Missing the Blessing

SERMON: 2016-07-03--g27c16--missing-the-blessing-part-2 SOURCE DURATION: 00:52:32.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 2 CONFIDENCE: 0.98 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 13 concludes the theological exposition of the sermon ('In Christ alone, our hope is found'). Candidate 14 (audience applauding) marks a clear transition to non-sermon material (room audio/applause), indicating the end of the spoken message. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:52:22.880-00:52:28.720 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:00:00.000; remove through 00:00:03.220] [CUT] (wind blowing) [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:00:03.220; resume after this marked segment] Want to pick up this morning where we left off last week. Missing the blessing, part two. Scripture reading is still Genesis chapter 27, the verses 30 to 41, rather than reading them again. I've asked Nancy to print them up on an insert in the bulletin. And so for those of you that may not have been here last week, feel free at some point to peruse the story as we continue to look at what happens when we discover that we are not wanted and we are not blessed. So before we get into that, join me in a moment of prayer. Father, I'm always so keenly aware that the words I speak and the words that we hear are only just that, words, unless they are empowered by your Holy Spirit to move deeply within our hearts and in our lives to change us and to transform us. And Lord, it's our collective prayer this morning that as you minister your word and as you move among us by your spirit, you'll help us to identify those places in our lives where we feel that we have not been seen or perhaps we feel that we have not been loved, where we have not been empowered and where we've in so many cases had to look after ourselves even as children. More than that Lord, help us to give these places to you. Help us to receive from the Lord Jesus a spirit of sonship so that even if mother and father abandoned me and nobody loves me, we might know at the deepest levels of our hearts the love of God the Father that surpasses all knowledge and all wisdom. So come Lord, empower us now, move among us, do what you do so well, which is to wrap us in your arms and to communicate to us the grace that is ours through Jesus Christ in the power of your Holy Spirit. We thank you for hearing us and we thank you Lord for what you're doing even now in our hearts and in our lives. We pray it in Jesus' name, amen. Well we saw together last week that in Genesis chapter 27 Esau has a three-fold response to discovering that his brother Jacob had yet again stolen from him the blessing of the firstborn. To review just very quickly, first of all the story tells us that Esau experienced deep, deep anguish. Verse 34 of Genesis 27, when Esau heard his father's words, he burst out with a loud and bitter cry and said to his father, bless me, me too, my father. Verse 38, Esau said to his father, do you have only one blessing, my father? Bless me too, my father. Then Esau wept aloud. That cry of Esau's is the cry of the orphan spirit throughout all generations. And it comes I think to its ultimate expression in the voice of the Lord Jesus when he hangs upon the cross and he cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? There is nothing worse in life than to be abandoned and forsaken ultimately by God himself. Secondly, what happens to Esau is that he becomes very angry. Verse 41, Esau held a grudge against Jacob because of the blessing his father had given him and he said to himself, the days of mourning for my father are near, then I will kill my brother Jacob. Unfortunately for Esau, as I pointed out last week, Isaac lived another 50 years. And so by that time, his anger had worn down as well. Jacob had fled the country. But I think in Esau's anger, we see here the cycle of rejection. When we experience being unwanted and unblessed, it almost always turns into anger. And that anger is ultimately highly destructive because it leads to murder. And just because you and I don't actually go out and we kill those who we feel have been favored over ourselves, that doesn't mean we are innocent of murder because it begins in the heart. It begins with character assassination. It begins with a critical attitude. It begins with the joy that we have when somebody else suffers difficulties or experiences heartache. Anger leads to murder. And that kind of anger is fueled by Satan himself because that's how he feels when he wanted to be God and he got rejected by God and cast out of heaven. And then thirdly, Esau tries hard to be good. A very interesting thing happens when we get in touch with those negative feelings of anger and murder. It produces an incredible amount of shame once that cycle passes and then we say to ourselves, I can't believe that that was me. I didn't know that lived in my heart. And so one of the ways in which we cover that shame sometimes is then we go through a season where we try to be nice, we try to be