The Faith-Building Power of God Moments

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. What would happen if every blessing, every good thing in your life, if you saw that every single drop of it had come down from heaven? What would happen if every morning you woke up and you breathed in air, and it might as well be celestial air to you because you know that this is a gift from God?

I'll tell you what would happen is your faith would grow every single day. 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, God Moments, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina.

If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It's Pastor Alan's book by the same title, God Moments, and 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 a copy of Pastor Alan's book, God Moments, our special offer today. 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 on God Moments.

Here is Alan Wright. If there was someone that you did not trust because you were ignorant of how much they loved you, and just how much they advocated for you, and how much good they wanted for your life, but you pushed them away, and you distanced yourself because you just couldn't trust, then that would be foolishness where you really needed faith. Because to really have faith is to have an awareness of the truth of a situation, and then have confidence in it. There can be truths that seem to be competing at the same time.

That's why I say faith is confidence in ultimate truth. For example, if when my kids were little, I disciplined one of them by taking away one of their favorite toys temporarily. And if that child is thinking through it, a child in our home where there was lots of love and support, and they knew that punishment wasn't permanent, and they knew that there was lots of love, and that there was supposed to be a lesson to the discipline, that child might have two truths at the same time. One truth would be, I'm not happy right now.

I don't have my favorite toy, and I feel really hurt by this. There's a bigger truth, and that truth is my father loves me, my mother loves me, my home is secure, I am safe. I may not understand everything about why this is happening, and I may not like it, but the bigger truth here is that they have my best in mind, and I am going to be secure in that.

I'm loved and provided for. But if a child had a toy that was taken away, and that child was in an environment where there was no love, there was no honor, where there was no security, where there was no acceptance and a sense of safety, and that child loses a toy, and that child then is going to have a reality of, this has been taken away from me, and the mind is going to begin to think, and this is the way life is, so I need to hold on to everything that I possibly can. It raises this very important point about faith and how faith is built. Faith is built upon what you do know rather than the things you don't know. I just cannot overemphasize the importance of this, especially when you go through a difficult time. I think back to some of the most difficult times of life, the most painful times of life, and the things that I just don't understand, and I could sit here today and I could enumerate for you many, many, many things that I don't understand from my own personal life, but I could also enumerate many times that I've walked with some of you in pain, and we can't explain why that suffering was there, why God allowed it.

We have no answers for some of those things. But the way that faith grows is not by dwelling upon what we don't understand, but instead meditating upon what we do know for sure. So what I know for sure, because I have a deposit of the Holy Spirit in me that guarantees, like an earnest money, a deposit within me that guarantees a greater inheritance in the saints, what I could say to you for sure is I know I'm a child of God. What I could say for sure is that I have been rescued, that I have been loved with a fierce love by a God who came in the person of Jesus Christ and died in my place on a cross. What I could say for sure is that time and time and time and time again, many convincing proofs by the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life that had given me four tastes of heaven.

What I could say for sure is that there is a plan and that God is sovereign and that He is on His throne. And so faith gets built upon meditating upon all these things that you know for sure. If you fix your life upon the meditation of things that you don't understand, then there is no faith that is in that. Faith is believing an ultimate truth, turning on the light in a room is a very simple thing, but it's an act of faith. You step in the room, you don't think about it, the light switch is there, you flip the switch.

Why? Because you are convinced that even though you may not understand everything about electrical currents or lights and how it works, that this is what we do. We flip on this switch and then the light comes on. You don't go into a room and turn around three times, stomp your feet twice and then jump up and down and say woohoo in order to get the light to cut on. You don't do that because that's foolish because that doesn't turn on a light. But a light switch does.

You get into a car, you turn the key or you push a button for the car to start. And you do this because it's an act of faith. In other words, if you just pay attention to what you do, then you'll know what you believe, which will describe to you what faith really is. To have faith, therefore, is not a blind leap, as many people propose. And it is not mental gymnastics that is about developing some intellectual certainty for something for which you have no evidence. That's not what faith is at all. Faith is something that is not a work of the mind, it's not a work of the flesh, and it's really silly to even think about going into a room and concentrating hard and saying I believe that this light switch will turn on the light, I believe this light switch will turn on the light, I believe it will turn on this light, and then flip it on.

