Use my whole voice before we even started.
Cupboard is bare.
All right.
I'll try my best not to be long and boring, but I know one thing.
If no one here enjoys
my sermon, I know my mama will.
I could say, amen, and Jesus loves you 10 times and she'd still be proud of me.
I love you, mama.
There's very little about me that would
be worth a man at all without my mom and
my dad may rest in the Lord's arms.
All right, so speaking of sons.
That's what we're going to be back in looking at Isaac and Rebecca's
son's life, the life of Jacob, the little heel
grabber himself.
So, um, we
are going to be in Genesis chapter number 28 today.
Genesis number chapter number 28 and
these are narratives.
And so I'll be reading the whole chapter for
us this morning, but Genesis 28, 1
through 22.
God, George says, So, Isaac, called Jacob,
and blessed him, and charged him, and said to him,
You shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan,
Arise, go to Pedan Aram, to the house of
Bethul, your mother's father.
And from there, take to yourself a wife, from the
daughters of Laban, your mother's brother.
May God Almighty bless you, and make
you fruitful, and multiply you, that you may become
a company of peoples.
May he also give you the blessing of Abraham, to you
and to your descendants with you, that you may possess the land of
your sojournings, which God gave to Abraham.
Then Isaac sent Jacob away, and he went to
Pedan Aram, to Laban, son of Pethul, our
man, the brother of Rebekah, the mother of Jacob and Esau.
Now, Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob,
and sent him away to Badonaram to take to himself away
from there, and that when he blessed him, he charged
him, saying, You shall not take a wife from
the daughters of Canaan, and that Jacob had obeyed his
father and his mother, and had gone to Badonaram.
So Esau saw the daughters of Canaan displease his
father Isaac, and Esau went to Ishmael, and
married, besides the wives that he had, Mahaloth,
the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham's son, the sister of Nabaioth.
Then Jacob departed from Beersheba, and went toward Haran.
He came to a certain place, and spent the night there, because
the sun had set, and he took one of the stones of the place, and
put it under his head, and lay down in that place.
He had a dream, and, behold, a ladder was
set on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and,
behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
And behold, the Lord stood above it,
and said, I am the Lord, the God of your Father,
Abraham, and the God of Isaac, the land on which you
lie, I will give it to you and to your descendants.
Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth.
And you will spread out to the west, and to the east,
and to the north, and to the south, and in you, and in your descendants,
shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
Behold, I am with you, and we'll
keep you wherever you go, and we'll bring you back to this
land, for I will not leave you until I have done what
I have promised you.
Then Jacob awoke from his sleep, and said, Surely the Lord
is in his place, and I did not know it.
He was afraid, and said, How awesome is this place?
This is none other than the house of God, and
this is the gate of heaven.
So Jacob rose early in the morning, and took the stone that
he had put under his head, and set it up as a pillar,
and poured oil on its top.
He called the name of the place Bethel.
However, previously, the name of the city had been Luz.
Then Jacob made a vow, saying, If God will be
with me, and will keep me on this journey that I take, and
will give me food to eat, and garments to wear, and I
return to my father's house in safety, then the
Lord will be my God.
This stone, which I have set up as a pillar, will
be God's house, and of all that you give me, I
will surely give a 10th to you.
Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, we love you.
Thank you, Lord, for your mercy that is displayed in all of our lives,
and in Jacob's life that we can read this morning.
I pray you bless the message in spite of the messenger, and that
all your words and your truths will bless our minds and our hearts
for your glory in Christ's name.
Amen.
All right, so this is the 3rd part of
Jacob's life.
And this chapter is actually the beginning of the
third part, which will be spread over the next four chapters after this.
So get ready for when we read that whole passage next time.
But we have taught, we started out talking about
Jacob's birth, and how, from the beginning,
he's a little schemer, that supplanter,
the heel grabber, that he was always out
for himself, and trying to make plans to better
himself by his own way.
And we also talked about Rebecca,
and the prophecy that God had given her, that the two babies
that were in her womb, that the twin brothers, Esau
and Jacob, were the start, the beginning of two
different nations, that the rogue named
Jacob, would be one nation, and the utterly
secular man that was Esau, would be another nation.
And one of the things, when we're dealing with the
sovereignty of God, either in scripture or in our
own lives, one of the main things we ask is
the question, why, God, have you ever tried
to ask God why?
Have you ever heard anyone else ask God why?
We can all relate to that question.
