Pastor, author and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.
There is no event of life that is the past or in the future that could ever change the nature of who God is, and that is that God is love. 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 Idrith, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series Son of David, as presented at Rinaldin 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. It can be yours 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.
Or call 877-544-4860. Now, more on this later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. David, the Lord is breathing out upon him. I make you a house. Take in the magnificence of the good news of this message of a future and a hope that is firmly fixed in my heart, says the Lord, because of my steadfast love. And take this in and receive it into your spirit. And then, as David prays, what comes out of him is that word. And that's prayer. Let me identify for you some specific, beautiful aspects of David's prayer.
And then I want to tell you a miracle story. And then we're going to pray for one another. First, and this is one of the key aspects of what I would call gospel-centered prayer, or gospel-emotional empowered prayer. First, David appealed to God's goodness, not his own. David appealed to God's goodness, not his own. Look again, verses 21, 22, 23. Verse 21, because of your promise, according to your own heart, you have brought about all this greatness. Verse 22, therefore, you are great, O Lord God. And then he recounts at verse 23, the great deeds of God.
What's David doing? David is making his appeal to the goodness of God because he has had a revelation that God is good. And you'll never have great power in your prayer life until this revelation settles in upon your soul. No matter what you're going through, the adversities and circumstances of life do not define whether God is good or not. What defines whether God is good or not is did God so love the world that he sent his only begotten son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to die in your place, to live a life that you couldn't live, to die the death that you should have died, to become your sin so you could be reckoned as his righteousness so that you could be his forevermore and belong to him for all eternity. Has God so loved the world as that? And if he has, then God is good all the time and all the time, God is good.
There is no event of life that is in the past or in the future that could ever change the nature of who God is. And that is that God is love. God loves you with an everlasting love. He came for you in Jesus because of that love. He will not give up on you because of that love.
He laid down his life because of that love. At every point, beloved, know this, God is utterly for you. He is good, I tell you.
He's good. I don't understand everything in this life. It's a broken world and there is a sin nature that runs rampant and God, while he tarries before he comes back, allows that there still can be the consequences of sin that are at work and bad things happen, but God is not the author of evil. Sin is the author of evil. God is good all the time.
God is good. And why this is important in our prayer life is because it forever and finally and firmly answers the question, does my sacrifice move God? No, it does not.
No, it does not. God is moved because of his love for you and because of his covenantal promises for you. He is already benevolent towards you. Prayer is not us overcoming God's reluctance to bless.
It is the laying hold of his desire to bless. And this is important because some people would think that if I give up chocolate for Lent that, you know, God's moved by that. Now you might should give up chocolate. It might be really good for you to give up chocolate, but it's not going to move God. Some people might say, well, I need to fast for three days because I've got a big problem and I need to ask God a big thing here.
It might be good for you to fast at some times in your life, but if you do so, it is because it creates an awareness and a sensitivity in you as you lay aside the earthly appetites and let your spirit be focused upon God and you're setting aside some of the daily appetites of the flesh and being reminded that your spirit thirst for the living God and maybe you can have a communion with God, but I'm telling you that your fast doesn't move God. How could we ever bring a sacrifice that would move God when God has already made the sacrifice once and for all through Jesus Christ? And there is nothing that you could ever do to add to or take away from the sacrifice that God has made in Jesus Christ.
He came in the person of Jesus because we needed a human being who would live a sinless life and none of us could. And we needed that perfect sinless human being to die on behalf of humanity so that the punishment that had been promised that the wages of sin is death would come to pass and it did come to pass in the one person of Jesus. And therefore, all we can do, beloved, is say yes to this amazing gift and let our entire life be rooted and fixed in the sacrifice of Jesus for us so that for the Christian, we are not moving God by any form of our own righteousness. Prayer will always lack power if in some way or another it returns to my ability to say the right words, to live righteously enough, to do good things, to sacrifice enough or any other form of godliness. Prayer is not rooted in your sacrifice. It is rooted in the finished work of the Lord Jesus. David made his appeal to the goodness of God.
God, you're good. So I'm coming to pray. The second thing that I notice in this prayer is that immediately after appealing to God's goodness, that David appealed to the covenant of God with his people look at verse twenty three. And who is like your people Israel, the one nation on earth whom God went to redeem to be his people, making himself a name and doing for them great and awesome things. And then he recounts the exodus, which is the story of the deliverance of the people of God. Then at verse twenty four, and you establish for yourself your people Israel to be your people forever. And you, O Lord, became their God.
