Our scripture reading today is Genesis 31 verses one through
13. Jacob heard that Laban's sons
were saying, Jacob has taken everything our father owned and
has gained all this wealth from what belonged to our father.
And Jacob noticed that Laban's attitude toward him was not what
it had been. Then the Lord said to Jacob, Go
back to the land of your father's and to your relatives,
and I will be with you. So Jacob sent word to Rachel and
Leah to continue out to come out to the fields where his flocks
were. He said to them, I see that your
father's attitude toward me is not what it was before, but the
God of my father has been with me.
You know that I've worked for your father with all my
strength, yet your father has cheated me by changing my wages
10 times. However, God has not allowed him
to harm me. If he said the speckled ones
will be your wages, then all the flocks gave birth to speckled
young. And if he said the street ones
will be your wages, then all the flocks bore streaked young.
So God has taken away your father's livestock and has given
them to me in breeding season. I once had a dream in which I
looked up and saw that the male goats mating with the flock were
streaked, speckled or spotted. The Angel of God said to me in
the dream, Jacob, I answered, Here I am.
And he said, look up and see that all the male goats mating
with the flocks or streaks speckled or spotted.
For I have seen all that layman has been doing to you.
I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar, where you
made a vow to me. Now leave this land at once and
go back to your native land. May the Lord add His blessing to
the reading and the hearing of His Word.
Following God is a struggle. Following Jesus is a struggle
and there's no way around that. Jesus made it clear.
He was very explicit about it in this world.
He said to his followers, in this world you will have
trouble, but take heart. I have overcome the world.
He said it when he said things like if anyone wants to be my
disciple, they need to deny themselves, take up their cross
daily and follow me. This is the life that we've been
called to, the life that we've agreed to.
When we get baptized it it is. And when we give our lives to
Christ, it is a beautiful and wonderful thing to think about
eternity with Jesus in heaven. It is also part of what we are
doing when we make those decisions to give our lives to
Christ to be baptized. We are picking sides in a war
and we are signing up to be part of the struggle.
We can expect a life of faith to be a life of struggle, which
requires patience and perseverance as well as
accommodation from God for our our sake.
And so those are the things we're going to look at here this
morning. First, we're going to take a
little closer look at Jacob, Leah and Rachel's long struggle.
And it was a long struggle. Jacob was with Laban for 20
years, and during that time, Laban, his stepfather, who was
the head of that household, the patriarch to whom Jacob owed
allegiance, allegiance and loyalty, lied to him, deceived
him about the most important sorts of things, and cheated him
over and over and over again for 20 years.
And God did. God protected Jacob to be sure,
but God did not insulate Jacob from pain and struggle and
suffering. That was in his life.
And it wasn't a quick thing. It wasn't a I'll be here for a
week long thing or a month long or a year long.
It was 20 years, 2 decades of this Laban lying to him.
Jacob wanted to marry Rachel and Laban deceiving him by sending
his older daughter Leah in to be his wife and then saying, Oh
yeah, you can, you can marry Rachel too, but you got to work.
Another seven years, 14 years, Jacob worked to be married to
the woman that he wanted to be married to and now had to care
for others that he did not want to be married to, but now owed
them his protection, his care, his service.
And his and and Laban's daughters, Lee and Rachel.
This was no walk in the park for them, used and manipulated and
in their own words, sold by their father, who then
mismanaged things so badly that he squandered all of the wealth
that he should have gotten from selling them and had little or
nothing left to give them. In the end.
When God told Jacob to go back to his homeland, that business
of he invited Rachel and Leah out to the flocks to give them
this news. God has told me to return to my
native land. He he did that to get them away
from Laban. He got them out into the fields
away from Layburn, and then they all left without telling Layburn
they were going. Layburn found out and chased
after them. That's another story.
We're not even sure we're going to get to that specific 1.
The point here is, is that this was not quick.
It was not easy. It's conceivable that Jacob, at
some point in his life, imagined that his life would be charmed
and unendingly blessed by God, that things would be smooth
sailing for him throughout his life.
His mother was told before he was ever born that he, Jacob the
younger son, would rule over his older brother, that he would be
the inheritor of the promise, the covenant that God made with
Abraham and the God made with Isaac.
That he would be in charge, that he would be the ruler, that his
descendants would fill all of that land and all of that land
would belong to him and his descendants.
That all the nations of the world would be blessed through
him with those kind of promises coming from God being told to
you from the time that you were little.
And it would not be surprised. We don't know for sure, but it
would not be surprising if Jacob had thought that, man, this is
going to be great. God is clear in the way, making
the pads straight, leveling the mountains, it's all going to be
wonderful. And then suddenly he's running
for his life and he spends 2 decades being lied to, cheated,
manipulated and deceived by his father-in-law before having to
go back and face his brother who as far as he knows, still wants
to kill him. We will talk about that.
