad things and indeed it might be totally falling apart at any moment except for God holding it together. So as Christians, we don't have to pretend like, oh yeah, no, all's good.

That's not what this is saying. I like the way Tim Keller put it, only God makes the factors of life turn to our good. Christians do not believe the world is a nice place or that life by nature will be happy. Many Christians are shocked and disillusioned by the tragedies and hardness of life.

I mean, sorry, many people are shocked and disillusioned by the tragedies and hardness of life, but not Christians. We don't expect things in life to simply work for good of their own accord. When we find things working out beneficially for us, it's all God, all grace, all Him. When things work out, Keller says, Christians never say, of course, that's as it should be.

Rather, they praise God for it. So the text doesn't say that bad things are good. It says God works all things, even the bad things towards good. Doesn't mean there's a good thing that my dad left home when I was a kid, just me and God took a bad thing, ended up bringing about great good. I wouldn't be preaching here except for that, you see.

And your life's the same way. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. It has been called the most influential letter ever written. Every word written by the apostle Paul and his epistle to the Romans is dripping with the astounding news of what God has done for you in Jesus, answering the two biggest questions of life.

What went wrong and how has God made it right? Discover the richness of those answers and enhance your Bible journey today. Make a donation to Alan Wright Ministries this month and unlock our Romans reading guide paired with the ESV scripture journal. Immerse yourself in the word and capture personal insights, prayers and reflections directly alongside the powerful text.

These sleek portable journals amplify your study, enrich group sessions and deepen personal reflections. Elevate your spiritual odyssey and forge a stronger connection with the scriptures. Help Alan Wright Ministries reach the world with the good news of the gospel with your gift today and receive these essential tools that will elevate your study, enrich your prayer life and deepen your understanding of the book of Romans. 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 on the one hand, we must never say, oh, nothing good can come from this. That's just biblically incorrect. But on the other hand, we don't ever need to say suffering is good, so we should just embrace it. Again, Keller, difficulties are not to be enjoyed or welcomed.

They're not good, but their results can be. And it's about all things. Doesn't mean that all things are good, but all things. And that includes the bad things, and that therefore includes even our own folly and our own sin.

As bad as it is, as bad as our sin is, as bad as our rebellion is, God's able to take even that. And so the stories of the Bible are just over and over giving us pictures of how that which was bad ends up being good because of the providence of God. There's stories of Joseph, whose evil brothers sell him into slavery, but that's what gets him to Egypt. And when he gets in the prison, that's where he meets the former cupbearer to the king so that the cupbearer one day remembers Joseph so that Joseph then has a chance to interpret a dream for Pharaoh so Pharaoh can appoint Joseph into leadership of Egypt so he can wisely administrate and govern so they save up grain during the years of plenty.

So during the years of famine, they can have grain for the whole world. And then Joseph's own brothers come and they get grain from him so Joseph can forgive them. And the reason he can forgive them is that he knows that though you meant it for evil, God meant it for good. There is a way that God takes all things. And ultimately, beloved, where this gets pictured in its most beautiful, powerful, and excruciating sense is that the hatred of the people for Jesus, the false accusations against Jesus, and the nails that put him on the cross from hate-filled, demonically inspired people who had no idea what they were doing became the very means by which Jesus took the sin of the world and thus became our savior.

All things. And this is about the big purpose of God for your life. Verse 29, those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son. So the good things are working all towards good. It doesn't just mean good things, material things, and good jobs, and good families, and blessings in life, although God loves those things. But he's talking about a higher good.

He's talking about this, the best thing. The best thing is to be conformed to the image of his son in order that we might be the first, he might be the first born among many brothers. In other words, that you would become like Jesus, who is like your big brother, astounding. It means that to say he is the first among many brothers is to say that what the Holy Spirit is trying to show us by his indwelling presence is not just bearing witness that, hey, I'm a child of God, but that ultimately what you see is that all the blessing that Jesus earned and secured through his death and resurrection and his righteous life, all of that is now being shared with you. This is what it means to be a co-heir with Jesus so that you are never going to be God. You're not going to be the son of God that he is, but you are in a very real sense like his younger brother or sister, because you've been engrafted into him and whatever blessing should have been only reserved for Jesus is now being shared with you.

And God, you know, I think you could understand this. If you were ever a parent that had one child, you love with all your heart. And you thought, if I ever had another child, could I love that child in the same way? And then you have a second child and you realize love does not have to be divided up like a scarce quantity. Love is not a scarce resource. Time is, you have to divide your time.

Money is, you got to divide your money up. Other resources do, but the love itself doesn't run out or be diminished towards another child because you had so much love for your first child. Can you imagine the love of God? So to the same extent and in the same degree and in the same manner that the father loves his only begotten son, Jesus, the firstborn among many, he loves you. It all leads to what someone has called the unbreakable golden chain that he foreknew, he predestined to be conformed to the image of his son. And that from this, this leads to this incredible connecting force that he foreknew and he predestined and he called and he justified and he glorified.

