Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.
When you think about His goodness, when you think about His love, when you think about the ways that He positioned people in your history to dig cisterns so that you could drink, how can you be anything less than just grateful, and it makes you fall in love with God? 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.
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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. I want to talk to you today about appreciating and apprehending those blessings that are possible because of those who've gone before us. We're talking about generational blessings, both of our physical ancestry and our spiritual ancestry. I want to talk to you about drinking from those cisterns that you did not dig. In the old city of David in Jerusalem, there is a natural water source called the Gihon Spring. You can see it today. And it had long been thought to be the sole water supply for old Jerusalem. In fact, there was a tunnel Hezekiah had built that you can still see.
You can read about it in the Bible and then go see it. And that would go under the city walls to that spring so that in a time of siege they could still get their water. So they've often thought this was the whole water supply, except there was something confusing to Jewish scholars because in Isaiah chapter 36, we won't turn there, but this is the Assyrians trying to convince God's people to surrender and says to them, make your peace with me, come out to me. Then each one of you will eat of his own vine and each of his own fig tree, and each one of you will drink the water of his own cistern. And so the scholars of all ages said, well, where's this cistern that is being spoken of here?
And they always wonder about it. And then in 2012, while cleaning out Herodian drainage channels that housed mikvahs, which were the old ancient ritual baths, and they were working on this renovation, a worker noticed that one of the floor panels was wobbly, and they brought in the antiquities authorities. And soon they were with flashlights and a portable ladder, and they were descending down into this huge chiseled out reservoir.
You can see it was covered with the brownish yellowish type limestone plaster that they used to help seal off a cistern that was characteristic of about a thousand years before Christ. We just take water for granted, don't we, here in North Carolina. But in ancient times, water sources were the whole key to civilization. Find waters to find life. And the only way you could build a community or city was to have water. The primary sources, of course, freshwater lakes and freshwater streams and rivers. Otherwise you had to dig a well, but if you didn't have the tools and the aquifers ran too deep, you couldn't get a well.
And so sometimes the only alternative was a cistern, essentially a hole in the ground that could gather water either by the runoff along the ground of the water or, best, by the direct rain itself that would fill up those cisterns. Jerusalem has a dry season and a wet season. In November they get about an inch of rain, maybe December, maybe two inches, an inch or two in January, an inch or two in February, a little bit maybe in March. April it starts going away, and by May there's no rain.
It really doesn't rain hardly at all from April till October. And so it has always been that way. So you had to have a way to have enough water to make it through the dry season, and that involved having a cistern. It had to be big. Another interesting story, in 2005 the Israel Antiquities Authority got word that a Jerusalem neighborhood playground was experiencing the problem. The sand of the floor of the playground was being swallowed up by the ground. So they sent the authorities over, and pretty soon they discovered the playground was built above a 1,500-year-old cistern. They started by seeing and uncovering a big hole that started leading to it.
And here's an example of just how big these things needed to be if they're going to provide for a community. Just massive, this particular cistern could hold 300,000 gallons of water. An effective cistern wasn't dug by a father and his son on an afternoon in the soft dirt.
Water just drains out through soft dirt. The best cisterns were chiseled out of rock. And so when you dig a cistern, you're talking about so much work and so much sweat. And they last, this cistern, they opened it up and got down inside it, and there was the water, still there, thousands of years later. This is what God's wanting you to think about when you hear Him say, and when you come to the cisterns that you did not dig. Somebody dug them, and now you're just drinking from them. It's like finding an Olympic-sized pool underground, hand chiseled, gathering the rains of the winter, and you show up in the middle of an arid summer, and you just drink it.
And what God's saying is, don't just drink that cool cup of water. Think about who dug this cistern for you, because if you hadn't had someone dig it for you, you'd be digging it rather than drinking from it. And what happens when you drink from a cistern that's already dug is that you are refreshed by what someone else did, but you're not just refreshed.
You are now equipped to do something beyond. Because if you had no cistern, you've got to spend your life digging cisterns. But if you have a cistern, then maybe you could spend your life building a house, and building a farm, or writing a book, or expanding the territory. Our advances, what I'm saying, come because of the cisterns that have been dug before us.
Without it, we're just going to stay in the same place, always having to dig a cistern. So when you drink of it, and when you drink of the living water of the Holy Spirit, and you drink, and you worship today, and you delight in the presence of God, think about those who dug the cistern. You know, what this does is something that is remarkable, because we know instinctively that we have to address the things that need to be healed in our lives. And it's a big point of focus for us, something that the Lord put in my life many years ago, to discover what it is to understand shame, this feeling of not measuring up, and it causes so much angst in our lives, and how the brokenness of our past can lead towards that.