Life was a long and hard struggle for Jacob.
And that's the way life is for anyone who was part of God's
purpose and God's plan, particularly for those of us who
say, I want to follow Jesus, I want to be a disciple of Jesus.
We are not asking for a life insulated from pain.
We are volunteering for a life that is filled with challenges
and suffering and heartache. We can expect that the long
struggle of faith requires patience and perseverance
through the pain, not insulating from the pain.
I, I, I saw a thing online recently and I agreed with it,
so I didn't bother to Fact Check it.
You know how that goes and, and I don't know if it's true or
not. It sounds true to me.
Makes sense to me. Didn't bother to Fact Check it.
I should Fact Check it and I probably will at some point.
You can Fact Check it for me if you want, but I think you will
probably hear what it's saying and it just intuitively makes
sense, at least to me. There was a guy talking about
how we treat children now versus how we treated children, you
know, as a society 20304050 years ago.
And he was looking particularly at playground equipment.
Now I the playground I grew up with at Bidwell Elementary
School, we had the 1213 foot tall metal slide with no guard
rails, right? You walked up and by the grace
of God, you didn't fall down and break your neck.
It was hot when the sun was out and and you didn't want to go
down it in shorts in the summertime.
We had the really good swings. The ones that that were again,
they were really tall and they were chains.
You had to be careful or you pinched your fingers if you
gripped the chains wrong. And when we, when I started in
elementary school, they changed them gradually while I was
there. We had the flat board seats.
Those are the best 'cause you can jump from those.
I hated the curvy hugging your hips.
It's hard to jump out of those. We we'd swing as high as we.
Our goal was always to see if we could flip over, which as I
understand now is not physically possible to do that on your own
power. But that was our goal.
And we would jump out and we would sail through the air and
land on gravel. Gravel on a good day, not wood
chips, not little rubber chips, gravel on a bad day.
It was mud. I never liked the mud.
So I didn't jump from the swings on the bad days.
And the slide was on pavement. We fell off.
We were going to land hard on the pavement And, and, but we
did. We played and, and by somehow I
managed to not get injured doing those things other folks did.
I got injured in other ways. But then he, you know, went
through that and then he showed pictures of modern playgrounds
where where nothing is taller than that, you know, and, and
they are designed primarily so that no one can get hurt and sue
the people who are managing the playground equipment.
And he made this point and this is where the fact checking, and
I think this is worth fact checking.
I need to do it at some point that children need danger.
They need to be in situations even at a young age that we
don't want them to die. We don't want to, you know,
cover the playground with broken glass and, and, and, and rusty
nails. We don't want them to die, but
they need danger. They need to learn at a young
age how to recognize a dangerous situation and work through a
dangerous situation. Children need for their own
development to suffer, to experience pain, that broken
bones and injury and those kinds of things help children at a
young age learn how to work through injury and pain and
suffering. And that insulating our children
from all possible suffering and all possible pain doesn't help
them. It in the long run hinders them.
Now again, I didn't look up his data.
I don't know. Intuitively that makes sense to
me because that seems to be how God has designed this world.
It is not safe. There is ample opportunity for
pain. There is ample opportunity for
suffering, and the suffering and the pain and the persevering
through that are part of life in general for most people, but
especially part of the life of faith for people who choose to
be followers of God, followers of Jesus Christ.
Paul compares the life of faith to athletic competition, to
training for a race or training for a boxing match or a
wrestling match. That to go into training, to do
the training, to do the competition requires patience
and perseverance and suffering to get yourself in a position
where you can compete to win that prize, that trophy, that
crown. Now we're right in the middle of
the Winter Olympics right now. So we got lots of examples of
this full confession. I have not watched even a single
minute of the Winter Olympics. I used to watch the Winter
Olympics like crazy. For whatever reason this year, I
haven't tuned it in. Nothing against the Winter
Olympics, just hasn't been on my radar much this year.
But I've read and I've seen a lot of cool stories and I love
the back stories for the Winter Olympics and the pain and the
because for every gold medal we see, for every race, one, for
every record set, there's, there's hundreds, thousands of
falls and hurts and bruises and breaks and injuries and
disappointments and failures and mistakes and, and everyone I
love that, that the half pipe is one of those amazing things to
watch. You couldn't pay me enough money
to drop into one of those things.
For every beautiful flip and twin and spist twist that we see
on a halfpipe with a gorgeously graceful landing, there's been
100 falls by that same person where they've smacked and banged
and bruised and broken stuff. There's a story.
