Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. It's a wonderful thing, because it means you can get really good at hitting a tennis ball or doing a certain surgical procedure, or you can get really good at interpreting a verse of scripture in a Christocentric fashion.
You can get really good at almost anything by doing it over and over again. 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 this series, Increase, as presented at Rinaldo Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program today, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now available to you for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. 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 right now, let's get started with today's teaching.
Here is Alan Wright. Why would we ever think that for our spouse who is acting in an unkind way that we could sow unkindness and get some kindness coming back from that? Why would we ever think that? Why would we ever think that we could sow impatience and reap patience from the coworker that we're struggling with? Why would we ever think like that?
But we do. We get tempted in that very direction, don't we? To think, well, in order for this thing to work, I'm going to have to start doing it my way.
In other words, I'm going to sow this kind of seed, and I'm going to get this different kind of fruit. Don't be deceived by that. Don't fall for that. It's the oldest trick in the book.
It's the oldest lie of the devil. Don't fall for that. Watch out for it because that temptation will come.
Don't fall for it. Instead, be glad that God has established this world in such a way that you can count on reaping what you sow. In many ways, the whole book of Galatians, this epistle is about don't be deceived. There was a group of religious people called Judaizers who were legalists who had infiltrated the Galatian Christian community, a community that had blossomed with the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit and miracles were taking place and life and people being born again. And then these religious legalists came in and said, well, if you really want to be spiritual and you really want to be close to God, you also need to practice the Old Testament ritual of circumcision and then inject a little bit of law into the gospel.
And Paul's just furious about it, and he's just like, don't be deceived by these guys. So now we come to this, like, don't be deceived into thinking that you can sow one way and reap another. It will never, ever work that way.
Wouldn't the world be chaos if you could? Could you imagine the farmer and his wife are sitting around and he says, well, honey, we sowed all that corn, acres and acres of corn seed. Said, I sure hope this year we get corn from it. You know what happened last year when we got pineapples that came up?
They don't do very good in eastern North Carolina. I sure hope this year corn pops up. It's ridiculous. Can you imagine a couple, their first child, and they're going in to get the ultrasound and the wife says to her husband, said, well, honey, let's just pray and hope that when this ultrasound, when they show it, that we've got a human being in here. You know, Sally and Joe, they're in their 14th week with an iguana.
And, you know, it's just ridiculous, right? Celebrate this fact that everything reproduces after its own kind, which one of the things that does for us, by the way, is it makes life really simple because if you want to know what you want to produce, then you know what you need to sow. It's just that simple. If you want to get, I want to get some apples. Okay, put some apple seeds out there. I want to get some kindness out of my child. Okay, put some kindness in them. I'd like to get some more patients out of this work environment.
All right, put some patients into it. Whatever you want to get, that's what you sow. And oftentimes, it means you got to sow the opposite seed of what you're seeing in someone else or in a situation. But it makes it really simple. It's not that complicated. Whatever you want to get back, that's what you sow.
And it will never, ever work in the opposite direction. Don't be deceived. Celebrate. In this crazy mixed up broken world, one thing is for sure, corn seeds produce corn. Watermelon seeds produce watermelons.
Human beings produce human beings. And so you can count on it. That's what it means to say God's not mocked. The text literally means you can't turn your nose up against God. You can't go, well, God made things that way, but I'm going to operate by a different set of physical and spiritual principles.
You can't any more than you can say, well, gravity might be a thing, but I'm not going to be susceptible to gravity. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. God's not mocked.
And it's not like people are running around trying to openly mock Him. It just means you're acting like that this principle is not going to apply to you. Yes, it is.
It's just the way it is. And then at verse 8, for the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption. But the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.
What's he talking about? This is a highly misunderstood and misused verse. In fact, some have said that he's talking about eternal salvation and that if you do a lot of disobedient things and you have a lot of sin in your life, then that means that you have sown towards it and you get eternal damnation. But if you do a lot of righteous things and a lot of good things and you keep doing good, you've sown towards eternal salvation and you have salvation. And others have said that this is pointing to how you could be a Christian. And yet if you start doing a whole lot of bad things that you're going to end up reaping destruction from that rather than the eternal salvation that once was yours.