kind, we try to be good and Esau, as we saw, did that by trying to please his parents by marrying a third wife that would be more to their liking than the two Hittite wives that he had previously married. And so we read in Genesis 28, eight to nine, Esau then realized how displeasing the Canaanite women were to his father Isaac. So he went to Ishmael and married Mahaleth, the sister of Nebaiath and the daughter of Ishmael, son of Abraham, in addition to the wives he already had. That brings us back then to you and me. And I left you last week with two very significant questions to ponder. Question number one, what do we do when we have been denied a blessing? Question number two, what do we do when it seems that God doesn't want us? And in the time that we have this morning, gonna try to answer those questions in the hopes that as we lay hold of these biblical principles, God will turn the curse into a blessing and grant us faith to believe that because of Jesus, we don't have to remain in a state of emotional or mental poverty because God has blessed us in Christ. With every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. The place though to begin, and this will sound counterintuitive to many of us, is that we need to begin by grieving our losses. Grieving our losses. One of the men here sent me an email in response to these two questions last week. And he said, in regards to not receiving blessings from our earthly fathers or father figures as we're growing up, or perceiving that we haven't received those blessings, I'd say it leaves us like rudderless boats in the open seas without a navigator. Adrift and with no sense of direction. And even if we knew where we were, we'd have no way to get to where we want to be or need to be. Even as an adult, I feel this way quite often in regards to myself, desperately seeking my port or spot, but not having the ability to steer or to know where I'm supposed to be going anyway. Classic description of not having been properly fathered. Those kinds of things leave us, as we have said before, with holes in our lives. And those holes need, first of all, to be grieved. It was back in 1969 that Elizabeth Kubler Ross first published what would prove to become a very popular book in the grief counseling world. It's entitled "On Death and Dying." Elizabeth Kubler Ross was an American psychiatrist living at the time in Switzerland. And as she engaged patients in hospitals who were dying, she was aghast at the lack of grief counseling that they were experiencing. There was really nothing in place at that time to help people through that difficult part of their lives. And she observed that as she looked at individuals and families going through this, that there was actually a five-stage process that most people went through. That became the substance of her book, and it's been adapted and used in many circles for many years in the field of grief counseling. It was originally designed, as I said, to be used in the context of people losing loved ones, but over the years has been expanded and extended towards any kind of loss that people have suffered. It's not been without its critics. There are people who think it's too rigid, and even she herself, in the later years of her life, said that these stages were never meant to be prescriptive, nor that they were hard, fast, and fixed, but that they gave a framework to the kind of suffering that people went through. And without spending a lot of time on it, I wanna take just a few moments this morning to walk you through the five stages of grief that she talks about. They've actually been extended to seven by some other people for reasons that I will show you in a moment. Take a look at this. These are the stages of the grief cycle as she has developed them historically, and as they have been modified by some other people over the years. It begins with shock and denial. Shock is the extension of denial, and that becomes number six, as opposed to just number five. But shock and denial, you probably can't read all of that. It includes avoidance, confusion, fear, numbness, and blame. What's the first reaction that Isaac has when Esau shows up to receive the blessing? He is shocked out of his mind because if you're Esau, then who did I bless a moment or two ago? And what was Esau's first reaction when he discovered that Jacob had stolen the blessing from him? He likewise was shocked. Shock is what happens when you are confronted by something that overwhelms your system. It is one of the first reactions that everybody has. When somebody has an accident, we often talk about people being in shock. It's the body's mechanism to keep stuff away so it doesn't overwhelm us. Shock often leads to denial. Denial says, it hasn't happened to me, it hasn't hurt me, it doesn't bother me. Denial says, my mother didn't really try to abort me. Denial says, my father didn't really cross lines sexually with me when I was a young girl growing up in that household. Denial says, my friend couldn't possibly have betrayed me like what you're trying to tell me. Denial is what