But there's another question that's not asked nearly as
much, but is just as important, and that is how
God, how are you going to fulfill your
promises with the situation as it is?
For example, Abraham.
God made a promise to Abraham that his seed would
fill the earth, that he'd be the father of many nations,
that his seed would be like the sand, the sea, and the
stars in the sky, and that he would be a blessing to the whole world.
And then his next generation, is Isaac.
And we saw how much a mess Isaac was.
And then the generation following Isaac, the third generation
after Abraham, is Jacob and Esau, and
what a batch of dysfunction and
mess, where Jacob and Esau,
and Rebecca and Isaac all together.
So how, God, are you going to keep your
promises and make them work out with this material?
Well, part of the reason why Genesis
is written at all is to show his people,
the Hebrew people, and then us, the Christian people,
exactly how God works, and that
helps us, as we live our lives, and we wonder how
is this going to work out for your glory, that we can trust in that?
And that's kind of the message of what we're talking about through all of
Jacob's life, that God weaves his
plan through the tapestry of all of our lives.
He works out.
He works through our lives, and he works through the lives of
sinners and dysfunction and mess,
just like all of us.
And we can see that he does that by looking at the example that
he gave us in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
and so forth, and so on, all the way up until Christ.
Since the two fraternal twins were born, as we saw.
There was this sibling rivalry that was just constant.
They were both working against each other, trying to get ahead, and
then this reached the apex of it in our last message,
where Esau, the favorite son of
Isaac, because remember Isaac liked the food that he cooked.
He was going to receive the blessing of the family as
the eldest of the two brothers.
And this hungry patriarch, Isaac,
was going to give him his blessing for a
meal of game that he cooked.
But Jacob, Rebekah, his
favorite son, stole it through deceit,
that the working of Rebecca and Jacob to deceive
Isaac to seal the blessing.
And this is exactly the material that I'm talking about.
This is what God has to work with.
All four of these are full of dysfunction and sin.
But God can make the pottery
of his plan work out even with lumpy clay.
So today's passage actually begins in the
last chapter, in the last part, as we see
more of this dysfunction laid out with Esau,
Jacob, and Rebecca and Isaac.
So if we go back to verse 41 of chapter
27, it says, So Esau bore a grudge
against Jacob, because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him.
And Esau said to himself, The
days of mourning for my father are near.
Then, I will kill my brother Jacob.
Now, in the words of her elder son, Esau,
were reported to Rebecca, she sent and called her younger
son, Jacob, and said to him, Behold, your brother,
Esau, is consoling himself, concerning you,
by planning to kill you.
Now have you ever comforted yourself by planning on killing someone else?
Now, therefore, my son, obey my voice,
and arise, flee to Haran, to my brother Laban,
stay with him a few days until your brother's
fury subsides, until your brother's anger
against you subsides, and he forgets what you did to him.
Then I will send you and get to you from there.
Why should I be bereaved of both of you in one day?
Now, I want you to remember, that is the purpose that Rebecca wants
Jacob to go to her brother Laban's house, or
land, or farm, is
for him to escape the murder of his brother.
But then, Rebecca goes to Isaac, the patriarch,
laying up in bed in his old age and blindness, if you remember, and
she says, This in verse 46, Rebecca said to Isaac, I am tired of living.
Because of the daughters of Heth, if Jacob takes
a wife from the daughters of Heth, like these, from the daughters
of the land, what good will my life be to me?
Oh.
So she's not telling the whole truth to
her husband, Isaac, is she?
Esau was so mad at Jacob, he threatened to murder him.
Rebecca heard this, and she immediately started
to make plans, and a scheme about what to do.
So she told Jacob her plan, go
leave, and then Esau eventually will forget what happened.
Now, would you forget that
your blessing was stolen by your brother?
Probably not.
But she knew Esau, and she knew that
eventually he would, because his personality,
as soon as his mind went to something else, all that was
gone, all his care for this was gone, and he would just be completely focused
on whatever was in front of him, and the next thing that he wanted.
And she knew this about her son, and she knew that
Jacob would listen to her.
But she did have a problem.
She had to deal with Isaac, the patriarch,
the husband, the one that wore the pants in the family.
But she was a master schemer as well.
She was a master manipulator of her husband,
and so she went in and came up with this complaint
that Esau, you know, he married two local pagan
women, and so she went to Isaac and
put her hand on the back of her head
on her forehead and said, Woe, it's me, husband.
What am I going to do?
And I just picture Scarlet O'Hara, from Gone with the Wind.