What's he doing here? This is the language of covenant, which means it is the language of the gospel. He is reminding in prayer his own soul and lifting up in adoration to God that the nature of God is that he is a covenant maker and keeper and that David is speaking from the position of one who is firmly in the covenant. He is acknowledging that the only reason that this favor of me becoming king and of this people having been delivered out of Egypt and of all of the blessings that have ever come, they have come for one reason, not because of the righteousness of this people, but because of a covenant that you made. And this covenant is firm. And therefore I come to you, Lord, in the posture of a child of the covenant. I am one of the heirs of the promises that were spoken to Abraham that were delivered unto the people through the exodus. And now, as I come into your presence, O Lord God, I come as such as one who is confident in the covenant that you have made. And see, what has happened for us Christians is something that is just so marvelous that it staggers my imagination every time I think of it, that there is a new covenant that has been made. The old covenant was temporary, and the old covenant was only pointing to the need for a new covenant. For the old covenant of works essentially said, if you will be obedient, then you will receive all of these blessings. But no one could ever be obedient.
That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Got some giants to slay? Need some encouragement in the midst of a trial?
Wondering if God really cares? Meet David. Who can compare to him? He was the ruddy, handsome, youth-tending sheep riding psalms and worshiping God in the humble Bethlehem fields. He was the lone Israelite brave enough to decapitate Goliath and the sole warrior adept enough to cut off the scourge of the Philistines.
He was the stately king who established peace, expanded the borders and reigned in prosperity for forty years. Who else could be a gentle shepherd, a glorious hero and a noble king? Would there ever be another leader like David? Yes, the son of David. His name is Jesus, and he is a better David than David could ever be. He came to be your shepherd, your hero and your king. In a 12-message audio series, Alan Wright takes you on a thrilling adventure with David in order to point you to the answer for your every need, the son of David.
Discover how Christ enables you to face your biggest obstacles, deal with your fiercest persecution and live as an heir of grace. It's an audio series from Alan Wright. As our thanks for your donation, we'll be delighted to send you Pastor Alan's audio messages in either a digital download or a CD album format.
Son of David, shepherd, hero, king. 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 so there was a temporary sacrificial system that was set up through the temple sacrifices that people's sin was temporarily paid for, but there was always an uncertainty about the fullness of God's blessing because two things were going on. God is love and he's good and he wants to pour out his blessing, but he also had said that there's justice in this earth and therefore that sin must be punished and good must be rewarded. But people kept sinning and so the old covenant was insufficient and Jesus came and he held up the cup on the Passover night and he said, this is the cup of the new covenant.
And he said, it's my blood that's poured out for the forgiveness of your sins. What was it that made the new covenant so new? It's that no longer is it really between us and God. Instead it is between our representative and God. Jesus is the human representative and he is the divine representative because he's both God and man. The covenant was between the father and the son. If the son would be perfectly obedient on behalf of all of humanity, then the father would have the right to be just in pouring out blessing and forgiveness and mercy upon this people. And so it was that Jesus never once denied his father or disobeyed his father, but he lived a sinless life and then the father did the unthinkable.
He took the sin of humanity and put it literally into the body of Jesus on the cross so that in Christ a covenant was made and a covenant was kept. And when you Christian accepted Jesus Christ, you came into covenant by being in Christ. The reason you're in covenant with God is not because you've kept up your end of the bargain, but because Jesus did and you're in Christ.
And this is why Paul says in Christ, we've been blessed with every spiritual blessing. It's covenant language. Oh God, because of what you've done for me in Jesus Christ, I am in the covenant. And therefore, though I don't deserve it, I come to you as your child and an heir indeed a co-heir with Christ himself. When you begin to pray as a child of the covenant, when you make your appeal based upon God's solid, eternal, covenantal says your prayer life now shifts all the attention away from yourself and to the finished work of Jesus.
That's the way to pray. So we understand covenant. It's in everyday life. Sometimes it's not spoken or written down, but it's there.
It's like any loving parent has with his or her child. I was reminded this week of a moving story back from the 1989 earthquake that decimated Armenia, the deadly tremor that in its initial quake and its aftershocks killed 30,000 people. And in the midst of all the confusion of that earthquake, there was a father and it made national and international headlines because this father went to his son's school and he saw the rubble and that there were no survivors. And he knew where his son's classroom was and he went to that area of the rubble and he began to remove stone after stone. Other grieving parents came and tried to pull him away and said you're going to hurt yourself, you're going to exhaust yourself. The firefighters, the paramedics tried to get him to just leave and to go get some rest. There was no hope, but he refused. Two hours went by, four hours went by, he continued to move stone after stone. Ten hours went by, twenty hours went by, twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours he was still pulling stones away. He wouldn't leave. And in the thirty-eighth hour he pulled away a stone and there was a cavernous spot that had been entombed by all these stones and he heard the voice of a child and it was his boy.