we all do for a season. Some do it much better than others. For God to heal us, denial has to break down. And I've noticed over the years that when people come to the Lord and they say, Lord, start working in my life, try to change me, make me more like Jesus, what happens is that denial begins to break down. Reality begins to emerge. It's often very difficult and very painful, but it's the first step towards healing the grief of our losses. Denial is followed by anger, and we've talked a lot about that in the context of Esau, frustration, anxiety, irritation, embarrassment, and shame. Anger can be directed at the person who hurt me, it can be directed at myself, it can also be directed at God. And if you read the story of Job, you see how much of his frustration and how much of his anger was directed towards God. Paul Witts, in a book, the title of which you've heard me quote many times, Faith of the Fathers, or Faithless of the Fathers, something like that, talks brilliantly about the fact that many of the brilliant scholars who have influenced the Western world negatively away from God are people who had a negative father image, a negative relationship with their earthly father. Their fathers either weren't there, they were bad fathers, or there was another issue between them. That enmity towards their earthly father gets projected upon their heavenly father, and you get people becoming atheists because they end up rejecting all authority. A fascinating book I recommended highly. Anger is followed by what she called bargaining. Bargaining, reaching out to others, desire to tell one's story, struggle to find meaning for what has happened. In my book, Olive Shoots Around the Table, I use the term searching behavior because what happens when you are faced with loss is that you try to strike bargains, sometimes with God, sometimes with yourself. A person who is dying will often say, "Lord, if you let me live, I will." You know, it's like kids in school before exams. Ronald Reagan used to say there was never an atheist before an exam because everybody turns to prayer. "Lord, let me pass this examination." But searching behavior includes things like, let me just quickly rattle off the list because it's really quite interesting, I think, aimless wandering and restlessness, a feeling of being lost, not knowing what to do, inability to initiate any activity, a feeling that time is suspended, a feeling that life can't be worthwhile again, confusion and feeling that things are not real, a fear of going crazy. And you see how closely that ties into the next step, which on this chart actually comes earlier, and that is depression and detachment, overwhelmed, blase, lack of energy, helpless. We all have moments when we don't really wanna get up in the morning and we say, "I'm not a very happy person. "There's gotta be more to life than this." But that's not clinical depression. Clinical depression can be so extreme that you literally cannot move. And you literally do not want to get up because all meaning to life has been lost. It's a terrible condition to be in. And on more than one occasion, the psalmist in the scriptures talks about being in that kind of place. Where are you, God, when life is this difficult and this hard? That leads then ultimately to what is called acceptance, exploring options, a new plan in place, empowerment, security, self-esteem, meaning those are the terms she uses in the process of grieving our losses. It's an acceptance of reality. Yes, my sibling was favored over me. Wasn't just my imagination. Yes, my mother really didn't want me. Wasn't just my imagination. My life has been tough. It's like a dark cloud has followed me around. That's not been my imagination. That's really been the picture. Life has been hard. And I have had a lot of pain. And so I don't hide from it. I don't deny it. I embrace it, in short, grieving your losses begins by identifying the things that you've missed out on. It means embracing the pain of it and saying, I can't do anything about it, but God, if you don't heal me, I'm going to remain where I am. Now, listen to me really careful, carefully. Christians typically make a serious mistake when it comes to grieving our losses. I say that because the typical Christian tendency is to say, if you know the gospel and if you know the Bible and if you know the Lord Jesus, the temptation is to say, turn to Jesus and he will fill you up. How many of you haven't heard somebody say, well-meaning preachers say, I know life is hard, life is difficult, you've suffered losses, go to Jesus and he'll fill you up. Is that true? What's wrong with that? Well, in a way, there's nothing wrong with that, but it misses a very significant point. Jesus will help you grieve your losses so that after you have grieved your losses, he can fill you up, he is not going to fill you up without first healing the places of loss. Let me explain it this way. Let's suppose that you're one of these individuals who has been left with a big hole in your heart and you're just always looking for affirmation, right? Now