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November 30, 2021 5:00 am
Pastor, author and Bible teacher Alan Wright.
We invite people I don't want you invite people for Easter because as you want to invite people for Easter because you delight in the morning is beautiful is wonderful in all of his ways. Esther Allen welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I begin to accept free beer to teaching today.
In the series. We called saver has presented it were an older church in North Carolina are not able to stay with us throughout the entire program to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. Audio album called saver could be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries either a seamy album or digital download of these audio messages so as you listen to today's messages go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us@pastorout.org that's pastor out in.O RG or call 877-544-4860 877-544-4860 moral all of this later in the program but now let's get started with today's teaching here is Alan Wright to live a Christian life is not a celebration of our sacrifice to God. The Christian life. The celebration of God sacrifice for us and everything powerful about being a Christian depends on understanding that there may be times that God calls you to deny yourself of something or they may be a suitable fast the time of focus, but it is not to shame yourself or denies self in a sense of trying to therefore impress God so Isaiah 58 continues to where we come to our text today in the invitation to delight in God begins with the invitation. In verse 13 to call the Sabbath a delight.
If you turn back your foot. Verse 13 says from the Sabbath from doing your own pleasure.
All my holy day. If you don't have to run around travel everywhere. That's what is talking about turning back your foot are just making it all about you, including your sacrifices. But if you cannot do that instead call the Sabbath a delight and a holy day Lord Hon. if you honor it.
Then he says you will take delight in the Lord. If you call the Sabbath. The delight is a strange thing to say because the Sabbath is a delight. It's the oddest thing in the world that people of God would struggle to keep the Sabbath because the Sabbath is one of those wonderful things that God has ever given to his people is the day in which not only do you not have to work, but nobody else expects you to work is something we don't even have anymore.
We can even find this not only are you not expected to send out 37 emails and respond to 14 business calls and to make sure you get all the chores done on that day but nobody else is calling you and expecting an urgent answer on something. It's the day and which nobody had to be productive.
I just got to enjoy being. We enjoyed being together. The children just allow the Sabbath in the life of Israel.
They knew every week, every week. This can be a day that mom and dad are working are distracted to be deliciously just devoted to having family time and it would be the day that no matter how poor they are.
Have a nice feast that day care who you are you a get yourself some scrawny chicken together and have some kind of a feast on Sabbath day. It is the day that if you've got problems, you'll talk about will lead you guys some marital issues you need to work out honey will do that tomorrow.
Today is Sabbath today. We enjoyed being today were going to enjoy one another today we got a laugh today would you worship the Lord today were going to feast today were going out were going to play today were going to rest today we're just going to put a wonderful day. It's a vacation day in the middle of every at the end of every week for the people of God. Why would God have to say, if you will just delight in that day because people didn't know how to delight in that day was the same way we struggle to delight in the day in which were not productive.
We struggle to delight in the day that we didn't get a bunch of things done. We seem to measure our days by how much we got done and whether we landed the big accounts and whether we got everything cleaned up and whether we brought home the big check. That's how we tend to measure our sense of well-being and God saying if you can come to the place where you call it a delight to just be a child of God, then you have come to the place of delighting in the Lord to delight in the Lord is to delight in the grace of God. God is most happy when we are at most, at rest in him. God is most glorified when we most enjoy.
He's like the father of a boy who ran away with his inheritance early spent everything, and while living scandalized the family name became destitute and return home and when he returned home, expecting his father.
Shame instead found his father's grace and in that celebration of a son who had failed you recognize the father's heart is not primarily oriented toward celebrating the accomplishment of his sons, but the Fellowship office and this father bag. The older brother to come in to the party but the older brother would not reset. I been slaving for you. For all these years and you never gave me such a party. The father begged him it's all I have is yours come in please and celebrate, but he could not delight in the father's love because his heart and mind were blocked by the notion that I please. My father through my own sacrifices to delight in the Lord requires delighting in the Sabbath. In this sense, delight in the grace of God. The let you rest from your labor to earn your way to going that's Alan Wright will have more teaching in a moment.
