David Wright

Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

The Cure For Selfishness

As parents, do you ever notice times when you feel like your kids are becoming selfish?

Maybe they are wanting and constantly begging and needing and their room is full of toys or whatever it is, but they want more.

Do you ever notice that in your children, parents?

My wife grew up in Africa the first 9 years and she remembers when her parents noticed that little characteristic starting to crop up.

They would gather some of the toys they didn't play with very often and would go give them away to people in town that had very little.

And so when we got the opportunity to go to Meru, Kenya with some of you that are here, the idea was to do the very same.

And so I don't have sound on this, you don't really need it, but here we are at 1 of the boarding schools, this is an elementary boarding school, so these are little kids, All they have is a tiny chest and everything they have is in that chest.

I'm trying to remember if they even split the, excuse me, split the chest with somebody else, but we got permission to go in with some of these stuffed animals.

And so Elizabeth is there with a bag handing out some of our kids' toys and stuffed animals.

And so each 1, we had to have 1 for each of these young people to put on their chest so when they came they received and had something fun there to to be to enjoy And I don't know if you can see, it's not too big, but the smiles on these kids' faces and on our kids' faces as they're handing out and giving away.

I mean, these stuffed animals were at home before and they were sad.

They were just in this pile or in the corner and they weren't getting loving.

And now, all of these, I promise you, have gotten a lot of loving.

Truly, it is more blessed to give than to receive.

There's a joy that comes in giving that I think is beautiful.

First Timothy chapter 6 verse 10 it says, for the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.

You know the Love of money is 1 of the clearest manifestations of selfishness.

Second Timothy chapter 3 verse 2, for men will be, and this is describing people in the last days, lovers of themselves, selfishness, Lovers of money.

Do we live in a time when people are in love with themselves?

You know, I'm just gonna put out there, there is a myth that many have bought into and that is the simple idea that stuff, that things, that money equals happiness and it's not true.

In fact there are plenty of examples where the inverse is true.

You know, if we just had a car that was more reliable, if we just had a this or that to enjoy and so on and so forth, then we'd be happy.

Happiness does not come from what you have.

If you've been on a mission trip, you know you have seen people that have essentially nothing.

And they have more joy on their face than these Americans that have everything.

Evangelism 633 says, selfishness is the root of all evil.

Steps to Christ, page 43, the warfare against self is the greatest battle that was ever fought.

I think certainly part of the answer is in giving.

It says, let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.

By giving of our time and our resources, we help put at bay this idea of selfishness.

Matthew 6, 21, for where your treasure is, what?

All I have to do is look at your credit card statement or your checkbook or or whatever it is and I can tell very quickly what is important and of value to you.

Councils on Stewardship says this, the Lord places in our hands his gifts in order that we shall divide with those who are needy and it is this practical giving that will be to us a sure panacea or solution or we could say cure or remedy for all selfishness.

If we're selfish, we need to Give, not less, but more.

But that works against, well, exactly, against my selfishness.

Because I want to do this and I want to do that.

I'm saving for this, that, and the I want to be comfortable.

And here we're told that the solution, the cure, the remedy for selfishness is in giving.

I find it interesting as Adventists we believe in the 3 angels messages, yes, of Revelation chapter 14 And at the heart of this message is a people keeping the seventh day Sabbath.

And we know that when we talk about prophecy and end times that the Sabbath is part of this thing.

Certainly We know from Revelation chapter 13 that there's going to be a national Sunday law and that ultimately it will lead to a death decree.

And so really the idea is are you going to follow God and keep the 10 Commandments or are you gonna compromise and follow man for self-preservation?

But here's the question I want to ask of my Seventh-day Adventist audience.

If we believe there is a time that is coming when we would rather die than break 1 of God's commandments, what about today?

Today, are we breaking 1 of the 10 commandments And thinking it's a light thing that doesn't so much matter?

Is there stealing in the church that's taking place today?

What is 1 of the commandments that we have here?

The eighth commandment, thou shalt not steal.

Malachi 3 verse 8 says, will a man rob God?

But you say, in what ways have we robbed you?