In other words, it's all a big setup. It is to say that he knew you long before you knew him. He knew you before you were fashioned in the womb and he knows you intimately. And to be predestined means to have a destination that has set a direction of being conformed to the image of Christ. This is his will for every one of us. And this is what's happening for every believer, a predestination, a destiny, a place you're going, a way of which your life is being molded, shaped and changed into more and more the conformity of the image of the son of God. And that you're justified, which is what all of Romans has been about, made right with God, not by your merits, but by Jesus's and glorified, interestingly uses the past tense or the Eris tense and in Greek that doesn't always mean past, but it conveys the idea that this is so sure that even though you will not be glorified until you get your resurrected body, that it is so sure that you can't break this chain. It just one leads to the other.

So it's part of it. And so in that sense, we can say we have been glorified. It is in that sense that we sometimes talk and say we have been healed, even though you might still be battling a disease in your body. You, you have an unbreakable chain that has been issued by an unbreakable promise of God. And all of those dominoes are going to happen so that you are going to be glorified one day.

It's as good as if, as it happened. In other words, it is all a big set up to bless you. One of my favorite Andy Griffith episodes is about Henry the jinx. Henry, he's standing behind Barney Fife, who's playing checkers at Floyd's barbershop and Barney loses the checkers. And he says, it's Henry's faults. He's the jinx. And Barney is all superstitious and, and convinces himself and others that, that Henry is a jinx poor guy. And he wants to convince Henry that he's not a jinx. So Andy always wins the annual fishing contest because he's got the best spots on the lake. So he says to Henry, come on with us, me and Barney, and then we'll win as always. And it'll prove that he's not a jinx. Well, the boat got a leak while they were out in the lake and they sunk and they didn't win. And Barney's just convinced.

He's a jinx. Well, after a while the whole town's talking like this because of Barney and spreading all these rumors and poor Henry decides, he's just going to have to leave Mayberry. Well, when they realize they've hurt the poor guys feeling so much and convinced him that he's a hex, they all, the whole town agrees, we got to convince him he's not. And Aunt B is selling tickets for the church social raffle, which will be giving away a portable TV set. And they said, why don't we do this? We'll make sure that Henry wins it. So they said, we're going to put all the same number in the hat. Everybody's got the same number in the hat. And, and so everybody pulls one out, but it's all being the same. Henry will pull it out and nobody say anything, but let Henry call out the fact that he's got the winning number. So the big moment comes, Andy reached in, they pulled it out. He said, the winning number is 44. Come on up and collect. And everybody's looking over at Henry, like go collect your prize. And Henry just standing there. And he said, the winning number is 44. Come on up.

Nothing happens. Finally, he said, Henry, did you pull a number out? He said, yeah. And he said, well, is it happened to be 44? Henry goes, no. And Barney looks over and Henry says, I've got six and seven eighths.

And Barney does like this. Oh, he pulled out the hat size tag. And all of a sudden they realize that, that, that now he's going to feel a worse hex than ever. And Andy just goes over and saves the day by saying, okay, everybody hold up your ticket.

And Henry looks and they're all number 44. And he said, well, you've got all 44. And Andy said, that's right. He said, because we wanted you to win and we want you to know you're not a jinx. And he says this, he says, maybe the best luck a man could ever have is to have good friends. And you've got that.

And I gave him the TV set. And I love that episode because I think in life, a lot of times it's like that where you just feel like, man, things are against me. But if you could see behind the curtains of heaven, what's going on, you'd find out that God that God by every means possible has been setting it up.

One shot starts here. It goes all the way through until it ends up in a place where he wants you to be because he loves you. And God is able to work things for your good.

Even when it looks like it's really going bad. It's all a big setup. God is rigging your blessing. And that's the gospel. Alan Wright, our good news message, the big setup from the series, More Than Conquerors, the study of Romans 8. And Pastor Alan is back here in the studio in just a moment for today's parting good news thought.

Stick with us. Romans reading guide paired with the ESV scripture journal, immerse yourself in the word and capture personal insights, prayers and reflections directly alongside the powerful text. These sleek, portable journals amplify your study, enrich group sessions and deepen personal reflections. Elevate your spiritual odyssey and forge a stronger connection with the scriptures. Help Alan Wright Ministries reach the world with the good news of the gospel with your gift today and receive these essential tools that will elevate your study, enrich your prayer life, and deepen your understanding of the book of Romans. 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 Pastor Alan, sharing his parting good news thought for the day. And the teaching is the big setup, and it really goes to show that God's a lot more involved in even the minutia of our lives than we probably think. To say that we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good is to say that God has a way of linking even the hard things, the confusing things, from our perspective, the bad things that we experience, to linking it to some other means by which we will end up being blessed.

He is the ultimate master chess player who can be a thousand moves ahead of the enemy. And so whatever you're going through, God not only knows and is close to you, but he has ways that he can link it into a future blessing that ultimately what you experience now, even though it seems it is very bad, is going to lead to something very good. And that's Pastor Alan.org. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.