along comes a well-meaning Christian or a well-spoken preacher and he tells you, just go to Jesus and he will fill this place in you and he will make you feel like you belong. Ever try that? It doesn't typically work and it doesn't typically last. Why? And I'm saying this at the risk of being misunderstood because you know by now that I love Jesus and I preach him. But what happens is you expect Jesus to do something that he isn't going to do. What you do is you set people up for failure. They turn to Jesus. People turn to Jesus with sexual identity issues or they turn to Jesus with this place inside that says, I don't feel I know how to belong or how to connect. Will you please fill me up, Jesus? Nothing happens or nothing happens long-term. People become cynical. They leave the faith because Jesus has not delivered what they thought he should deliver. Are you hearing me? It's really important. Jesus will come and he will fix up what is broken in you when that which is broken in you is healed, then he can fill you up and now, now you can hold on to his grace because nobody can take it away from you. Making sense? I know I'm running the risk of being misunderstood here but it's really, really important. Don't just say, well, give you a story that illustrates it. Rosaria Butterfield, and we've talked about her before, used to be a lesbian English professor at the University of Syracuse. Miraculously got converted, left that whole lifestyle behind. As her life was changing, one of her lesbian friends noticed the differences in her and asked her what was going on. And as she began sharing her faith, this woman became very, very sad because she said, I was a Presbyterian minister for 10 years and I have prayed so many times for God to change my sexual orientation and he hasn't done it. And in effect, I hope he can do it for you but he didn't do it for me. Do you understand what I'm saying? Why the one and not the other? It's a very complicated issue. Wanna be very careful not to make it simplistic but unless you go back to the roots that produces sexual dysfunction or any other dysfunction in our lives, it's never going to be enough. So we gotta help people to go to Jesus who is a sympathetic high priest, understands our suffering and he will help us to break the denial. He will help us to face the places of pain and he will help us in those places where we have gotten twisted up in the inside so that we cannot receive the gifts of God's grace because of our brokenness. He wants to heal brokenness, then he will feel brokenness and life can flow abundantly out of the grace of God. You still with me? Starts with grieving our losses, feeling the pain, processing the pain, taking the pain to Jesus, asking him to heal what was broken inside on account of the pain. Then, number two, we need to find our identity in the Lord Jesus Christ. Two weeks ago you heard me quote Psalm 27 verse 10, "Though my father and mother forsake me, "the Lord will receive me." And while it is true that blessings in your life and in my life typically come to us mediated through the significant people in our lives, beginning with our parents, the reality is that they are not the ultimate source of blessing. The ultimate source of blessing is God. And where human beings are not present to bless me, God himself will step in and he will provide that blessing through faith in Jesus Christ. He'll do that in one of two ways. Listen carefully. Number one, he will bring somebody into my life who serves as a vehicle of his grace. I cannot tell you how many people I've talked to over the years who were let's say abused as children for whom life was hopeless and desperate, except every so often along the way, somebody came along who saw their heart, who could break through their shells and who could communicate acceptance and love. Sometimes it's a sibling, sometimes it's a teacher, sometimes it's a virtual stranger, but just at the right time, like an oasis in the wilderness, somebody who loves me, who sees past all the exteriors and who can communicate unconditional love to the core of my being. Breathe just enough life into that dying flame so that it can keep on burning. It's an amazing thing. And if you will look at your life over the years, you will see that periodically, whether as an infant or a child or as an adult, the Lord has raised up somebody who contributed life to you that was a gift of God's grace. Without that person, you would not be who you are today. Make sure you thank God, make sure you thank that person. Saved your life. Second way is by coming to you himself directly. Not everybody finds somebody to love them. But remember, God is a God of orphans and widows. God has a special place in his heart for people who don't have the normal means of defense, the normal means of protection, the normal means of support, the normal means of encouragement. And in those places, God himself will show up and he will pour out his grace unmerited. And Jacob is a classic example of that. You know, I mean, he struggled all his life with being second best. Remember, he