Now, let's just be very clear about that. Neither of those errant ways of looking at this could possibly be true, especially in the middle of the Galatian Epistle where Paul has just gone to great lengths to make this point that there's absolutely nothing you can do to add to or take away from the finished work of Jesus Christ. And everything that makes the gospel good, that makes the good news so good has to do with this. You're saved not by your merits in the least but solely by the merits of Jesus.
If you're here today and you're just exploring what the gospel of Jesus is about, let me just tell you the good news is good because Jesus paid a penalty that we couldn't pay but were due. The penalty for sin was on us, but we couldn't pay it and we couldn't live the righteous life to merit heaven. None of us, none of us could all have fallen short of the glory of God. All have sinned and that's why Jesus came. He came to be a God-man. He came to be the fullness of God and the fullness of humanity and to live as a human being a perfectly righteous life so that when He went to the cross to take upon Himself the debt, payment, the penalty, the punishment for sin, He did so as one who was unblemished and therefore a perfect sacrifice.
And anyone who trusts in Jesus, anyone who trusts in Jesus and says, I acknowledge myself a sinner in need of a Savior and I believe Jesus is the Son of God and I accept what He's done for me. In that simple receiving act, an exchange takes place and Jesus has become your sin and you've become His righteousness and you're in Him and He's in you and everything changes. That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. You'll discover the power of your lasting legacy as He leads you through a simple process to clarify your family core values and God-given purpose in the world. Pastor Alan will also help you dream to imagine your 100-year impact.
The video series is accompanied by a practical study guide with templates and worksheets. You'll also receive the full length preaching series Increase that exposes the biblical principle of generational blessing. Make your gift to the ministry today and get your made for more audio video bundle as our thank you for your partnership. Contact us today and discover the power of your lasting legacy. 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. And that's the heart of the gospel and nowhere does Paul, nowhere does Paul celebrate this in a greater extent than in this Galatian Epistle. So there's absolutely no way that what Paul's talking about here is that if you will sow into it, then you will reap and get because you deserve it, eternal life with God in heaven.
He's got to be talking about something different and deeper. When you're a Christian, you get heaven forever. But Jesus said, I came to give life and life more abundantly. He doesn't just mean that you get to not die by going to heaven. He meant life like God is life. He's the one who made life. He's the one who generated life in the beginning. He's the way.
He's the truth. He's the life. And so what Paul's talking about here, as is the case throughout the New Testament, is that life is something bigger than just heaven. Life is what we experience in the fullness of God's energizing presence and the delight of the soul at merely being alive. To be alive, to be really, really alive is to have Christ's life flowing in you. The one who sows into the Spirit is reaping from that, that sort of life in an ongoing way.
That's what he's talking about. And so when he talks about sow into the flesh, it's not just talking about acts of disobedience, though that's included in it. I mean, if you say, well, the way that I'm going to have fulfillment is through the fleshly pleasures that I can pursue and I'll try to do it my way, then that's all that stuff, the lust of the flesh, all that's part of what it could be to sow to the flesh. But Paul, when he talks about flesh, he's not just talking about selfishness or sin behaviors.
He's talking about about relying on human effort and merit. He associates flesh with law and law-based living. For example, Galatians 3 verse 2, it says, Let me ask you this. Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?
Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? So what he's talking about there when he says you began in the Spirit, do you think you're going to perfect it? You think you're going to become a better Christian, closer to God, more full of life by practicing an Old Testament law also? By believing the Judaizers' deception that you need to practice circumcision? You think that you started in the Spirit? You had the actual presence of God in your life, and now you think, but I'm really going to get spiritual and better Christian, but also we'll practice circumcision, who keeps an Old Testament ritual.
What are you even saying? So for Paul, perfecting by the flesh, he means trying to live by human effort to keep law in order to please God. That's what he means by flesh. Another example, Galatians 4 verse 23, this is after Paul has been using this allegory of Hagar and her son Ishmael versus Sarah and her son Isaac. We don't have time to go into the whole story, but Abraham and Sarah were very old. They were promised they were going to be given a son, and they believed God, but the son, they had no biological son for a long time, and so they assumed wrongly that they needed to help God do this by bringing in Hagar, who was Sarah's maid servant, and Galatians, she's called the slave woman, bringing her in to be a surrogate mother, and so that's what they do. And so Abraham fathers this child with Hagar, and the son is Ishmael.
