Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing—a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. Jesus's name is more powerful than we have conceived, and we've been given more authority than we have believed. And those, I think, are the lessons from Luke 10, where Jesus sends out the seventy-two, and they return overjoyed that even the demons are subject to them in Jesus' name. Jesus answers the giddy followers with a vision. I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.
Jesus has seen the defeat of evil in the cosmic realm, and he invites us into his heavenly vision so that we too will fear no evil. The key to strong faith is accurate vision. I bless your spiritual eyes to see the demise of the devil, which has been secured by the blood of the Savior. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Allen Wright. And I think this is the invitation Jesus gives.
It's the allure and attraction towards His kingdom that beckons us inward. Come and seek first Me, Jesus says, and all of My kingdom. And let it be the one thing in your life, and everything else will find its place. 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 are 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. 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 they're 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? Said, well, you can go out deeper, catch even more fish, bigger fish. He said, why? I 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 four hundred one k, and you could." Hire 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 are 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 do. 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's 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 40 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. 30 of the people who had sampled from the small assortment of just six jams, 30 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've 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 Dr.
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, if it's 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 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 is like we stand 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 you there." 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.
Interesting citizens in wealthier countries three times more likely to have generalized anxiety disorder than those in low-income countries. That's startling, and. We're just more anxious, even before COVID, which spiked our anxiety. Two thousand seventeen, two thirds reported in a American Psychiatric Association poll being anxious. Millennials have the most anxiety.
Barna reports three out of five young adults identify as stressed out. The anxiety is like so often like a Rush of one thought to the next that has a hard time stopping. Like one person struggling with anxiety said, "It's like I have a list of possible problems in my head." Is almost it's it's it's not funny, but because we've all experienced it. But this is what happens. And if all the real problems are solved, I turn another one into a problem so I can worry about it.
And there's something Jesus says of a whole different approach to life, where you can find liberty, freedom from this through an incredible narrowing. I was on a plane this week. I don't like airports or planes. Nobody likes sitting here like this, you know, but. I do find if I get a two or three hours on an airplane ride, if it's not too bumpy or whatever, I'm I'm strangely productive.
I'm I'm oddly in touch with God. I'm oddly creative. You'd think it'd be the opposite, and I was thinking about that this week while I was was thinking about this message and sitting on my little seat, you know, and like, why is it like?
Well. Because the plane ride narrows all my choices. You can't talk to anybody on the phone. I guess you can pay for internet now, but you really can't be checking your emails. You, you, you can't go somewhere else.
You're just here. Most of the time, I don't know anybody else on the plane, and something about it's strangely freeing. I'm all. I'm saying all of this to begin to point you to the mystery that Jesus is talking about, that He's inviting you into. He's inviting you and me into the deeper and more authentic kind of peace that He's saying can only come through this unique, powerful.
And beautiful, and utterly prioritized relationship with Him, in pursuit of everything that He oversees—the kingdom of God—and that if you really want, that's what this principle says, to have all this other stuff. The secret path is through seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. These other things get added to you. I'm just—I know I'm going on and on about this, but let us not be duped by this culture that we are in. The answer is not to keep our options open for fear of missing out.
The answer. Is to zero in on this one thing. I'm saying that this kind of covenantal relationship with Christ, this kind of, this is opening up, like when He says, "The narrow gate leads to life; the broad gate constricts." The narrow gate opens it up, and I feel like that. We who have lived for some time, seeing the power of that kind of narrow choice that opens up greater blessings, need to talk about it. Which means sometimes us married folk who have been married for a while need to tell some people: being married is a challenge.
And you go through some difficult things, and you go through days where you are like, "Man, why are we even trying to do this? And this is so hard. And that conversation was so hard." And you are going to be married. You are going to do that, and you are going to learn to forgive a thousand times, and you are going to get things shaped and stretched in you. But we need to say, "But marriage is wonderful, and it is the only pathway to a certain kind of blessing." It doesn't mean that there is not a blessedness in being single.
And I don't share an illustration like this to say, "Hey, you need to hurry up and get married." And I sure don't share an illustration like this to say, "Gosh, feel bad about the you know the brokenness of what happened in your marriage." But we just need to tell some of these stories. And Anne and I have laughed before because sometimes when married people and you've been married a long time, thirty-nine years for us, you just things just happen. You are like, "Oh, I can't even believe that." We've told you before. One night in the middle of the night. Just in the middle of that, just three a.m.
in the morning, we both just out of our sleep decided to kind of roll over towards the center at the exact same moment, and just head butted each other right in the middle of the night. Like, how can you even do that? How is that even possible? Just, I mean, the and and I'll never forget it. And we just like bam, bam, bam.
My head was, you know, like it was hard, like bam. And all of a sudden, I hear her snickering, and she said. What are the chances of that? There's no chance of that. There's no chance of that.
And this week, I had a day that was a really hard day.
Some hard things happened in that day.
Some things that that hurt my feelings and were hard, you know. And that night, we're lying in bed, and this woman of God began to minister. The word to me, and just in the middle of the night, we both moved our hand and towards the center of the bed, and our hands just touched each other, and we clasped our hands. Pastor Alan Wright, our good news message: Simplicity from the series The Gateways of Grace. He 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 with Pastor Alan in the studio as we place the bookmark here in simplicity, and might this kind of go hand in hand with an earlier teaching on rest, or it's just it's focusing in strategically on simplicity. The same complexity of the culture that makes it hard for us to rest makes it hard for us to practice simplicity. As we've been looking at in this message, it's we live in a world of choices gone wild.
It's hard to pick out a box of cereal in the grocery store. It's hard to make any choice because there's so many, many choices.
So I think we all recognize that there can be a freedom that comes when life gets simpler.
Well. The power in narrowing choice down is something that Jesus is pointing to in our text from Matthew six and throughout the Sermon of on the Mount. To be anxious for nothing doesn't mean you don't care about things, but it means that on the most basic things of life, what you wear, what you eat. Holding the future, that you move to a level of trust in God, and it starts simplifying your life. Thanks for listening today.
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