Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing—a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a declaration was signed, announcing liberty to a new nation. But long before ink touched parchment, a greater declaration had been signed—not with pen and paper, but with nails and a cross; not with ink, but with blood. When Christ stretched out His arms upon the scandalous tree, He declared forever that sin would no longer enslave, that shame would no longer condemn, that fear would no longer reign, and that death would no longer have the final word. May you rejoice this weekend in the freedom secured by brave patriots, but even more, may you rejoice in the greater freedom secured by the Savior.
I bless you today to live as one who has been set free. Indeed, pastor, author, and Bible teacher Allen Wright. He says, "Here's the key: don't care so much about everything else, but care about this so much that it'll give you peace." 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 "Gateways to Grace" as presented at Renolda 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, which can be yours for your donation this month to Allen Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at pastorallen.org. That's pastorallen.org, or call eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty.
That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. While at our website, please let us know how we may pray for you. Submit your prayer request to our prayer wall and be uplifted and encouraged as the community around this ministry starts praying for you and receive notifications as your. Request is prayed for. That's the prayer wall at Pastor Alan dot org.
We're honored to stand with you in prayer. More on all of this later in the program, but right now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Allen Wright. Let's pray, Father. Thank you as we come to your word today.
Though life seems so fast. Transitory and fickle. That there's something we can count on. That not one word that you've spoken is empty, or falls to the ground, or returns to you void of its power. But your word stands forever, though the grass withers and the flowers fade.
Your word stands forever, O God, and so we come eager to drink from eternity, to be filled with abundant life, and receive a word that is like no other word. Your word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. Make our hearts now ready soil to receive your word. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen. Therefore, Matthew six twenty five, Jesus says, "I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you'll eat, or what you'll drink, nor about your body, or what you'll put on.
Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?" And then let me jump to famous verse thirty-three. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Okay, are you ready for some good news? You're sounding kind of alive today. That's great. If you want to get rid of anxiety in your life. You probably don't need more.
You probably need less. Jesus said, "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness." All these other things, these things we worry about, they'll be added to you. But get this one thing as a priority, and it's going to change everything. We're talking about spiritual disciplines, which I call gateways of grace. And today, it is considered one of the classic sort of spiritual disciplines of life, and that's practicing simplicity.
Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you you got to get rid of your TV. I like my big screen TV to watch football on. I wish it was a little bit bigger, but I like my technology. I'm not going to tell you to give everything away. I'm not going to tell you to quit your job.
But I want to focus in on this principle that Jesus, who cares so much about you and me, that He doesn't want us living with anxiety. And so He says, "Here's the key." Don't care so much about everything else, but care about this so much that it'll give you peace. Wow! I don't know. I was thinking about the old blockbuster movie City Slickers.
Remember City Slickers and gruff old cowboy played by Jack Pallant? Is that you say his name? And Billy Crystal, comedian, playing in this Western comedy about Mitch and his friends that can't seem to find meaning in life, or purpose, or fulfillment, or peace.
So they go out to help drive cattle for two weeks from New Mexico to Colorado, and through their many adventures and disasters, they're learning and they're growing. And then it boils down to this moment in the movie where famously. The cowboy, old cowboy, with a cigarette in his mouth, Curly riding along next to Mitch, and he says to Mitch, "You know, they're just riding along, and he's just talking like this." And and he said, "Ah, there's nothing like driving the herd." And Mitch said, "See, Curly, that's the thing. You've got your life figured out. You know what it is that you want." And Curly says, "How old are you?
Thirty-nine." And Curly says, "You know what the secret to life is." Miss goes, "What?" And Curly holds up one finger. Miss goes, "What? Your finger?" No, one thing. Said, "One thing, and nothing else means anything." And I went back to check the clip and realized when he said "focus on that one thing and nothing else," means he didn't say anything after that.
So all my clips have cuss words in it. But anyway, he says, "Well, how do I know what that one thing is?" He says, "That's what you got to figure out." Well, it's pretty deep philosophy in the middle of a silly movie that, in some ways, really got it right. For those New Yorkers whose lives had so much going on, and in the simplicity of getting away from all of that, driving cattle and kind of getting away all the distractions, could finally maybe begin to think about what is the one thing. The movie never answers it. Jesus does.
Here is your one thing: seek first the kingdom of God. And his righteousness. I want to kind of approach this message a little differently. We're going to actually come to the text and go through it a little bit later in the message. But first, I want to talk to you about the problem of so many choices and why it's not working for us.
