Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. 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. 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 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. Okay, family, are you ready for some good news? The blessings that you enjoy in your life today are only possible because of blessings that have gone before you and have been passed along to you. And when you stop to consider it and think on those who've gone before you and your physical ancestry and your spiritual ancestry and just those who have in one way or another been used by God to help make you who you are today, the more you think on it, the more grateful you become. And the more grateful you become, the more joyful you become.
And when you're joyful, you're strong. In 2001, Fred Rogers, the Presbyterian clergyman and children's TV pioneer, gave the commencement address at Marquette. And he was being given an honorary degree, and Mr. Rogers gave a beautiful address. And about the midway through, he said, a few years ago, I was asked to be part of a White House meeting about children and television.
Many broadcasters from all over the country were there. Since I was supposed to be one of the speakers, I was seated beside Mrs. Clinton, who afterwards said congratulations and was whisked away to her next meeting. But as I was leaving that enormous room, I heard something from one of the military guards who was all dressed up in white and gold, looking like a statue. I heard him whisper, thanks, Mr. Rogers. So I went over to him, noticed that his eyes were moist, and I asked him, thanks for what? Well, sir, he said, as I listened to you today, I started to remember my grandfather's brother.
I haven't thought about him in years. I was only seven when he died, but just before that, he gave me his favorite fishing rod. I've just been thinking, maybe that's why I like fishing so much and why I like to show the kids in my neighborhood all about it. Mr. Rogers continued, well, as far as I'm concerned, the major reason for my going to Washington that day was that military guard and nourishing the memory of his great uncle. What marvelous mysteries we're privileged to be a part of.
Why would that young man be assigned to guard that particular room on that particular day? It's slender threads like that that weave this complex fabric of our life together. And a little later in his speech, he continued, anyone who's ever graduated from a university, anyone who's ever been able to sustain a good work has had at least one person and often many who believed in him or her.
We just don't get to be competent human beings without many different investments from others. And I'd like to give you all an invisible gift, a gift of silence to think about those who nourish you at the deepest part of your being. Anyone who's ever loved you and wanted what was best for you in life, some of those people might be right here today. Some may be far away.
Some may even be in heaven. But if they've encouraged you to come closer to what you know to be essential about life, he said, I'd like to have a silent minute to think of them. One minute, he said, let's do that ourselves. A minute out of our busy lives to think of one person, not right now the many, just think of one that comes to mind. And spend a minute thinking of how they blessed your life and thank God for them. You know, what would be so fun would be if we could all just take a moment and share who we're thinking about.
Wouldn't that be fun? I was the first service I'd started thinking about my grandmother, but for some reason here and now I started thinking about my godmother, Gladys Scoggins. Gladys and Carl lived across the street from my parents in their first home on Pershing Court in Greensboro. And they asked her to be my godmother. And she just loved me in an unusually wonderful way. She just she thought I was the most wonderful thing in the world. And she had nothing but smiles and love for me. You know, as a kid, it's so funny as a kid, you just don't know things, right? So all I knew was she gives me better presents than other random people, you know, at Christmas.
But as I grew, I came to know that what she was really giving was she was just adding to all the love that had come in my life. I wonder who you were thinking about. There were, according to God's command to remember, there were two equal and opposite dangers for those who forget the goodness of God and the power of God. And the first danger is that you could come out of slavery in Egypt, be brought out by miracles, go through a parted Red Sea. And then if you forget God and you forget how good He's been to you, when you face adversity, you could come into fear, which is what they did.
The first generation didn't take the promised land because they were too afraid. So remembering God helps us to have faith. But there's an equal and opposite danger. And that's what Deuteronomy 6 is about. And that is that you could come into a land flowing with milk and honey. And in your prosperity, if you forget God, you become prideful.
You forget and think that it was all your own doing, or you just lose your gratitude. And that's an equal and opposite danger because it's essential that we know. This is God's heart, again, from verse three of our text, that it may go well with you.
It's the foundation of everything you have to understand about God your Father. He wants it to go well with you in the biggest and broadest and most pervasive sense of what that means. And that you may multiply greatly. He wants what's good in you to increase. As the Lord the God of your fathers has promised you. And He wants it to be in a land flown with milk and honey in a kingdom of spiritual riches.
That's what God wants for you. So He attaches to it a warning. You must understand that the warnings from God are gifts to us. Warnings are gifts to us, right? Every time that you don't have a crash at an intersection because you have to stop at a red light, that is a gift to you. Every time that you stop because a light starts flashing at a railroad cross and then you don't run across it and get crushed by a train, that warning's a gift to you. And so God gives a warning here when, at verse 10, the Lord your God brings you into the land that He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, with great and good cities you did not build and houses full of all good things that you did not fill. And cisterns that you did not dig.
And vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant. And when you eat and are full, then take care. Here's the warning. Take care lest you forget the Lord who's the one who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, the one who gave you all this. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Next 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. So 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 said, well, where's this cistern that is being spoken of here? And they always wondered 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, 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 they 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 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 have 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. 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, pastoralan.org. Back here in the studio now, share Pastor Alan's parting good news thought for the day. And when you sat down to prepare this message, Pastor Alan, what was your goal?
Drinking from cisterns you didn't dig. I'm fascinated by that title. Well, it's a beautiful image. And I'm thinking about generational blessing. I'm thinking about how much our lives have been made what they are because of the people who've gone before us and the good things that are in us, the virtues and the blessings that are in us that really came down through a line. And it came down through a line maybe through a genealogy in your family history. It maybe came down through someone. It was like a spiritual parent or grandparent or great-grandparent that made a difference. God wanted his people to know when they go into a promised land and they started living in cities they hadn't built and the houses that they didn't build and cisterns they didn't dig.
And that just intrigued me. I started looking to see, you know, what were these cisterns? They weren't a little hole in the backyard and one little shovel full of dirt. You know, this is something that's going to catch enough water from the rain waters or the groundwater that runs off that is supposed to last you through the entire dry season. I mean, from March to October, you're not getting any rain in Jerusalem.
And so they had to have maybe a hundred thousand gallons of water ready. And someone dug that before you saying, and you come in and you just drink from it, right? Don't just drink from it. Stop and think about it and say, someone dug this and thank God I'm having this because God put a blessing in my past. Well, this message and what we're talking about these days is inviting us to, okay, we know our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, they were by no means perfect. Some of us have had those who knew how to bless us, some didn't, but there are still qualities and virtues and blessings that have been passed along to us. And there's power in recovering that in your heart and in your mind and knowing, wow, I'm blessed because others have gone before me.
The cisterns, you did not dig. 744-4860. 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.