And later, God, as He promised, gave them a miraculous child, born to them, Isaac. And here, Paul is confusing this allegory once again to talk about flesh versus spirit, and he says this in Galatians 4 verse 23, but the son of the slave, that's Ishmael, born to Hagar, was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. So for Paul, flesh has to do with law and human effort. Spirit has to do with grace and trust in promises. This is really important because we're honing in here on what he means by sowing to the flesh or sowing into the spirit. He's getting at some of the deepest kingdom principle of living. There's a kind of living, even for a Christian, that could be sowing into the flesh, the humanistic, moralistic, legalistic attempts to make ourselves acceptable or to make ourselves fulfilled by our own efforts versus sowing to the spirit, which is to flow into God's pathway of fulfillment and joy and ultimate success. To sow into the spirit is to believe and talk and act as one who knows that God is the giver of life and that His grace is sufficient and has found that the way of the spirit, the way of trust, the way of forgiveness, the way of blessing, the way of praise, the way of standing in the spiritual battle, these are the things that if you sow day after day, then you get to reap from that. So in the simplest way to think about sowing and reaping, at the most practical way, it is to say that you get good at what you do over and over again. We're learning a lot about the neuroplasticity of our brains. You know, I think for a long time, scientists thought, well, you kind of had the brain you have, but now we realize, no, it's always being wired and it can get rewired, but the things it gets wired into early on, boy, it's in you, right?
It's like a language that gets in you and your brain's wired for it. I played tennis every day of my life as a kid, some days, many days, all day long, all the way through the end of high school, and a tennis racket just feels natural in my hand. I don't play tennis anymore. I haven't played in decades, really. I might go out and hit a ball every once in a while, but I mean, if I could, if I had the stamina to go play today, I could play a few good points.
I actually think you could put a tennis racket in my hand, and I don't play at all, never practice, and I probably, from the very first swing of that racket, am probably a better tennis player than I am as a golfer when I try to play all the time. My brain's wired for it. It's just wired for it. It's just wired for it.
Isn't this wonderful? Think about this. God made everything to reproduce after its own kind, and He also made it that what you do over and over again, you get good at. Your brain goes, oh, hitting a tennis ball, that must be really important.
Let's get good at that. It's a wonderful thing because it means you could get really good at hitting a tennis ball or doing a certain surgical procedure, or you could get really good at interpreting a verse of Scripture in a Christocentric fashion. You can get really good at almost anything by doing it over and over again. It also means you can get really good at being resentful. Your brain can get really wired. Some people have got brains that have been wired for this, and they're just fantastic.
They can just go to the negative without any problem whatsoever. You can get really good at not forgiving people. You can get really, really good at lashing out in anger. What you keep doing, you get good at.
So we can pass down our values on purpose. In Pastor Alan Wright's brand new six-week video series called Made for More, you'll discover the power of your lasting legacy as he leads you through a simple process to clarify your family core values and God-given purpose in the world. Pastor Alan will also help you dream to imagine your 100-year impact.
The video series is accompanied by a practical study guide with templates and worksheets. You'll also receive the full-length preaching series Increase that exposes the biblical principle of generational blessing. Make your gift to the ministry today and get your Made for More audio-video bundle as our thank you for your partnership. Contact us today and discover the power of your lasting legacy. 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. Okay, you know, you need to know when there's an end to something. But on this particular thing, doing good, sowing into the Spirit, sowing into the things of God, doing things God's way, what I mean by this is don't give up on grace, don't give up on blessing, don't give up on God's way, because there is a temptation to do that, especially when you feel like you've been sowing and then you don't have the fruit yet. I'm talking about when, you know, you've been blessing somebody and yet they haven't risen up to show you any change yet and there's a little temptation to maybe start cursing them instead. This is when you've been sowing the seed of patience towards someone, but they continue to be impatient with you. And there's a temptation in there, right?
And I think we need to admit that. This is coming from God. It's a beautiful gift to have a warning saying, don't be deceived.
You're never going to sow one thing and get a different kind of fruit. And so don't ever think that you should give up on the way of God. And that's encouraging in and of itself. But what we're going to see, and tomorrow we wrap it up, it'd be so important, is the great promise behind this is the energizing principle, and that is we will reap. It's the certainty of our blessedness that energizes us and more on that in tomorrow's broadcast. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries. Thank you.