No, it's not like that, is it? It's just something you're convinced of and you turn on the light switch because it has something that you believe. Notice, please, that you do not have to understand how something works or even why something works in order to believe in it. I don't know how a plane flies. I know there's some kind of Bernoulli principle and something about air pressure and the wings and the air speed. Oh, but I have no idea how it flies.

I have no idea. That's such a big, heavy piece of metal to go through the air like that. I still get on a plane.

I go, how does this thing even work? But I know this. I know it's the safest way to travel. I know that every time I've gotten on a plane, it landed. I got off the plane. I know that it works and that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of flights every day that are going on and they're taking off and they're landing. I have confidence in that. And so it's not a blind leap of faith for me to go and get onto an airplane.

It's something that's rooted in that. And I don't understand how it works. I don't understand how my iPhone works.

How can you send a wireless text message or picture to somebody on the other side of the world? I have no idea how that gadget works, but I use it. I use it every day because I believe that it works. Faith is like that. And what faith is not is faith is not believing an unlikely possibility that is relegated to a few super spiritual people.

It's as silly as saying that turning on a light switch is relegated to the few people that have an amazing capacity to believe it. That's not what faith is like at all. In fact of the matter, God is not sitting up in heaven saying there's a steep cliff.

Go and run and jump over that cliff with no evidence that anything good will happen. That's not the way God works with us at all. God has given us His word. God is for us. God is with us. He's come and revealed Himself to us. If any of you missed Pastor Chris' excellent sermon on Psalm 19 a few weeks ago, I highly recommend this and to share it with anybody who ever has intellectual doubts in their faith. He talks about the heavens are telling the glory of God. And really the fact of the matter is that it's not hard to believe in God.

It's hard not to believe in God. Imagine you were a caveman and you were just walking down a rocky path and the wheel hadn't even been invented. And you come up, all of a sudden there's a bright red Porsche in the middle of the pathway. And you come over and go, huh, huh, huh. You touch it, huh, huh, huh. And then your hand gets on the door handle and go, huh, huh, huh. And you open it up and inside there's this beautiful leather seats and this dashboard with all this stuff. And you, huh, huh, you get in it, you sit in it. And then you accidentally push a button and the thing starts. Huh, huh, huh. You accidentally put it in drive, huh, huh, huh. And it starts moving down the pathway. You've never even seen a wheel before and now you're driving a Porsche. And you're that caveman.

What do you do? Do you say in your heart, wow, it's amazing how this just sprung up on its own by accident? Of course not. Even a caveman would say, somebody really smart designed this, wow. In other words, just the design of it all. You look at your body, you move your fingers, you have a thought, your heart beats. Your lungs are filled with air.

Your brain tells your legs what to do. Somebody designed this. It's somebody very intelligent.

It didn't spring into its being any more than a Porsche showed up on a rocky path of a caveman in the middle of his walk. It's hard not to believe in God. The heavens are telling the glory of God.

That's Alan Wright. And we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. God's always been there. In every moment you narrowly escaped from danger. In every moment you were surprised by a blessing.

In every moment you just knew the direction to take. God was there. Your life is defined by countless moments of God's grace.

Perhaps they've been covered by the sands of time or have just gone unnoticed in the rush of life. But your life is full of God moments. When you make a gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's heart-stirring book, God Moments, that will lead you on a spiritual treasure hunt to uncover your God moments. It's Alan Wright's timeless book, God Moments.

Discover your God moments in the past and be filled with fresh faith today. 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 what happens is that sin in this world has served to be like blinders over our eyes. And all that it takes, all that it takes is for the Holy Spirit to lift the veil from our eyes, to lift the veil from our heart and let us see things for what they really are.

To just see your life for what it really is. In the same way that somebody could be veiled into thinking that this is all a cosmic accident, you could be veiled in looking back over your life and missing all the God moments that are there. But if the Holy Spirit were to remove those blinders, what you would begin to see is something like what David saw, and that is that the Lord has always been with me. He has delivered me from the paw of the lion, delivered me from the paw of the bear. He has always been there.