wanted to be born first. He strived for the blessing of the firstborn. He was in many ways a much less likable character, I've always thought, than Esau. And when he swindled Esau out of the birthright and Esau wanted to kill him, he had to skip the country. And from Jacob's perspective, that left him pretty hopeless and pretty desperate. If you know the story, what's the next thing that happens? He falls asleep, his head upon a stone. What happens in the story? God comes to him in a vision. He sees angels ascending and descending and God enters into covenant with him and promises that God will look after him and he will provide for him and he will bring him back and he will bless him. And that strengthened him for the journey. And over the next 20 years, there were multiple instances like that because he was in covenant with God and God blessed him. If you're in covenant with God and he's chosen you to be his own, even when father and mother forsake you, God will be there and he will raise up somebody who can proclaim Jesus to you, somebody who will take you by the hand, lead you to faith in Jesus, help you to experience the blessings of Jesus in your own life so that no matter what has happened to you, what has been denied you, the scripture says even if everybody forsakes you, if God is with you, who can be against you? Grace is always greater than sin. But you say, what if I'm not elect? Not a question that a lot of people ask anymore these days, although it might be a wise question to ask sometimes. What if God doesn't want me? After all, he didn't want Esau. What chance did poor Esau have? Well, actually it was Esau's choice to reject the blessing. You can't lay that at the feet of God, but the message of scripture is, as I said a moment ago, grace is always greater than sin. And I love these words of Jesus where he says in the gospels, "Ask and it will be given you, seek and you will find, "knock and the door will be opened to you, "for everyone who asks receive he who seeks finds "and to him who knocks the door will be opened to you." Don't worry about if you're elect or not. If you're not elect, you don't care. That's the way that it works. If you care, you're elect. And God says, if you will pound on heaven's door, if you will take as little as 15 minutes a day to say, God, I'm stuck, I don't know what to do, will you please bless me? I'm not gonna let you go until you bless me. You will see that God's hand is forced by the importunity, the Bible calls it, of your prayer. You know that? Don't ever doubt, don't ever doubt that God wants you or that he will not give you the riches that are yours by faith in Jesus. He will create a hunger in your heart and he will let you pound until the door opens and the blessings come your way. Let me say it one more time, grace is always greater than sin. And a classic example of that is Ruth in the Old Testament. Remember Ruth? Do you remember what nationality she was? She was a Moabite. Do you remember what God says about the Moabites in the Old Testament? They will not enter the house of the Lord up to the 10th generation. Ruth becomes one of the forebears of Jesus. Why? Because grace is always greater than sin. Syrophoenician woman, they've preached on her a couple of weeks ago in Sunday night service, same kind of story. Jesus ignores her pleas because she's not of the children of Israel. And he says it is not fitting to give food given to the children to the dogs. And what was her response? Brilliant, brilliant, understood his heart. She said even dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall off the table. Don't settle for anything less than what God has for you. He's got more for you than you and I can yet begin to imagine it's ours to claim by faith. So we have to grieve our losses, feel the pain, work through the disappointments, get to the point where we can release it and let go and forgive. We need to find our identity in Jesus because in him, even if nobody wants me, even if everybody thinks I'm a loser, God says I called you into being. I've given you your name. I have a plan and a purpose for you in the world and I want to see you fulfill that purpose and that destiny and all of hell is not going to stop me from getting you to where I want you to be. Do you understand how determined God is to present us before the presence of his glory without any wrinkle, blemish or spot? Let the Holy Spirit open up our hearts so that we can receive what it is that he has for us. This isn't just for some good people. This is for everyone who is in covenant. Jacob was a lying cheat and the story of Jacob is recorded in scripture so that you and I, in all the places of a brokenness and all the places that we don't like about ourselves, can receive the forgiveness and the healing and the restoration that God has brought about in the person of Jesus. One more thing and then we'll wind up in just a little bit. We need to be open to whomever God raises up to bless you. Now most of you here have heard me tell the story of the man who was caught up in a flood climbing