And she's going in there, and complaining
to lying to her husband.
But the nagging, complaining works.
And Isaac complies, as
we'll see when we get into our passage.
So I want you to keep in mind, as we go through the
story, this narrative, this account, that the
big picture is that God is weaving
and working through all this, that he is using these
sinners and their actions, their sins,
to fulfill his ultimate will, and
he does that every single time.
God absolutely, through all of this,
invades Jacob's life with
grace, in spite of who he is, and
what he's done, and who Jacob is, and what Jacob has done.
So let's start at the beginning of our chapter and see
how this all works out, as Jacob is sent
to search for a wife in the first nine verses.
First verses, so Isaac called Jacob and blessed him and charged him,
and said to him, You shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan.
Arise, go to Padanaram, to the house of Bethul,
your mother's father, and from there, take to yourself a
wife, from the daughters of Laban, your mother's brother.
And listen to the blessing he gives him.
May God, Almighty bless you, and make you fruitful and
multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples,
may also give you the blessing of Abraham,
to you, and to your descendants, with you, that
you may possess the land of your sore journings,
which God gave to Abraham.
This scene really cracks me up.
I find it hilarious, because we know what just happened in
the last chapter.
Rebecca went in and she put that bug in
Isaac's ear, but he's sitting in his bed, blind and laid up, and
he's telling Jacob, like, it's his idea, like, this is what you need to do, son.
You need to go get you a wife from our family.
So Isaac calls Jacob
and tells him that he must go away to find a
wife from his native land, like it was his idea.
And on top of that, Jacob already
knew what he was going to ask him, because it
was him and Rebecca's plan.
And the reason that all of this is in there.
is to show that this is just one big circle of
dysfunction and manipulation going on,
again, just like we talked about last time.
And there's some other stuff that's coming that will continue to show you the same thing.
So, maybe you can relate with this,
but hopefully, only in a very small way in
your families.
But Isaac goes along with Rebecca's plan and her manipulation
of him, and he blesses Jacob.
He basically blesses Jacob with the
same promises that the covenant that
Yahweh made with Father Abraham down
to him, to Isaac, and passes that blessing
on noun to Jacob.
So you remember how unlikely that
this was to happen last time, because
in Isaac's mind, he was going to bless Esau
with these covenant promises, but God saw
to it that he would end up blessing Jacob
with these covenant promises dead, because
Esau have I hated, and Jacob have
I loved.
So then, the author gives
us Esau's reaction to what has just happened in
verses 6 through 9.
He says, Now, Esau, Saul, that Isaac had blessed
Jacob, and sent him away to Badan Haram to
take to himself a wife from there, and that when he
blessed him, he charged him, saying, You shall not take
a wife from the daughters of Canaan.
and that Jacob had obeyed his father and his mother, and
had gone to put on her arm.
So, Esau, Saul, that the daughters of Canaan displeased his father Isaac.
So what does Esau do?
So Esau went to Ishmael, and
married, besides the wives that he had, Mahalov,
the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham's son, the
sister of Nabarov.
Esau saw that Jacob had got another blessing from
Isaac.
And Esau wanted one of those things for himself.
He just wanted some kind of blessing.
So in his fleshly and secular mind,
he saw what happened, and he tried to
do his own thing, and go his own way, and follow
his own instructions, according to
the way that his mind worked.
So he went and married another woman,
who wasn't a daughter of Heth, who
wasn't a Canaanite, she was the daughter of
Isaac's half brother, Ishmael.
And so, if you remember the story of Abraham
and Sarah, their first child, their
first son, was Ishmael that they had with Sarah's
maid, Hagar, right?
And this was their way of trying
to get what they wanted their own way, instead of God's way.
So Esau is following in his grandfather's
footsteps, by doing it his own way, and finding someone
that's in the family, like Jacob
was going to do, but not exactly what
God was talking about.
Ishmael was over here, and Isaac was over here,
and now he's going his own way, and doing his own thing,
another mess, and just another reiteration
of the problems of not trusting in God.
But that everyone involved here is
a mess, but the difference is the hand of God.
Jacob is a mess.
But God's hand was on him, and
we'll see that in the next part, as Jacob
leaves his family and his land, and heads to
his uncle's place in Padanaram to find a wife.
But something happens along the way to
Padan Aram, as it usually does.
Jacob sleeps on the way, and
he dreams a dream, verse number 10.
Then Jacob departed from Beersheba,
and went toward Haran.