And the response, in tithes and offerings.

Sometimes we think, well if I just check the tithe box, I'm good.

But this verse says quite to the contrary.

I don't have to check just the tithe box, but God wants me to return offerings as well.

Because he knows it's a cure for my selfishness.

That's where I wanted this quote that was quite a ways back.

I'm not sure I'm gonna go back, but she says, it's a very solemn thing that I have to tell you.

It's in Councils, is it on Councils on Stewardship?

Anyway, I could find it, Christian Service.

It's a very solemn thing I have to tell you, and that is not 1 in 20 is prepared and will be ready just because their names are on the church books that when Jesus comes they will be found not ready and will not be going to heaven.

And so we have this idea if I my name is on the church books if I return tithe but you know the offerings I'm not such a big I'll put a few $1 bills in the offering plate when it comes by but I have a lot of things that I need to do.

And could it be that's the Petri dish that fosters the selfishness, the self-preservation, the me first attitude that ultimately could lead to my destruction.

Perhaps this is more serious than we thought.

Percent of active, this is the Seventh-day Adventist members who return, excuse me, return tithes by age.

And you'll notice there, 20 to 29, they're having a harder time letting it go.

Righteous Fruit

I'm gonna go back and grab some stories here from our chapter of the Wright Photo Album.

But somebody had the idea, and I don't have pictures from the original trip, if you will, but I tried to piece together.

The idea was to go to Cherokee, North Carolina, and we were gonna do a couple of things.

1 of the things was go down Deep Creek, anybody done that in Bryson City and you rent these inner tubes and you actually go up into the park service area, the protected part of the land and you float down on this beautiful creek and it's a good time.

And then another thing that we had on our plans of things to do was go to Unto These Hills.

It's an outdoor drama of the Cherokee people and the Trail of Tears and their displacement and so on.

And so all of this was just going to be a wonderful time with another family we enjoyed and hung out with a lot.

And I won't say the name of the individual that made the reservations, Carol Smith, but she had found this beautiful, quaint little place.

And this was before internet and before pictures and certainly before reviews, but it just sounded so nice.

Doesn't that sound like a nice place to stay?

And the rooms were spacious and they had little kitchenettes and the whole thing and there was a pool for the children and so on.

And so she thought, this will be wonderful.

And so she made the arrangements for the rooms that we needed for our 2 families, and so we drove into the parking lot of the princess.

And it wasn't quite the quaint little place that we were anticipating.

I mean the grass is tall and the landscaping is out of control and we're not sure where the front desk is.

I mean, there's issues, and then there's a sense even that there's a creepiness about this place, and the parents had to go into the room, and I won't tell you some of the things that they found in the room that they had to clean up and so on.

In fact, I think they had to go and get some kind of cleaning supplies to clean the rooms before we could stay in the rooms.

I had to text my mom, I said, did we actually stay in the Princess Hotel or did we go down the road?

And while the parents were kind of cleaning out the room, we checked out the pool.

And the pool looked very similar to this picture, very green, lots of leaves.

And then we noticed, I shouldn't tell you about this part, but there was something waiting at the bottom of the deep end, and we thought, yeah, I don't think we're gonna use this pool either.

We had expectations of a place, and our expectations happened to be wrong.

They didn't quite pan out like we thought or that we had anticipated or that we had hoped.

And today I wanna talk to you about expectations that we might have as it relates to righteousness.

That may not be necessarily wrong, but they're not necessarily accurate either.

And so we're continuing this series, Christ Our Righteousness, and this is part 7.

So what is Righteous Fruit and what does that look like in the life of the believer?

Now we talked last week about obedience, we talked about how that's in the heart of the 3 angels' messages, we talked about some of the beauty and joys that come along with that, and so I'm not here to put that to the side in any respect, But oftentimes when we think about righteousness, we think of something that I don't do or don't do any longer.

But I want to stretch our minds a little bit this morning that righteousness is more than just not doing things, but is in fact doing things.

Certainly the Lord wants us to surrender to Him on a daily basis.

The Lord wants to do a work in our lives, but that's not where it stops.