And I aim to expose two competing ideologies about the pathway to peace, and then I want to take a little closer look at the text, and maybe even talk about some of the practical ways that we can implement simplicity into our lives to make room mentally and physically to pursue the kingdom of God.
So, if our culture were to ask the question, "Well, what's the secret to life?" we probably wouldn't hold up one finger. We like all these things and toes. Can I count on those too? In other words, we tend to think the secret to life is lots of things. I'm not just talking about material things.
I'm just talking about lots and lots of choices and lots and lots of desires. And so, we want to keep our options open. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that purity of heart is to will one thing. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Jesus says, and the word pure means unmixed, unmixed.
When Jesus says, "Seek first the kingdom of God," he's not he's not saying that there other things aren't important. He's just saying there's so much. Less important, so that you could even bring it down to this essence, this one choice of enjoying Jesus and pursuing all that's in His kingdom. That that is what makes life so rich. Not so so many choices.
We get really mixed up, don't we? I was thinking back to the story of a man who was happily fishing on a big lake in his little boat, and he was catching plenty of fish. And a man in a much bigger fishing boat came by and said, "Wow, you really are catching the fish." I mean, I said, "Yep, having a good day." And he said, "Anybody can catch that many fish. You know what you ought to do?" The man said, "What?" The man in the bigger boat said, "You ought to get a bigger boat." Said why? He said, "Well, you can go out deeper, catch even more fish, bigger fish." He said, "Why?" He said, "Because you catch more fish and bigger fish, you might be able to get two or three boats, and you could be the captain of a whole fleet of boats that could be catching all of these fish." The man said, "Well, why would I do that?" He said, "Because, man, you could make so much more money that way.
You could sell all those fish." Keep building your fleet. You could you could be the president of a big corporation, and you could sell fish all over the world this way. And the man said, "Well, why would you? Why would I want to do that?" He said, "Because he said one day you could make so much money and put it into your 401k, and you could retire and spend your time doing whatever you want." He said, "That's what I'm doing." How confused we can get! We tend to think, in our culture, I'm talking about unveiling an ideology that we're not conscious of, but it's around us all the time.
That we think that more choice means more peace and happiness. And listen, I like my choices. Don't get me wrong. I am not a monk. I am.
I like. I remember. Does anybody else remember when they first introduced Baskin Robbins? I remember the first store in Greensboro on Battleground Avenue. Before that, we had chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and butter pecan.
And then Baskin Robbins came, and at thirty-one flavors, and we're like kids going in, like thirty-one flavors. That was when I got introduced to mint chocolate chip. Mint chocolate chip changed my childhood, and now we got Ben and Jerry's. We've been to the. Vermont headquarters of Ben and Jerry's.
There's so many flavors I couldn't list them all for you. I could highly recommend to you s'mores, caramel suture, and fish food. But take your sample of all of them. That could be a bucket list item for some of us. Just like taste all the Ben and Jerry's.
Do you have any idea how many choices of cheesecake there are at Cheesecake Factory? I didn't even like cheesecake until Cheesecake Factory came around. When cheesecake was just kind of a bland thing with some strawberries on it, I didn't as a kid. But cheesecake factory cheesecake, oh my!
Now that's where you should chase toasted s'mores galore, and it'll change your life. I was checking how many cereals there are, and you can't even list them. I don't take the time to even begin to go over them, so I wrote in my notes all the breakfast cereals that start with the letter C. And I don't have time to go through them all because once you get into Captain Crunch, you got Captain Crunch Quaker Oats, Captain Crunch Crunch Berries, Captain Crunch Oops Oops, Captain Planet cereal, and then you start going into Cheerios. Apple cinnamon Cheerios, banana nut Cheerios, berry nut Cheerios, cinnamon burst Cheerios, chocolate Cheerios, frosted Cheerios, fruity Cheerios, honey nut Cheerios, Millennial Cheerios, Millennial Cheerios, multi grain Cheerios, multi grain dark chocolate crunch Cheerios, oat cluster Cheerios, team Cheerios, yogurt burst Cheerios, yogurt burst Cheerios, vanilla or strawberry, and now we're into checks: apple cinnamon checks, chocolate checks, cinnamon check, corn check, double check, frosted mini check, graham check.
I hadn't even gotten. All the way down to where you start talking about the chocolate things, and just the C's—I can't even list them all. We got so many breakfast cereals. Isn't it life? Just—I mean, like we think the choices are going to help us be more satisfied, and then it somehow does the opposite, doesn't it?