He came to a certain place, and
spent the night there because the sun had set, and
he took one of the stones of the place, and put
it under his head, and laid down in that place.
He had a dream, and, behold, a ladder
was set on the earth, with its top reaching
to heaven, and, behold, the angels of God were ascending
and descending on it.
And behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I
am the Lord, the God of your Father, Abraham, and
the God of Isaac, the land on which you lie, I
will give it to you, and to your descendants.
Your descendants will also be like the
dust of the earth, and you will spread out
to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to
the south, and in you, and in your descendants, shall all the families
of the earth be blessed.
Behold, I am with you.
and will keep you wherever you go, and
will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until
I have done what I have promised you.
So, on the road to Haran,
Jacob comes to a certain place.
And the Bible makes certain, the author of
Genesis, through the Holy Spirit, makes certain that we know
that this is a place.
It's that place.
It's a certain place, that
Jacob finds a place to rest.
Verse 11.
He came to a certain place, and spent the night
there because the sun had set, and he took one of the
stones of the place, and put it under
his head, and lay down in that place.
That certain place where he found a
stone to make a pillow, he would later call
Bethel, and it would become a major part
of the Hebrew geography
in cities, as we'll see later.
But Jacob must have been extremely
tired from his journey.
This is about 55 miles away from
where he started in Beersheba, and so this
is probably three days journey, walking around 55
miles to where he's ended up.
So how do we know that he was probably tired?
Because when he went to lay down, he used a stone
as a pillow.
Now, I'm an old man now, 45 years
old, and I don't need an alarm clock to wake up because
when I wake up, I wake up because my back hurts, right?
I cannot imagine laying down and
using a stone for a pillow, and how
he must have woke up.
But he must have slept really well.
Because as he was sleeping, God
caused him to have a dream.
And in this dream, he
sees a strange, very strange thing.
But the NASB here calls a ladder.
The word means more like a staircase,
or a stairway, up to heaven, no
pun intended with Led Zeppelin.
And so going up and down this staircase to
heaven are angels going
to heaven and coming from heaven and going to earth.
And so just like Esau marrying his
half sister, or half brothers,
however that worked out, was doing it in his own
way, kind of was a call back to
Abraham and Hagar and Ishmael.
This is kind of a callback earlier to Genesis,
to the Tower of Babel, because you
remember why they were building the Tower of Babel,
they weren't able to complete it?
because they were trying to build a building themselves to
reach heaven for themselves.
So here we have a call back to it, but
God's counter to it.
Jacob wasn't trying to reach heaven.
He was just trying to get as good a night of sleep as he could on a stone.
God built the staircase down to
Earth so that we could go up to heaven.
That is the picture that is going on here.
The Tower of Babel was man's way to try to make it
to heaven and to God.
And the Jacob's ladder, or Jacob's
staircase, is God's way of combing down to us.
And so this is ultimately a picture of the incarnation
of our Lord Savior, Jesus Christ.
So, Yahweh made this staircase that came
down to earth.
He built it for us.
And he stood above the ladder, and he called down
to Jacob, and he repeated the same promises
that he made to Abraham, and to Isaac,
and that Isaac that had just blessed Jacob with,
he told him the promise that he
would give him in verse number 15, behold, I am with you,
and we'll keep you wherever you go, and we'll bring you back to
this land, for I will not leave you until I have
done what I have promised you.
Now, can you imagine, this promise
being made to you, by Yahweh
himself, standing in the clouds on this staircase,
this ladder that went up to heaven, and just
imagine the booming voice that he must have heard in
this dream, saying that I'm going to keep you, that
I'm going to bring you back to this land?
Remember, he's leaving the land running for his life.
That was supposed to be his inheritance and all that he had.
Isaac just promised him that land,
but he doesn't know if he's ever going to be able to go back here, but God is
promising that he will be.
But lastly, he promises, I will not
leave you until I have done what
I have promised you.
I'm going to be with you the entire way until
every single one of these promises will
be kept for you, which means God will never
leave him nor forsake him.
What sounds like the same promise that God made
to Moses, that the author of Hebrews quoted
in chapter number 13, being content with what
you have, for he himself has said, I
will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you.
So that is the promise that he made to Jacob.
That's the promise that he made to Moses, and that
is the promise that he made to us, that
we can live our lives knowing that he will never, ever desert
us, and he'll never, ever forsake us.
And that is a promise worth living your
life anchored to.
But wait, there's a little bit of an issue.