on the roof of his house. He was a devout religious man and he wanted to use it as an opportunity to show everybody else that his faith was in God. So he said, God, I trust that you will save me from these waters. Along comes a neighbor in a canoe, says to him, hop in and he says, no, thank you. I've asked God to save me and he promised me that he would. Canoe goes on. Policeman comes by in a police boat. The waters are rising, you're gonna drown if you don't get off the roof, jump into my boat. No, thank you, sir. My faith is in God, he's going to deliver me. Helicopter comes along, they shout to him, grab hold of the rope, we can drag you off your roof. No, thank you, my hope and faith are in God. Well, you know how the story ends, of course. Dude drowns, stands before God. And he says, God, I'm just really disappointed in you because I trusted that you would save me and you didn't. Why did you let me drown? And God says to him the obvious. I sent you a canoe, I sent you a boat and I sent you a helicopter and you ignored all three and you deserve to drown because you didn't see my hand in the means that are used to want to rescue you. Catch the balance here. When nobody shows up, God will do so himself. Typically, however, he chooses to use other people to bless us and to help us along. And what he wants us to do is to be open to whatever vehicle or vessel it is that God raises up to pour his grace and his blessings into my life. And while that may be easy for some, it's incredibly difficult for others and I'm gonna give you four quick reasons why I believe that is. Number one, a lot of us, we have a bad theology. We have a theology that says it's wrong to depend on people and we ought to be depending on God. How many times haven't you heard somebody say, don't put your hope on people, don't be dependent on people, put your hope in God. Can I tell you how many times I have seen people get in touch with needy places of their lives and they have found by God's grace a vehicle through whom his love comes into their lives and some well-meaning Christian will come along and you say it is wrong for you to lean on man. Isn't that true? And there's a degree of truth. Because at the end, God wants us to be dependent on him but not on him only, he wants us to be interdependent on each other, he has created the body of Christ. And if you think it's just gonna be you and God and nobody else, I tell you, you are sadly deceived and you will miss out on an incredible pile of blessings that God has for you. Now it's perfectly possible that you are the kind of person who trusts in people rather than in God and God may have to pry your hands loose from people so that you learn to trust in God but it's never just God in you. It's God in you and the rest of God's people because that's why God has created the church. Some people have terrible theology. Please don't fall victim to it because you are robbing people of the help and the hope that God uses other people for in their lives. It's like raising your children. When your children are little, they need a high degree of love, a high degree of attention. The purpose in that is not to hold them in your arms and keep them little. The purpose for that is so they can grow up, be free and be people in their own right. That's how it works in the kingdom and that's what re-parenting in the body of Christ looks like. People have bad theology and then of course we have this thing called shame. Shame is feeling badly about what you are. What's the first thing Adam and Eve did after they sinned? They hid, they covered themselves. Why? Because they were ashamed of their nakedness. They knew they had things to hide. And one of the things that happens in all of our lives when we get in touch with places in our lives that aren't very good, emotions that aren't very good, we hide because we don't want anybody to see what we are really like and this is especially true in Christian circles and a lot of Christian circles, it doesn't matter how bad you were before you came to Christ but once you came to Christ, you better be nice and clean and neat and so everybody puts on their Sunday morning face that in the meantime they're crying deep in their hearts. Christian community needs to be a place where it's okay not to be okay. As Valerie likes to say, nothing is bigger than Jesus. And healthy community is a place where we can confess our sins to one another, pray for one another and be healed and experience the goodness of God. And amen would be okay. Oh, what an amen. My land, you can do a lot better than that. (congregation cheering) (congregation laughing) Elsie knows how to do the amens. Pride. God in me, I don't need anybody else. Pride is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble. The final one then is fear. Fear, if we open up my heart, I'm gonna get hurt. If I step out and I let somebody into my life, I'm gonna experience further rejection and further pain and I won't know what to do with that and I won't know how to handle that. Well, guess what? You're absolutely right. You are going