Today's important series so much worry about yesterday's failures cemetery getting ready for tomorrow is hard to focus on the moment that matters most. Wearing seasoned coaches calling mindfulness psychological program in Eastern religion.
Mindfulness living in the present is the way life each day to get messages with your digital way of saying thanks for your partnership making gift textures and levers of God's grace moment moment every day of your life.
The gospel is shared when you get to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support, today is the final day were offering special product when you get today. We will send you a special offer.
We are happy to send this to you as I thanks from Alan Wright Ministries, seven 877-544-4860 877-544-4861 come to our website past Rowan.work days teaching now once again is once you delight in the Lord.
It starts a process that is the description of Christian obedience and it goes like this. Whatever we delight in. We praise is not something that you try to do something you do if man meets her great-granddaughter and she's cute she praises her and you don't have to say now it's your duty as a great-grandmother to praise your great-grandchild. In fact, it is as if our praise to God is just an extension of our delight in God CS Lewis said it brilliantly. He wrote I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment. It is its appointed consummation of he writes it is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are the delight is incomplete till it is expressed part of it is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not be able to tell anyone how good he is to come suddenly at the turn of the road upon some Mountain Valley of unexpected grandeur and then have to keep silent because the people you are with care for it no more than a tin can in the ditch or he says, compared to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with. If there's something you delight in then no one has to tell you to talk about it. You just talk about it and this really becomes the primary impetus and fuel for all Christian evangelism is that we don't invite people to meet Christ because it's our duty. We invite people to meet Christ because he is our delight, and you can't help but want to tell people about something that is delightful. This means that it clarifies my job that my job as I see it, beloved, is not so much to tell you what you ought to do my job is a so lift up the excellencies of Christ that you would be increasingly taken with delight and how good he is. You praise what you delight in and what you praise you automatically want to share with others. If you just saw a good movie. Don't you want to tell seven people if you just found a restaurant and I had a really good meal. Don't you find it all week long. You telling somebody about how good it was there something about delight that wants to delight with others. It is not something that is fiercely individualistic.
It is something that enjoys fellowship a it's like in our home. Everywhere watching a good movie and somebody gets on their phone so my also call an outside what you're missing. It was so what they're missing that you are not missing it right here they're missing it because I am enjoying the fellowship of being able to both enjoy this good scene of this movie.
And so it is that we invite people I don't want it. Invite people for Easter because it's your duty. I want to invite people for Easter because you delight in the Lord is beautiful is wonderful in all of his ways and whatever we praise and delight, and we make sacrifices toward and for without giving it much thought.
The funniest the funniest Masters piece of trivia I have for you is that some years ago golf digest surveyed its readership about just how far people would go in their desire to get into see the Masters and one of the questions on the survey asked men if they would be willing to be struck by a Taser drive tasered just outside the gates and upon recovering allowed to go into the Masters and the majority of readers said yes they would be willing to be tasered. I was saying that if there's something that delights you and then you begin to be drawn towards it and such a way that other things get sacrificed but you don't think of it as a sacrifice. The problem the way in which the people of God were fasting that God rebuked in Isaiah 58 is that they weren't having it be the sacrifice that falls into place because of the delight in the Lord. There's a kind of delight in the Lord that yes, it changes everything in your life but you didn't even think of it as being denial prince of preachers, Charles Spurgeon said it beautifully. When I hear persons say well you know my religion consists in some things I must do and some things I must not do I reply. Mine consists in things that I love to do and in avoiding things that I hate and what's going to do the continued in a brilliant sermon. The say does the Dove deny itself when it does not eat carrion, referring to the flesh of a dead animal. No, verily, the Dove could not delight in blood would not feed thereon, if it could, when a man sees a company of swine under the oak, delighting themselves and their acorns and grunting out their satisfaction.
Does he deny himself when he passes them by without sharing their feast. No, verily he has better bread at home where he can eat and swine's meat is no dainty to him. So it is with the believer's faith, a matter of delight matter of satisfaction and that which he avoids interns from is very little self-denial to him.
These tastes are changed.