There's other kinds of suffering as well.
There were injuries that I I believe this guy is from
England. I can't remember for sure.
He's one of the skeleton competitors, which you got to be
a little bit touched in the head to do the skeleton racing
anyway, going what, 80 miles an hour on a metal sled down an ice
chute. One of their competitors has
survived not once, recovered not once, but from two different
times breaking his back. He broke his back and it
initially ruined his Taekwondo career.
So he apparently decided, well I can't do Taekwondo anymore I'll
look for a safer sport and do skeleton.
And he broke his back again. And he's recovered from 2 back.
Literal back breaking injuries to be an Olympic competitor.
It was a woman and I believe it was cross country skiing.
A 10K cross country skiing, which again, how is that a
sport? I do not understand how anyone
enjoys cross country skiing. It looks like punishment to me
rather than joy. But this woman competed and I
believe meddled in cross country skiing when she took it, had
taken a bad fall the week before and had seriously bruised ribs.
I fell down my steps and I stayed in my easy chair for
three days. She went and did a 10K on her
skis. Suffering pain, heartache,
hardship is part of it. Have you heard about the German
ski jumper this year who literally afraid of heights?
He he needed psychological counseling and therapy to
because particularly on the higher jumps, there were times
when he just couldn't do it because he was terrified.
He's ski jumping. He's ski jumping.
And then of course, the perseverance and the pain and
the heartache of failure and disappointment.
Ilia, was it Melanin, the US figure skater who had won 14
competitions in a row and then fell, what, two or three times
in his long program? The perseverance and the pain
and the patients that he's going to need to, to come back from
that disappointment. When it's one thing when you're
the underdog, but when you're the one that's expected to win
and and you fall that hard, the perseverance, the patience, the
willingness to suffer. If you're going to compete at
that level, you have to be willing to suffer.
You have to now, I know we're we're a week out now from what
in my opinion is the most boring Super Bowl in history, but we're
a week out. I'm going to switch from the
Olympics to football then, because my favorite example of
perseverance in sports is not from the Olympics, but from
football. You remember Rudy Rudiger?
Remember that name? They made a movie about him
years ago called Rudy. And the the actor that you know
that Rudy was played by Sam Wise Gangi, which was an interesting
thing. He did a great job.
No one laughed at that at Chester either.
But you know, if you're a real nerd, you'll get the joke.
Look it up. It's funny.
Trust me, it's funny. But Rudy was an undersized,
under talented kid from Indiana who had a lifelong dream of
playing for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team
and, and he wanted that so bad. And everyone told him, you don't
have a prayer, Rudy, you're not big enough, you're not fast
enough, you're not strong enough.
And it's one thing if you've got friends and family saying that
to you when the coaches of the team are saying that to you,
it's really tough to get on the team.
He had another problem. He wasn't smart enough either.
He wasn't a good enough student to get into Notre Dame in order
to even try out for the team. But he worked and he worked and
he worked. And what he managed to do, he
got a tutor, he got help. He got his grades up.
He got into the school and he got on the practice team where
he got to spend 4 years getting the snot beat out of him by the
starters with not a single ounce of glory or praise or
affirmation from the crowd. And that's what he did for four
years. Got the heartwarming ending.
True life that in like I think the last game of his senior
year, the coach put him in for one of the final plays of the
game and he got to make a tackle.
But he didn't get there without an incredible amount of pain and
heartache and suffering. And it was the physical pain of
the practice. It was the physical pain of
getting hit over and over and over again by people a lot
bigger and faster and stronger than him.
The emotional pain of having people not believe in him and
tell him you can't, you can't do it, you can't do it.
But he persevered. He did it for that one moment on
the football field where he got to make a tackle.
These Olympians do it for that moment of glory, for that medal
that they can win and they can hold up.
But Bible tells us Paul says the prize we are competing for is so
much greater eternity with God in heaven.
And if folks are willing to sacrifice and suffer and endure
and persevere for a crown or a trophy or a medal that they can
hang on their shelf, that that in, in, in, in, in a month or a
year or a decade will become insignificant and forgotten by
most of the world. If they're willing to suffer
that way for that prize, how much more should we be willing
to suffer for the sake of Jesus Christ, to persevere through
heartache and pain, to welcome? But Paul says, and I'm not here
yet. I'm not here yet.
Paul says he glories and rejoices in suffering, 'cause,
you know, suffering produces perseverance and perseverance
produces character and hope. And these I'm, I'm not there.
I just got to confess, there has not been one moment of suffering
in my life where I laughed and said, boy, this is so much fun.