See, Grace can be offensive
to us.
Can it not be?
If you don't know, think about it.
Jacob was a rascal, a rogue,
a mess, a great sinner, a liar,
a schemer, a heel grabber, all these things, and
he did nothing to this point, that could
be ever looked at or perceived as
something that was good.
But God came to him out of nowhere and
made these promises to him.
Grace can be very offensive to
our sensibilities.
But if you don't think so, I
read the story studying for this message, and
it was about Henry Gorecki, any World War
II historians here that recognize that name.
There's not many of us that Christian
historians of World War II.
He was a Lutheran minister from St.
Louis, and originally, he was
from Germany, so he spoke German.
And so when he joined the army, he became a
chaplain for the army.
And his post was
to the German prisoners that
were facing the Nuremberg trials.
These were the worst of the Nazis, who oversaw the slaughter
of thousands of Jews, and committed
heinous war crimes against the Allied
forces, and they were going to be condemned to death
or to be marooned and left in prison
for the rest of their lives.
He was the chaplain for
these men facing these charges and what they had done.
So he questioned them.
He was a minister, that he counseled with
them, he prayed to them, and he witnessed to them the
glory of the gospel.
Not all of them, but several of those Nazis
seemed to be genuinely repentant to him.
He was no softy.
His previous ministry experience was with criminals themselves.
Some of those he examined, he even admitted to the Lord's Supper.
And so near Christmas, of
1945, he wrote in his diary, and
I'm not going to read the names, I can't pronounce German names, but many of them were
some of the worst heinous Nazi criminals, there,
that they seem to have a genuine change,
and repentance seemed to come over their lives.
And all of this continued until
his career as an army chaplain ended in 1950.
He came back to the States and was a Lutheran
minister until he died in 1961.
After he died, his oldest son was going
through his things, and he found a secret compartment in
his desk, and in that compartment, was a thick
stack of letters that hundreds of
people had written to Henry Corecki, calling
him a Jew hater, and a Nazi lover, and
calling for him to be hanged, just like the Nazis
at Nuremberg.
They were all written in the most hateful
language management.
Why?
because grace can be offensive.
Because we don't understand the amount
of grace that we need for salvation.
We think we need less grace than
those evil Nazis needed.
But the fact is, we all
need all of the grace that God has given,
and by the way, he has an overflowing amount
of grace to all of us who have been saved.
And so if we ever get offended by
the grace God chose to our enemies, to the most hateful
people, they deserve to their punishment and the hanging,
but Christ can save any of
us, and if he can save us, he can even save Nazis
that are on their way to capital punishment.
We are all Jacobs in a way, if that makes sense.
Jacob had done nothing, in himself,
to build this ladder, this staircase, to
heaven.
Yahweh built it all for him.
Jacob wasn't worthy of God's promises that he made.
We aren't worthy of the promises of Yahweh either.
God made him out of his own grace, and
his own love, and out of his own will for
him and for us.
But Jacob received that grace,
and this became the pivotal moment
in Jacob's life.
This is where everything changed.
He woke up a new man.
And we can tell because of the way that
he responded to Yahweh's
grace, verse 16.
Then Jacob awoke from his sleep, and said, Surely the
Lord is in his place, and I did not know it.
He was afraid, and said, How awesome
is this place?
This is none other than the house of God.
And this is the gate of heaven.
So Jacob rose early in the morning, and took
the stone that he had put under his head, and set it up as
a pillar, and poured oil on its top.
He called the name of this place Bethel.
However, previously, the name of the city had been lus.
Then Jacob made a vow saying, If God will be with me, and
we'll keep me on this journey that I take.
And I will give
me food to eat, and garments to wear, and I
return to my father's house in safety, then the Lord will be my God.
This stone, which I have set up as a pillar,
will be God's house, and of all that you give me,
I will surely give a tenth to you.
I was asked recently by someone.
What would I say to Jesus Christ when
I see him face to face?
What questions would I ask of
Christ, and what would I like to know?
I told him that my first response would
not be any questions, or anything, but
to put my face on the ground and worship him for
all that he's done for me.
And that's kind of what Jacob does here.
There's a holy fear that comes over him.
When he wakes up from the stream, that Yahweh caused him to have.
And he's utterly amazed at what he saw,
not just at what he saw, but at
what God had told him and promised him.
Wouldn't all of us be waking up from that dream.
When he went to bed on that rock pillow,
he had zero idea, or intentions
of having a meeting with Yahweh, the creator of
the universe, that night.