And I experienced some of that, and so I learned about it, I wrote about it, I had conferences about it. We care deeply as a church about healing the soul, because I think a lot of times we just live in denial, and we try to put band-aids on things, and there's still festering wounds deep down that are fueling a lot of our other problems. So it's essential, hear me clearly, it's essential that we have healing of the memories. But the healing of the wounds is the smaller part of God's destiny for your life. The bigger part of it is the steadfast love of God, and the blessings of God that enable it for you to live in His love. The bigger agenda of God is not just that you will no longer be sick.
The bigger agenda of God, here in Deuteronomy 6 and always, is that it may go well with you, and that you may increase, and that you may be in a land of milk and honey. The bigger heart of God is not just to fix you up so you can muddle your way through life, but He's got a mission field for you, He's got a place for you, He's got joy for you, and that's what He really wants. So what we mustn't do, therefore, is become fixated upon what we've missed.
We need to be fixated upon what we've been given. 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.
Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. Let me just say it more plainly even than that, and that is to say that if you've got someone in your life that didn't show you all the love that you should have received and maybe hurt you deeply, well, that's a problem. And we need to find ways to forgive and find ways to be healed, and God does all that. But what we don't do, especially if that's one of our forebears, is to make an ungodly oath that in a blanket statement says, well, the goal of my life is to never be like that.
I don't ever want to be like Him. Because even if that person only one day took their chisel or their shovel to help dig the cistern, if they helped even a little bit, there's something to be glad for, which has been great for me because I felt like the Lord had called me over the years to be willing to be honest about some of the problems I face in the family of my upbringing. And I've never done so to in any way diminish the memory of especially my dad, but I felt like in order to try to help others, I needed to be able to be transparent.
So I've done that in my writings and in my teaching. But the focus of my life, never God wanted to be on just break the generational sin patterns that might have been there. Oh, a lot of things have been broken, right?
So my parents were divorced, and that's been broken in me and my brothers who are all happily married. That's over. The struggles with alcohol, that's over. And there's just so many things. Oh, that's wonderful, right?
But some years ago, it really helped me. Many years ago when Gladys Keating in our church, she came to me after a sermon one day. She said, Alan, you know, your ability to communicate, you know, that came from your dad. You know, so odd. Isn't it so odd, something so basic like that, that you could just miss it, right? And I'm like, you're right.
And that changes you. So my dad was a newsman, and I'm a good newsman. So I came across this some years ago, early picture of Dad at WFMY-TV. He was one of the pioneers in TV. We hadn't had TV that long, y'all.
And they just was one of the pioneers. Dad and Lee Kindert and Charlie Harville doing the sports. I remember Dad saying one time, he said, we had so few programs. You know, we only got three channels, really only two.
We couldn't pick up the third one. You know, I couldn't get the third one very good, but we could get channel 12 and we could get channel two with our rabbit ears. But Dad said that they had so few programs that one of their programs was they played music and they let the camera pan across different wallpapers on the wall. That was the show. That was a show. And they, all the commercials were live in TV in the early days.
Dad said, he got some funny stories. One time he was trying to do an advertisement. I think it was pet milk. And he's holding up the milk, you know, and he's dumping it into a glass, refreshing cool milk, you know, and he's not, no, he's looking at the camera, reading the teleprompter or whatever, you know, or they didn't have teleprompters.
They're just holding up posters, you know, and he's trying to read it and he's not noticing the milk's just spilling right over, just spilling over. And he started out in radio. That was interesting because now we're on 400 radio stations around the nation. Isn't that something?
I didn't, I hadn't even dawned on me. My dad was a radio man and I became a radio man. Huh? And he was a weatherman. This is, I found this clip. They didn't, they didn't call a meteorologist back in the day cause they had no training in meteorology.
And so look at this one. They called it the environmental report, a fancier way of saying the weather. Look at that weeknights at 1110. When he was first doing it, the news in the evening was 15 minutes long and the weather was the last five minutes. And now we need a whole weather channel. Somebody told me the other day, you can tell how old you are by how many weather apps you have on your phone. I got four.
You need a lot of them. They got different functions. I'm telling you, they do. And, but he is a weatherman and it was so precious. I was preaching one time on, from Paul, I think it was on that text where he says, whether we live or whether we die, we belong to the Lord. And whether we have plenty or not, I've learned to be content. And my assistant, Laura, who's so prophetic and gets all these God winks and puns from the Holy Spirit.