He wants to do that work in our lives so that we can be fruitful.

And that's what I want to talk about this morning because oftentimes it's that righteous fruit that gets overlooked.

To start, I want to begin by turning to Luke, chapter 7, and I hope you brought your Bibles this morning.

We're in Luke, chapter 7, and this is the story of John the Baptist as he finds himself in a situation that is not what he desires for himself.

And so we read this section of John's experience where John is really rather discouraged.

Have you ever been discouraged in ministry?

You're seeking to follow his plan, but it seems that things aren't connecting like you had hoped, like you had wanted.

Now yes, that's good for us to continue to be, you know, to fall on our knees and ask the Lord, Lord, am I doing what you want me to do?

Am I going in the direction you want me to go?

But let me at least say this, that just because things don't go well doesn't mean that God is not in it.

Sometimes we think if God is in something, it will be just blessing after blessing after blessing after blessing.

And sometimes that's true, but sometimes it's not.

Sometimes God delivers people out of prison, sometimes He doesn't.

Sometimes he delivers people and their lives, if you will.

And that is certainly the case with John.

And I'm thankful for this story of John because it helps me to not be so discouraged when things don't go according to the way I want them to.

And so that's where we find John this morning and we pick up in verse 19 of Luke chapter 7.

Luke chapter 7 verse 19, and John calling 2 of his disciples to him, sent them to Jesus, because he is in prison, so he sends his disciples to Jesus saying, are you the coming 1, capital letters, or do we look for another?

Wow, that's a big question, To send with his disciples to Jesus.

Essentially, John is saying, Are you the Messiah or are you not?

I thought, I mean John was there at the baptism and the dove and the voice, this is my son in whom I'm well pleased.

But now I'm questioning, are you the Messiah or should we expect someone else?

Because if you're the Messiah, you're not doing anything for me.

So, pssh, pssh, pssh, hey guys, come here, come here, come here.

I have a message for you and I want you to take it to Jesus and I want you to ask this very pointed question.

And they might even say, John, are you sure you wanna ask that?

Verse 20, when the men, the 2 of John's disciples, had come to him, Jesus, they said, John the Baptist has sent us to you saying, Are you the coming 1?

And then there's something very interesting that happens there in the passage.

And if you were Jesus, how would you answer?

Would you be tempted or inclined to respond with, well we won't say what we might do, but notice here between verse 20 and 21, there's no response.

It simply moves on as if they didn't even ask the question, as if the question wasn't even important.

Husbands, wives, do you like it when your spouse asks you a question and you get no response?

I asked you a question, are you not hearing me?

Gary Black was saying he got an ear test this week and he was showing his sab school class the results and he said, this little section where it says I don't hear anything, that I think is where my wife's voice lines up.

But Jesus doesn't seem to answer the question.

But it says in verse 21, in that very hour, he cured many infirmities, afflictions, and evil spirits.

He's curing many and their afflictions, casting out evil spirits and demons and so on.

Elijah

06 When Depression Seized a Prophet

If I could count all the times I had poor judgment.

I've shared with you many of my times of poor judgment.

I don't think I've shared this 1 with you.

There was a time that I had access to a four-wheel drive Wrangler, Jeep Wrangler.

I really enjoyed this vehicle very much, and it was through that that I had a love for four-wheeling and got to see what four-wheel drives can do.

I remember being taken out several times with people in their Jeep Wrangler and going up banks that I never thought you could go up in a vehicle.

In fact, we couldn't scramble up on foot.

And we thought this was an impossibility.

It was very much like this balcony here, and it was virtually got to where it was almost straight up.

And I remember on 1 of these expeditions, standing there looking at that, and it looked like a road that went up.

And I made the mistake of asking, do people actually go up that?

First, I want you to see if you can climb up it.

So we all make fools of ourselves on this shale, trying to climb up.

And I remember that at the start of this, I mean it was about as high as that is and it went straight up.

And on the other side of over here, there was a cliff.

There was the interstate right down here.

There's a little run at it, maybe as much as this, maybe less, and we go after it.