Grace came to him as
a complete surprise.
He wasn't seeking grace, he
wasn't looking for it, he wasn't following some
set of steps in order to find the grace
of God or to get saved.
He wasn't following pillars of religion
or sacraments to get to his grace.
His eyes were open to it, and he believed.
And how do we know that he believed at this point?
Verse 20, Jacob made a vow, saying, If God will be with
me, and will keep me on this journey that I take,
and will give me food and eat and garments to wear, and
I return to my father's house in safety, then the Lord will
be my God.
Now, he's not saying that he's
not negotiating with God here and saying, if you give me all these things,
then I'll make you my God.
What he's saying is, wow, if he's
going to do all that for me, then he's going to be my God.
Does that make sense?
That's the difference.
And he's only saying that.
Think of Jacob Pre, this experience,
what God had done had completely changed him and
his outlook on life.
He stopped following his own schemes.
This no longer became a way to get away from his murderous brother.
This became part of God's plan.
And so he was going to go on to the next step in a different light.
Now, obviously, as
we go on to the next part, there is still
some scheming going on.
This is a planting going on with Jacob and
with his uncle, Laban.
He doesn't become a perfect man, but the direction
of his life changes.
The orientation of his life becomes
reoriented towards Yahweh instead
of his own benefit, if that makes any sense.
He would take the stone that he made a pillow,
anoint it with oil, and make a pillar out of it.
He wasn't making an idol of the stone.
It was a memorial that what had happened
to him would be remembered, and it
would be remembered for a very long time.
Verse 19, he called the name of that place Bethel.
However, previously, the name of that city had been
Lus.
So Jacob called where he was Bethel, right?
Bethel means house of God.
This is where he went, and met with God.
And so, before this time, this city was
called Luz, and probably, the
other people in the area still called the
place Luz.
But Jacob knew it wouldn't be long, because God
had promised him this land, and that he
had rights to name
Even if they have, the other people haven't realized that yet.
So this place, that God had
promised Jacob, would become extremely significant
in the future of the Hebrew people.
It would become the future home of
the Ark of the Covenant in the tabernacle before
it was moved to Jerusalem.
And this place here had made an indelible mark
on Jacob's life, and his mind, and his heart.
He would never forget what had happened here
in Bethel.
And that is exactly what saving grace does
for each of us who are saved.
We are changed by the reality that
God is working in us, that God has promised us
salvation in the end.
Sometimes that change, that
outward change is absolutely revolutionary.
But no matter how drastic the outward
change is, every single person that faces
Christ and saving grace is changed
to the core, and everything that God
does for us, is done out of
overflowing grace that He has for us.
This journey started out, like we said,
as another scheme for his own good and his
own self protection.
But it would end up by God's grace and in his
sovereignty, being the most important journey of
Jacob's life.
He wasn't on a religious pilgrimage
to find God, but in God's
timing, and in God's way, God found Jacob,
instead of Jacob finding God.
The main thing about this is
that as we go through life, and we have loved ones,
that we pray for, as we have those
around us, that haven't been found by the grace
of God yet, we can remember that
God's grace comes sometimes in the most surprising,
unexpected ways, how
many of us were expecting to find God's grace
when it found us, right?
Not many, or not any, really.
Jacob responded to the promises of God, by faith.
When he started this trip, he had zero ideas that
God was going to meet with him like this.
You never know, how God is working in
the lives of those around you, those that don't know him, what's
going on with the trials and tribulations in their lives, in
our lives, and how God is going to use that, in
order to pour his grace on us, to
change our lives, and to make us more like Christ either way.
So make sure the next time you
have a loved one who needs Christ and that you're
praying for, the next time that life takes you on
a trip that you weren't expecting to have, remember
Jacob's ladder, or Jacob's staircase, and
remember this story, and ply that to your life, and
have faith in God, that he will keep every promise that
he's made to us in every single day.
And most importantly, in the end,
He will always keep his promise until all his promises are kept.
Let's pray.
Happy Father, we love you, Lord, and thank you for your mercy,
your word that you've given us here in the Old Testament, what a blessing.
It is.
I thank you for writing down Jacob's life and not cleaning
it up for us, but it's given us all the details, even
as bad as they are.
I pray that we'd all be able to apply this to
our Christian lives, and we'd grow closer to you, and whatever
happens, you would use it in our lives for your glory, and
for your son's name, in Christ's name.
Amen.