His wishes are altered. He delights himself and his God, and joyously receive the desires of his heart. That's the that's the denial that's the sacrifice that is lifted up in the Scripture, the kind that comes automatically from delighting yourself in the Lord such that what you are denying yourself of is not even a denial of self because you wouldn't even want it anyway and so this process of delight that leads to praise and praise that leads to inviting others and then leads to making sacrifices effortlessly leads to one final point as we saw in the Psalm when we delight in the Lord God delights in that and in a sense if you could say this of of a sovereign God. God is released to bless fully the one who delights fully in him because God is so good he would not give to you something that was bad for you. Just because you said you desired it.
These too good of a father for that. Thank God. If a cocaine addict's main desire was just a flesh is desire for more cocaine.
It would not be a loving father that gave the attic more cocaine cocaine. But as soon as the attic started thirsting for something that would be good for him or her, then the good father would give a superabundant soffit is like if you were drawn to polluted water and you wanted more of it. Your father in heaven wouldn't get it to, but if you began to be drawn towards living in pure water, he would give to his without measure.
In other words, what happens is the more that you delight in the Lord all of your own desires, then change and become increasingly conformed to the very heart of God. In other words, to delight in the Lord is to experience a process where your will start lining up with the very will of God. And when that happens, the psalmist says God will give you the desires of your heart. God loves you and he cares very much about you guys want to understand lover that every good gift comes down from God. There is no lack in God and God loves to give good gifts and it breaks my heart to see that there so many Christians that have come along with some ridiculous notion that being a Christian is about this life that is going to be contrary to anything that you would ever desire in your deepest heart's not the case at all the things that you and your deepest heart if you could really be in touch with it by the very things that God wants to give to you the focus of the Christian life. Therefore, beloved is not about you putting on a fast. By that I mean by you practicing some sense of self-sacrifice and self-denial that then you think is going to impress God and turn around, get him to give you something know that is absolutely reversal of the whole Christian life the Christian life is about you having a revelation of the goodness of God and what he's done for us in Jesus Christ saying that a great exchange has taken place where God the father loved you so much that he sent his only begotten son to die in your place to take your sin and to take your shame so that you would have no condemnation left in your life. No shame left in your life and God wouldn't even see your sin anymore.
So much so that you become the righteousness of Jesus and all of the wonder of God been poured out into you by the very presence of the Holy Spirit in whom you live and grow the life of God inside of you pulsating within you the beauty and wonder of the heavens open up to you when you see things from God's perspective. This is the life of the Christian ever more delighting in the goodness of God and everything that changes in your life comes because of that little bit of focus. This the grace of God is the delight of my life.
Delight yourself in the Lord give you the desires and as a gospel right in today's teaching delight take pleasure in obedience to the conclusion about teaching but also the conclusion of the series saver and Alan is back here in a moment in the studio with our closing good news thought for the day. So much worry about yesterday's failures cemetery getting ready for tomorrow's half.
Sometimes it's hard to focus on the moment that matters most. Wearing seasoned coaches, and mindfulness psychological program is rated Eastern religion.
Mindfulness living in the present unveils the way Pastor Alan my life each day to get messages with your digital Dharma is our way of saying your partnership. Make your gift to textures and levers of God's grace. Each moment moment every day of your life gospel is shared when you get to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support, today is the final day were offering special product when you get today.
We will send you a special offer. We are happy to send this to you as I thanks from Alan Wright Ministries, seven 877-544-4860 877-544-4861 come to our website.
Pastor our and not work out as we are close the book on this particular series of saver and certainly in this teaching take pleasure in obedience which are closing thought well Daniel, I hope that listeners have been able to join this journey with us and if not that they'll avail themselves of this very special collection of messages because I think it's one of the most important messages for our culture saver. We live so much of our life, not just in the busyness. Like we've all experienced but we live with regret about yesterday and that's exhausting and we live with the worry about tomorrow and that's frustrating and God invites us into a whole different way of living right here right now in this moment is what in the secular world they call mindfulness.
It is God's idea to his hits.
His plan that you learn to savor goodness each and every day that's my prayer every listener, you will be able to savor goodness of God in the moment. Each moment every day this year you only called heart 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@pastorout.org that's Pastor out and.org. Today's good news message is a listener supported production Alan Wright Ministries