I have meditated upon his works. And so David comes to the front line of the battle and every single Israeli soldier is absolutely terrified. And there's not one person, including the king, has one dab of faith whatsoever. And David is utterly confident and he says, the Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear, the one who's been faithful to me, obviously faithful to me. It's as plain as the nose on your face that God has anointed me. God has been with me. I have had supernatural moments where there was a lion or a bear that came and sought to take away the flock, the sheep that I was tending to, and I hurled a stone at them and I've become excellent with that. And the Lord directs the path of that stone and I've stunned those animals and I've grabbed their mane with my own hands.

And I have seen the supernatural capacity of God to equip me in the humble task of keeping sheep. And if God has equipped me in something as simple as keeping sheep, how much more is he going to be with me in this battle? After all, the battle belongs to the Lord. You see, the matter of the situation was that God had already predestined that this people would conquer the Philistines. They were not going to be servants to the Philistines. They were going to take the land. This was God's will for them and it already had been prearranged. The battle already belonged to the Lord.

The truth of the situation was they were going to win. There was only one man who saw it, though. So faith is just ultimate confidence and ultimate truth. It's seeing something for what it really is. It's seeing your life in the hands of God for what your life really is. What would happen if you, with the psalmist of old, could just forget not all his benefits? What would happen in your life if instead of saying, boy, I'm glad that that antibiotic got me well from the infection I had, what if instead you realized that God was the one who'd made the antibiotic? What if you realized that God was the one who had made the immune system that is bolstered by the antibiotic? What if you saw that every single cold that you ever recovered from and every stubbed toe that ever healed, that God was the one who healed you? What would happen if every blessing, every good thing in your life, if you saw that every single drop of it had come down from heaven? What would happen if every morning you woke up and you breathed in air and it might as well be celestial air to you because you know that this is a gift from God? I'll tell you what would happen is your faith would grow every single day. See for what it really is, your life in the context of the providence of God. See, there are two ways you can look at things. David could have said, oh, I'm nothing but a keeper of sheep.

I'm forgotten. Dad just uses me to bring bread to my brothers and then they just make fun of me. I'm nothing but a shepherd and half the time the lions and bears come to eat my sheep.

I've got a hard life and nobody appreciates me and nothing good ever happens to me. Would he have fought Goliath with that mindset? The least likely dude was the guy who went out and fought because the way he saw his life was accurate. My daughter Abigail has been in some national speech competitions and one of her speech that she gave all throughout the spring was really about God moments, really about counting your blessings every day and how powerful it is, really this very subject which we speak of. And in her speech she tells that when she was one year old, she doesn't remember it consciously but she's heard us tell the stories of it over and over. She was in the back of the station wagon in her little car seat and my wife was driving and somebody ran a stop sign full of speed, broadsided the car, turned it, flipped it over, crushed it. Whole roof was completely caved in, the jagged edges coming right down towards one year old Abby and she was just left hanging upside down in the car for a long time. And first people were afraid to try to rescue her because of all the leaking fuel and finally somebody went in and rescued her out of her seat and she never cried and she was unhurt.

It was like some angel had just surrounded her. The wreck could have taken my whole family from me. And she said, I hear those stories and there's one or two ways I could look at it.

One way would be to say, boy, the world's a scary place, I'll not even go outside. Or another way to look at it is, wow, in the most fragile moment of life when every risk and every danger was at hand, God took care of me. How much more will He take care of me on an ordinary day and the things that I could face? You've got to decide which is the more accurate way to see it, which is the truth. You've got to decide which is the truth. And when you see the truth and you believe it, that is, in a word, faith. And if you look back through the Word of God, what you'll see, beloved, is that God is not sitting up in His heaven with His arms folded like, I'm going to see who's willing to go take the daring blind leap over the cliff. Instead, God is doing everything He can to help you see that He's with you.

Look at all the saints. Look at all the key figures who paint the narrative of the drama of the Bible. Abraham, God called him and spoke to him personally. And He said, I'm going to bless you. And then in Genesis 15, He followed up by cutting a covenant with Abram and He put him into a deep sleep like a trance and gave him a vision of a blazing fire pot which was clearly a representation of the Holy Spirit that passed through these slain animal carcasses that God was saying, I am going to bless you.