But we can be willing, at least as followers of Jesus, to
acknowledge that however much we're suffering, Jesus has
suffered more, and to acknowledge that our suffering
is going someplace, that God is using that suffering to shape us
and mold us and make us. God is using that suffering in
ways that we might never even fully understand or comprehend.
This is the life that God calls us to.
But God doesn't leave us alone in it.
God doesn't leave us alone. He doesn't throw us off the
throw us into the deep end and then let us sink or swim on our
own through the long struggle. God accommodates our weaknesses
and our frailties. We hear a lot about
accommodation these days, particularly when it comes to
different kinds of of disability, weaknesses and
frailties that we as human beings have different sort of
accommodations for physical. Limitations.
And so, you know, new sidewalks, when they're put in now at the
edge, they'll have a ramp so that folks in wheelchairs can
get up and down on that sidewalk.
We have buildings being built need chair lifts or if they're
more than one Storey or elevators to accommodate people
that can't climb stairs, accommodations for folks with
mental health and mental illness.
We have lots of that in schools with Ieps and other things that
are there to accommodate human frailties in a world that
doesn't always take those frailties into account.
And the good news is this God does the exact same thing for
us. He did that for Jacob in this
story. We didn't read that part.
It was, again, it's a really long reading if you read the
whole story. But but Jacob went to Laban and
said, Hey, you know, I'm going to be leaving in a few years.
I want my wages. And then Laban, we heard a
little bit about that. Well, you know, you're, you're
in charge of the sheep and the goats.
I tell you what, when whatever a speckled sheep is born or a
street sheep, you know, you can keep that one and and I'll keep
the ones that aren't. And Laban kept changing it
because the sheep and goats kept being born in the way that Laban
said Jacob got to keep them. So Jake Laban kept changing the
rules on it, But Jacob had a plan when Layman gave him that.
He had a plan because it was widely believed back then that
that if the whatever the female was looking at when she became
impregnated would affect her child.
So Laban gots or Jacob got sticks and some of me stripped
bark off of them when it was strips.
So they were looking at striped sticks when they got pregnant
because that would make the baby striped or, or spotted sticks
because that would make the baby spotted.
Now we know that's nonsense, that that's not how it works.
But that was a widely held belief back then and, and Jacob
believed it and God was going, no, doesn't work that way.
Jacob, you don't understand genetics yet, but I do.
But God didn't scold Jacob for doing something that God knew
was silly and ridiculous and entirely unhelpful.
God blessed Jacob. God didn't reprimand him.
He didn't punish him any more than God punished Rachel when
she ate the Mandrakes, believing it would make her more fertile
so that she could have a baby. God accommodated their
weaknesses. They were doing the best they
could with the information and the resources that they had
available with him. They were doing the best that
they could. And God said, you know what?
I can work with that. I can work with that.
And eventually God made it clear to Jacob, your sheep and your
goats came out speckled and streaked because I did that, not
because your sticks did that. But that didn't happen until
after the fact. God knows that we're broken.
God knows that we're weak. God knows that that that there
are things that we believe now and are absolutely convinced of
that we're just as silly as mandrakes and stripe sticks.
But God says, you know what? I love them and I can work with
that. And they're doing the best they
can with what they have in order to be faithful to me.
And I can work with that. Rudy has that as part of his
story, too. We don't know it as well because
it happened after the movie, or at least after the events of the
movie ended. Rudy achieved his dream in his
senior year at Notre Dame. Everything he'd ever wanted,
everything he'd ever longed for, every goal, every dream he had
ever had came true. And then he had nothing left to
work for and strive for. And the bottom fell out of his
life. And within a few years, he was
not just broke, he was deeply in debt.
He was homeless, he was living in his car.
But God, God saw Rudy there. And Rudy's faith in God grew.
And Rudy gave his life to Christ.
And God helped him struggle through the poverty and through
the depression that afflicted him.
And he he got a new vision and a new dream to share hope and
motivation and encouragement with others.
And that's what he had spent the rest of his life doing.
I think he's still alive. God knew Rudy did not have a
career as a professional football player in front of him,
and God knew that Rudy was going to crash and burn after he got
his dream that early in his life.
But God didn't give up on Rudy. God understood Rudy's frailties
and his weaknesses, and God accommodated that.
And God made a way for that. And God brought him back and he
does the same thing for us. He accommodates our weaknesses
and he makes a way for us to be faithful and follow even when we
mess up, even when we fall, even when we fail.
For every every landed triple Axel on the skating rink,
there's 150, maybe 1050 falls behind it.
And the same is true for our life of faith.
We are called by God and invited by God to be patient and to
persevere, and God will accommodate our weaknesses and
our frailties and make a way for our efforts to make a difference
in the Kingdom of God and in the lives of the people around us.
In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.