I have a little post-trauma stress right now because this summer. I decided to explore switching cellular provider. If you're thinking about it, just don't do it. Just don't. Just don't.
Just take the medicine. Just pay the money. Just don't. Even though your your plan is the worst plan, just don't do it. I tried.
I explored all of the different providers. Learned about all the different options, and eventually got convinced by my provider to stay with them. And then there's just so many different things. I was convinced I was getting a good deal. I got my first bill, and I'm like horrors, and it stayed horrible.
And now I'm out of energy, and I can't. I'm just paying them more money to stay with the same people. I don't even know what happened. It just happened. It just happened.
It's it's bad. It's bad. I'm just saying that so many choices is actually sociologists have learned anxiety producing. We've spoken before of the famous study that some researchers did in a California gourmet market, where they set up 24 different kinds of jams, Wilkin and Sons jams, but every few hours they reduced it down to just six. And in this famous study, they found out.
That on average, customers would taste test two of the jams, regardless of which assortment they were looking at. And if they taste tested it, they'd give them a dollar off coupon for one of the jams. Here is the interesting part: sixty percent of the customers, sixty percent of people walking by, were drawn in to look at the bigger display that had twenty-four jams. Only forty percent would stop and look where there were just six jams.
So that's a significant difference. How many people wanted to stop and look? But what they found was really surprising. Thirty percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment of just six jams, thirty percent of them decided to buy some. But of those that tasted jam while looking at twenty-four different options, only three percent bought any.
They were ten times more likely to buy if the choice was narrowed down. And now there have been study after study that have shown the same thing. What is that saying? It's saying there's something about this modern world with all of its choices that is paralyzing. There's something about this where we look at so many things, and we're like, "I can't do anything." There's a word for that feeling of, "I can't, I can't, I can't decide.
I just, I just can't." A word for that? Anxiety. We're anxious. We got so many more choices, but I think of Doctor Phil's question: "How's that working for you?" Sometimes you feel like your choices are just eating up your life, too. The number of times that my wife and I have sat there and said, "What do you want to watch tonight?" and started looking around.
On the networks and Netflix and what's on and you know it was up to me one choice sports and we'd be fine but it doesn't seem to work and so we start looking through it all. I mean you know when when I was young we had three networks now we got fifty over the air networks plus all the streaming services. I mean, all these things: Netflix Prime, Pluto, Hulu, Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, Discovery Plus, AMC Plus, We TV Plus, BT Plus. You know what? Nobody ever office is something minus.
There's always plus. And how many times like we sit around looking for something to watch, and I'm like, "Honey, I'm out of time. I got to go to bed." We never saw that.
So, how's it working for us? Anxiety disorders now. The most common psychological disorder: one in five, twenty percent of Americans don't just have some anxiety; have what psychologists would label a disorder, chronic problem. Pastor Alan Wright, our good news message: simplicity from the series "The Gateways of Grace." Stay with us. Pastor Alan is back here in the studio sharing his parting good news thought for the day in just a moment.
What if growing closer to God isn't about trying harder?
So often we approach spiritual growth with a list of things we need to do: pray more, read more, be better. But what if the secret to spiritual transformation isn't found in greater effort, but in experiencing more of God's grace? In his book *The Gateways of Grace*, Pastor Alan Wright invites you to discover a fresh perspective on spiritual growth. Through timeless practices like scripture, prayer, meditation, wonder, and rest, you'll discover how to create space for the Holy Spirit to work in your life. These spiritual disciplines aren't obligations that earn God's favor.
They're gateways that open our hearts to experience more of God's goodness, peace, and transforming grace. When you give to Allen Wright Ministries, you help share the gospel with listeners around the world. And when you give today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's book, *The Gateways of Grace*, as our thanks. To discover these aren't just disciplines; they're gateways. Step through them and discover the grace that's been waiting for you.
The gospel is shared when you give to Allen 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 Allen Wright Ministries. Call us at eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty.
That's eight seven seven. Five four four forty eight sixty, or come to our website pastorallen dot org. Back here in the studio to share Pastor Alan's parting good news thought for the day on simplicity. As we place the bookmark here, our life is very complex. We're not going to stop the complexity of culture and society.
Everything is moving at lightning pace, and yet Jesus invites us into. A gift, the simplicity of ultimate focus on one thing. Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and to not be anxious about all of these other things.
So, to get rid of anxiety, you don't need more; you need less. That's the mystery we're diving into. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at pastorallen dot org or call eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty.
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