And one of the things that made the news was the boy quickly informed him there are fourteen of us, fourteen of this class of thirty that had survived and later the boy said I told all of my friends don't worry my dad's going to come save me and when he does he'll save you too. It's just a covenant. I'm just talking about why is a father doing that? Because it's just an unwritten covenant of chesed, of steadfast love.
If you've ever tasted of that even for a moment, you know what I'm talking about. It's an invisible bond that cannot be broken. It is a love that's stronger than death. And what I want you to know is that if that father had that commitment to his son, the Lord God has a greater commitment to your well-being. You're in covenant with God. When you pray, pray as a recipient of covenantal blessings.
My father. David appealed to the goodness of God and then he appealed to the covenant nature of God and then thirdly he appealed to the ultimate glory of God. This is something that is so important not because God is needy and he needs us therefore to glorify him but it is because God is enthroned in our praises and it is because that when you recognize that God is so committed to his own glory that he will not let his word fail.
You have a greater confidence in the way that you make your appeal to God. Look at verse 26 and your name will be magnified forever saying the Lord of hosts is God over Israel and the house of your servant David will be established before you. This is David who comes into a gospel revelation a gospel revelation a thousand years before Christ and what what he realizes is that God is highly glorified when we are highly blessed. God is most glorified when you are most blessed.
God does not revel in the sufferings and in the failures of his children. He revels in his redemptive powerful mercy that moves his children into the place of the promised land. God is glorified when his promises of redemption and healing and deliverance are coming to pass in his children and so you can have this confidence that not only is God good not only are you in covenant with God through Jesus Christ but God is so committed to his own glory that when you are blessed God is glorified so how much more therefore is God inclined to bless you. Fourthly here's what I observe David simply put prayed God's word right back to God. I can't think of anything more important to say about prayer than prayer is agreement with God's promises. Prayer is agreeing with what God has said. The Christian life is not built upon my promises to God. The Christian life is empowered by God's promises to me. Look at verse twenty eight. And now old Lord God you are God and your words are true and you have promised this good thing to your servant. Now therefore may it please you to bless the house of your servant so that it may continue forever before you for you O Lord God have spoken and with your blessing shall the house of your servant be blessed forever. You have made this promise to never remove your steadfast love and to always put someone on the throne from my household and therefore God I bring this promise to you and I agree with you that it shall be done. Thank you God. Prayer is agreement with God's word and so it is that as much as you take in the word of God and tune your heart to the revelation of the Holy Spirit leading you in your life that you breathe that back out to God in prayer and that is the heart and the substance of a life of prayer and more is wrought through our prayers than we have any idea.
Alan Wright. And boy that's encouraging to know. Keep praying. Keep praying. It's the secret to powerful prayer our teaching today in the series Son of David and Alan is back in the studio here in just a moment as he shares his parting good news thought for the day. Got some giants to slay? Need some encouragement in the midst of a trial?
Wondering if God really cares? Meet David. Who can compare to him? He was the ruddy handsome youth tending sheep writing psalms and worshiping God in the humble Bethlehem fields. He was the lone Israelite brave enough to decapitate Goliath and the sole warrior adept enough to cut off the scourge of the Philistines.
He was the stately king who established peace expanded the borders and reigned in prosperity for 40 years. Who else could be a gentle shepherd a glorious hero and a noble king? Would there ever be another leader like David?
Yes. The Son of David. His name is Jesus and he is a better David than David could ever be. He came to be your shepherd your hero and your king. In a 12 message audio series Alan Wright takes you on a thrilling adventure with David in order to point you to the answer for your every need. The Son of David. Discover how Christ enables you to face your biggest obstacles deal with your fiercest persecution and live as an heir of grace. It's an audio series from Alan Wright as our thanks for your donation will be delighted to send you Pastor Alan's audio messages in either a digital download or a CD album format.
Son of David shepherd hero king. 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 to share Alan's parting good news thoughts for the day and I think we've all been there Alan we we don't know if our prayers are reaching the ceiling but it's good news to know it's there's power in prayer. There's power in prayer. God comes to David and says here's what I'm gonna do for you and David is humble he says I acknowledge that I don't deserve this but instead of rejecting it David said I agree with you God go ahead and do exactly what you've said. This is a great model for prayer. Appeal to God's goodness not your own and appeal to God's covenantal promises not your own promises and return back to God the very promise of God. This is the nature of really powerful prayer. Every single Christian's prayer is powerful and effective in Jesus Christ. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.