to get hurt. You will experience pain. You will want to run. And you will want to build walls around you all over again, particularly if that has been the history of your life. But guess what? The walls you build to keep yourself safe are walls that keep other people out. You know how many people want to belong to community and they don't feel like they belong to community and they expect everybody else to do all the work? You want to belong to community then allow yourself to be seen, allow yourself to be authentic, allow yourself to experience pain, allow God to establish you and bless you and you will discover that counterintuitive as it is, when you push through the pain, God is there and life is richer and fuller than ever before. How does the story of Esau and Jacob end? 20 years go by. Jacob meets up with his uncle, Leibin. Who's an even bigger crook than Jacob? I love the irony. There must have been a generational habit in that family. And so he wants to marry Rachel. You know the story, he gets to marry Leah instead. Rachel gets thrown in 14 years of labor just to get those two wives. But remember, he's a covenant with God. He may be a crook, but God loves him and God is determined to bless him. So now he goes through bargain after bargain with Leibin about how he's gonna get paid and at the end he gets richer and richer at Leibin's expense. Gets 12 children by two wives and their two concubines or men because there were girls in that family as well. And eventually, eventually he gets so rich that Leibin is so peeved that the Lord comes along to Jacob after 20 years and he says it's time to go home. Remember the story? Now if you were Jacob, what would you be worried about if he had to go back home? Well, you got your brother back home and he's got a long memory. And so if you know the story, Jacob is in anguish and he's trying to figure out how am I going to receive, how am I gonna survive what Esau is gonna wanna do? So he sends all these gifts ahead of him and then he sends his wives and his children ahead. I always thought that was a hugely brave move of his and then he remains behind and he wrestles with God and then he goes out and he meets up with Esau. And what happens when he meets Esau? Fascinating conclusion to the story. Verse four of chapter 33, Esau ran to meet Jacob. Now that would be the last thing he expected. Embraced him, maybe would have thought he'd stab him, threw his arms around his neck and kissed him and they wept. Jacob's anger is gone. Jacob's desire to murder or Esau's desire to murder Jacob is gone. Instead, he is eager to be reconciled to his brother. Now here's the question that I want to leave you with. Why is that? Well yes, 20 years have passed and you know, 20 years is a long time to get over a grudge but I know of people that have held on to grudges a lot longer than 20 years and so do you. And he asks his father, Isaac is still alive so that's a bit of a problem but I know lots of people who have committed murder even when their father was still alive. Why do you think Esau now is so ready to embrace Jacob? I'll give you my theory and you can agree or disagree with it. I believe it's because Esau has experienced his own blessing. Remember, he didn't get the blessing of the firstborn and he had to plead with father Isaac for another blessing but a blessing is what he's got. Your dwelling will be away from the earth's riches, away from the dew of the heaven above. You will live by the sword, you will serve your brother but when you grow restless you will throw his yoke from off your neck in the intervening years. Esau was successful with his violence beyond his fondest imagination. And what happens when you feel that your cup has been filled and you have received blessing? You can afford to be magnanimous, you can afford to be generous because you are rooted and grounded in the gifts that you have received from the hands of God. So here's where I want to leave this. You and I in Christ have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. And how magnanimous and how generous and how kind and how fruit bearing we are in life is determined primarily by our ability to receive that inheritance. And the more we lay hold of that, the more we grieve our losses properly, the more we get filled up with Jesus and the more that we can receive as well as give to the people around us, the more well rounded we will be and the kinder we will be to people who have hurt us or wounded us or cheated us or who don't deserve our love. And that's what the church is called to be. The body of Christ filled with the presence of Jesus so that in us and through us God can establish his purposes on the face of the earth. That's the covenant God made with Abram. That's the covenant that Jacob experienced and that is the covenant that in Christ has become yours and has become mine. [PROPOSED CUT 2 START at 00:52:22.880; remove through 00:52:32.000] In Christ alone, our hope is found [CUT]. (audience applauding) [CUT] [BLANK_AUDIO] [PROPOSED CUT 2 END at 00:52:32.000; resume after this marked segment]