I'm making a covenant with you. Look at Jacob as we saw last time. He was such a doubter and God put him into a deep sleep and gave him a vision of a ladder that connected heaven and earth with angels ascending and descending. Look at Joseph. Why did Joseph have so much faith?

Because God gave him a dream and gave him an ability to interpret dreams and showed him at every point that God was with him by speaking to him even though his circumstances were terrible. Look at the life of Moses. Moses was a doubter from the beginning.

Moses was spoken to by God from a burning bush and he still said, I don't have any confidence. And God said, what's that in your hand? He said, it's a stick. He said, throw it on the ground. And he did it. It became a snake and he picked it up.

It became a stick again. And he showed him many convincing wonders. And on and on it goes through the prophets, God speaking to us, telling us over and over a Messiah is going to come. Look at the lives of people like Peter. Peter who denied Jesus three times, who said, I'll never ever fail you, Lord.

And then he denied him three times. But what happened at Pentecost? The Holy Spirit had come and Peter saw things for what they were.

And he said, this is that of which the prophet Joel spoke. And his whole life was changed when he saw the reality. Think of Saul of Tarsus. And he is the chief persecutor of Christians. But God intended for him to become the chief proclaimer of the gospel. And so he let a blinding light come upon him on the road to Damascus. And he spoke to him and he said, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And he changed him and he let scales like fall from his eyes after three days of blindness.

And Paul the apostle saw God. What I'm just saying is that God is for you and he is for your faith. And he wants you by the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit to see your life in the proper context and the full accurate picture of his amazing grace. And that is why Jesus on the night that he was betrayed took bread and broke it and said, do this in remembrance of me because I want to give you something that will cause you to actively remember how blessed you are and to see your life correctly.

That what your life is is one that has been bought with the most dear infinite price imaginable. The body and the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ that has been given and shed for you so that every time that you take communion that what you would be doing is you would be remembering and celebrating and being filled with faith. That you would see and know down deep in your being that the most accurate picture of your life is just like David. The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear.

He'll deliver me from this uncircumcised Philistine as well. The Lord who has been with me through this and that and this and that and sustained me by his grace all my life. He will be with me today and the grace of the Lord is sufficient unto me. Think on your God moments.

Remember, remember, remember. See your life in the context of the accurate picture of God's grace and your faith will grow and that is the gospel. Alan Wright and boy that gives me hope for the future by looking back and sometimes that's a message that you don't often hear but I think it's very scriptural and we're going to talk about this even more in a moment with Alan Wright here with additional insight on this for your life and a final word. Unlock the power of blessing your life. Discover God's grace-filled vision for your life by signing up for Alan Wright's free daily blessing. If you want to fill your heart with grace and encouragement, get Alan Wright's daily blessing.

It's free and just a click away at pastorallen.org. God's always been there. In every moment you narrowly escaped from danger. In every moment you were surprised by a blessing.

In every moment you just knew the direction to take. God was there. Your life is defined by countless moments of God's grace. Perhaps they've been covered by the sands of time or have just gone unnoticed in the rush of life but your life is full of God moments. When you make a gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's heart-stirring book, God Moments, that will lead you on a spiritual treasure hunt to uncover your God moments. It's Alan Wright's timeless book, God Moments.

Discover your God moments in the past and be filled with fresh faith today. 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 or come to our website, pastorallen.org. So Alan, I see this all throughout Scripture, looking back and recounting the times when God was there and oftentimes the word faith is used with that particular practice, right? It's over and over and over in the Scripture. Remember, remember, remember, commemorate, think on these things, teach these things to your children, remember what God has done. We're all going to face times where we're going to wonder, where's God right now? But if you build your life, organize your life, your daily life around recounting, remembering, commemorating, celebrating what you know God has done, then when you face the uncertain times and you need to draw upon your faith, it's like some deep well that's within you. And so that's what I found in my own life and in so, so many others that there's tremendous faith-building power. How you remember yesterday is going to determine how you're going to live tomorrow. Today's Good News message is a listener-supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.