And she said, well, you're a weatherman, but you're the W-H-E-T-H-E-R. You're a weatherman. And whether you live, whether you die, you're the Lord's. I'm talking about apprehending and appreciating generational blessings. My dad became interested in investigative. I'm not trying to spend my sermon time to tell you about my dad. I'm trying to demonstrate to you how this works in your soul.
Okay. He got interested in investigative reporting before there was such a thing. There were no 60 minutes and all of that. And he was very good at it, very smart. And he had an award winning feature of his research and investigative reporting about a financial scandal at Wesley Long Hospital in Greensboro. It was a big deal. I learned later in my life that he got death threats during all of that.
For it, he won the prestigious journalism awards called the Edward R. Murrow Award. And I had always wished that I'd had a copy of that award. And it occurs nobody had it.
My family was never very good at keeping trophies. So a dear friend of mine, as I began learning about generational blessing, we talked about it. He went and researched it and found out when the award was given and what it would have looked like. And he had one reproduced for me. I'm a newsman. I'm a weatherman. I'm reporting to you today about the goodness of God. I'm exposing evil.
And I want to do it in an articulate way. You can see in your life the awards that were before you were really cisterns that were dug from which you can now drink. Sometimes you'll discover it kind of jumps over a generation or something or jumps through it.
It's what it does. Our son Bennett was a pretty good high school debater, competed and his buddy Walker, they competed in national team policy debates. And one time got back from one of those debates and he was talking to my mother. Then it was, she said, well, how'd the debate go and what is the topic and so forth? And he was telling her about it.
And then she startled him. She said, well, tell me a little bit more about your one AC. They were like, well, how do you know about the first affirmative construction part of team policy debate one AC? She was using the jargon and Bennett was shocked to find out that his grandmother, she reported was on the Lenora Ryan college debate team. And in fact, I'd never told them. My parents met because they were both on the Lenora Ryan college debate team. I'd never debated, but now here's a son who loved it.
Probably part of the reason he decided to go to law school in the end was he enjoyed all of that and it had lived on before and they didn't know about it. You see most of the generational blessing has come down to you. You have no idea. Alan Wright, today's good news message titled drinking from cisterns. You didn't dig in our series increase. Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio, sharing his parting good news thought for the day.
In just a moment. You're made for more than your span of years on this earth. What might happen if you start taking the long view of your impact? We need to know what matters most to us 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, pastorallen.org. Back here now in the studio with Pastor Alan, sharing his parting good news thought for the day. There's a phrase when I heard you preach this message, Pastor Alan, that is awfully familiar. And it was a phrase that a buddy of mine uses, that you're eating from a garden you didn't plant.
And it always brings about a thought of gratitude. And so I leaned in close to listen on this one and was fascinated even by the illustration of the actual cisterns, you know, that you're talking about, drinking from cisterns you didn't dig. A cistern which gathers the rain waters during the rainy season so that you could have water during the dry season. As we learned on our opening day of these messages is not a little shovel full of dirt and you get a little hole in the backyard. These usually were chiseled out of rock. I mean, you don't want water, you don't want, you know, you want sandy sedimentary type soil. You want, you want rock that waters will sit in and stay there. And boy, the things that we have found, we found, you know, in 2005, a 1500 year old cistern in Israel that was so big it hold 300,000 gallons of water.
Wow. I mean, you think about what it takes to hand chisel out basically an olympic-sized pool size underground into the rock and the people it took to do that and then someone else comes in years later and just enjoys drinking cool cup of water and they didn't dig it. And see, when you didn't have to dig it, it means you could spend your life doing something else. This is how things advance and this is how we grow.
If someone else dug the cistern, you don't have to dig it, you can stay hydrated while you build a city or take territory or write a book or whatever you're doing, you see. And so I just want our listeners to think about this. Think about generational blessing that's come in your life because of something that's gone on before you, which you may or may not even know, but it fills you up with so much gratitude to think of it. In some ways, it's a reversal of our modern notions of therapy. I believe, and we spend so much time in our ministry helping people be healed of the emotional wounds and traumas of our past, and we must. We can't just put band-aids on it, we can't just act as though we haven't had these hurts and wounds. God wants to heal them.
But I'm not sure that's the place we should always start. As God says, remember, remember, remember what I've done for you. So yes, we need to be healed, but we need to know that there's been blessing that's gone before us and the power in recovering that and thanking God for it and thinking on it, you see, it makes it yours.
So there are a lot of cisterns we didn't dig from which we're drinking a lot of living water. 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.