Then on the third attempt, I don't know if he put it in low or what he did, he had to get the gears figured out, got a little bit more rev that he needed, maybe it was in second low, I don't remember.

I was just looking at this place straight up that we were going to go, thinking this isn't going to happen.

And the front tires just barely go over the edge, and those four-wheeler enthusiasts know what I'm talking about.

And when those front 2 top tires just barely got over the top, we just crawled right up.

And we thought, well, man, that wasn't so bad.

Which leads me to another story of poor judgment.

When I was in the Wrangler that I had access to, and I had it full of people in the car and we were going someplace on a Saturday afternoon, and part of that was a gravel drive, and there was this rutted road going up, and it was pretty steep, but it was nothing like that.

And somebody said, well, can we go up there?

You obviously don't know what a four-wheel drive can do.

I'd never been on this road before, but That doesn't so much matter when you don't have good judgment.

You know, I'm picking my route, I'm avoiding different things, and then there's some ruts.

No problem, I know what to do with the ruts.

And so I'm beside the ruts, and I'm straddling the ruts.

And the ruts get bigger and bigger and the walls get higher and higher until there's no place to go except slide down into these ruts that are I don't know this this tall And the bottom of my Jeep is bobbing out and scraping.

And then before I know it, it's, zzz, zzz.

Well, suffice it to say, eventually, we scraped and bumped and made our way back down the road, To which I was a little bit red-faced and embarrassed.

It says a successful man was asked the secret of his accomplishments.

And from where did you gain your experience?

Maybe some of the wisest people here in the room.

I've learned from my mistakes." We took quite a pause, if you will, from this series on Elijah.

Filled with courage and humility, a dependence upon God.

It can be easy to put him on a pedestal as superhuman.

But then it's the brother of Jesus who reminds us in his book James chapter 5 verse 17, Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, like yours, like mine.

He had his challenges, he had his shortcomings, there were times of doubt and discouragement as we will see more fully in today's piece.

05 Unashamed and Unterrified

Well, Nikita Hershov, the former Soviet Union, gave a major address on the state of Soviet affairs before the Supreme Soviet in Moscow.

His speech broke new ground as it openly addressed the savage excesses of the Stalin era.

As Hershoff spoke, someone from the audience sent up an embarrassing note.

Premier Hershoff, what were you doing when Stalin committed all these atrocities?

He was rather upset when he received the note and he shouted to everyone out there, who sent up this note?

I will give you 1 minute to stand up and claim it.

The seconds ticked by and nobody stood up to claim it.

Finally, he offered this, All right, I'll tell you what I was doing.

I was doing exactly what the writer of this note is doing now.

Afraid to stand up against the regime until a more convenient time?

Today we're gonna talk about in this piece of our series entitled The Days of Elijah in Part 5, unafraid and unterrified.

Because we see in this piece of the story, we see Elijah being willing to be counted in a marked way against some very incredible odds.

Yet in the entire process, we don't see Elijah afraid.

We see him glorifying God by his actions.

And we don't see him standing for matters of personal opinion, we're not talking about preferences but no, we see him taking a stand for the true God, the 10 commandments, the character of God.

And so as you recall this all began with a bold message as Elijah was jealous for the glory of God and it went from there to a season of isolation where he was alone by the brook, trusting in the provision and timing of the Lord, followed by a call finally to go.

And then we have the miracle of provision in Zarephath, followed by an incredible reunion that we looked at last time.

And now we're gonna pick up the story in 1 Kings chapter 18.

And so if you have your Bibles, I encourage you to follow along as we read and allow this story to unfold.

There are certain stories in scripture that are intimidating to preach.

Back to Menu

Presenter

David Wright

All Recordings

The Cure For Selfishness

53m

Righteous Fruit

42m

06 When Depression Seized a Prophet

42m

05 Unashamed and Unterrified

48m

04 The Power of the Truth Lived Out

47m

03 Willing to Give Up Everything

55m

02 When the Brook Dries Up

48m

01 Standing Alone in the Gap

46m

God Invented Sex

1h 34m

Never Enough

49m

Are You an Evolutionist?

54m

A Father’s Love

1h 15m

Sound Doctrine