I'm preaching today on one of my favorite stories in the Bible,
and I've never preached on this before.
And it's I've been waiting for like 30 years to preach this
sermon since it actually probably longer.
Yeah, definitely longer than that because it's since I first
heard the song by Paul Overstreet.
Dig another. Well, we're actually going to
listen to that song in a few minutes.
But this story of Isaac and the wells and how his wells kept
getting filled up with dirt by his enemies and then his enemies
were stealing his wells and, and, and what's he going to do
about it? What's his response going to be?
It's not a story that gets a lot of air time, if you will, but I
think it's one of for me, it's one of the most powerful stories
in the Bible, spiritually powerful stories in the Bible,
the story of Isaac who who dug another well and to really kind
of see, oh, I turned it off. It was on before and I turned it
off. I don't know why I did that, but
I did. Now it's back on to really see
how the the power behind the story.
I want us to get the context here.
So just as a reminder where we are in the timeline of the
story, Abraham has died, Sarah has been dead for a number of
years, and Abraham has just died.
And now Isaac is the patriarch of the family.
Being the patriarch means that there is a tremendous burden of
responsibility on him. He is responsible for every
single person in his household, whether they are blood relatives
or servants or, or or whomever. If they're part of his household
and he's got a big household, he's responsible for making sure
that they have enough food, enough water, they have shelter,
they have protection from enemies.
They have everything they need to live lives of, of joy and
hope and and peace in the world that's on his shoulders.
And like his father, Abraham and his mother Sarah, he is a
stranger in the land. He's a foreigner.
He's an alien. He owns no real estate other
than the The Cave where his parents are buried.
He owns that. And that's the only real estate
he has. And on top of that, he's a
farmer. I don't know how how you make a
living as a farmer when you have no real estate, but he farmed
crops, he farmed animals, he had sheep and he had goats and and
he was doing all of that purely on the willingness of the
political powers that were around him allowing him to be on
their land. Worse still, after Abraham dies,
and while he's still a stranger and a foreigner in this land,
God comes to Isaac. And God says, Isaac, there's
going to be a famine. You're going to be tempted to
flee to Egypt. That makes sense.
Egypt is where the water is. You got the Nile River.
If there's a drought there, if there's no rain there, it's all
right. The Nile River still is going to
flood. There's still going to be plenty
of arable land. It's a great place to be,
particularly in a famine down there where there is abundance
of resource. God says don't go to Egypt, stay
right here. One day all of this land will
belong to your descendants. I will make your descendants
into a great nation, and the nations of the world will be
blessed through you. And so Isaac stays in the land,
and there is a famine. And during that famine, Isaac
the farmer, God blesses him, and he prospers greatly.
And he becomes very wealthy. So wealthy that one of the local
kings, Abimelech, is the nearest to him, tells him, get away from
us, you're too powerful, go away, go away.
Plus, to make sure he understands that he's not
welcome anymore, the Philistines fill up all of his wells with
dirt wells that his father dug him, his, you know, they, they
were dug by his. I mean, his father Abraham
didn't do the digging. He was a wealthy man too.
He hired, he had people that were part of his household, his
servants, the dig, the digging. But his father was responsible
for those wells being there. They filled up his wells with
dirt and Isaac dug him back out and they filled him up again.
And Isaac moved on and he found the new place and he dug a well
there and he found water there. And people came in and they
stole the well from him and kicked him off the land.
And he moved someplace else, and he dug another well.
And people came in and they took that well.
And he moved someplace else and he dug another well.
And no one quarrelled over it. No one came to take it.
This is the context which this is happening, in which a, a lone
household LED for the first time.
I mean, Abraham had been leading the household for years.
Now Isaac is in charge. He's a farmer, he's a stranger,
he's a foreigner, he's got no land.
There's a famine and people are taking his wells.
This is not the issue here is not a question of wants.
You have to have a well if you're going to farm, if you're
going to raise animals, particularly during a famine,
you have to have a well for your family to survive.
You have to have a well for your animals to survive.
You have to have a well for the crops to survive.
You have to have a well. And they keep taking as well.
And this is the situation that Isaac is in now.
I'm going to preach after I'm going to about another 20
minutes here and I'm about to play a song.
I put a kind of a cheesy video behind it.
So you got something to look at while we listen to the song.
It's about a three minute song and Paul Overstreet preaches
this sermon in 3 minutes better than I'm going to preach it in
the next 20. But if you want short sermons,
you need to hire a poet. Poets are very good at, you
know, conveying deep things in a short amount of space.
I'm not a poet. Paul Overstreet is, he's a great
songwriter. And, and, and I think this is,
is as good an interpretation of this passage as you're going to
find anywhere. So, so let's listen to the song
and then we're going to talk about all of this in the context
of this story. So let's check this out.
Well I had a blessing from the Lord up above.
Gave him a beautiful woman to love, a place to live and some
land farm. 2 good legs and two good arms.
Well the devil came sneaking around one night.
Decided he would do a little evil to life.
Figured he would hit a life where it hurt, so it filled up
all of oxwells with dirt. And when I went not for his
morning drink, he got a dipper full of dirt and his heart did
sink. But he knew it was a devil.
So he said with a grin, God bless me once and he can do it
again. He bless me once and he can do
it again. So when the rays don't fall and
the crops all fail and the cows ain't putting any milk in the
pail, don't sit around waiting for a check in the mail.
Just pick up the shovel and dig another whale.
Pick up the show and dig another.
Well, now me and old I got a lot in common.
The Lord bless me with a beautiful woman.
He gave me a job, He gave me a home, He gave me a will to call
my own. Now when I go out for my morning
drink and get a different full of dirt and my heart does sink,
but I think of old I can, I have to grin.
This God bless me once and he can do it again.
He bless me once and he can do it again.
So when the rains don't fall and the crops all fail, the cows
ain't putting any milk in the pail.
Don't sit around waiting for a check in the mail.
Just pick up the shelf, dig another well, pick up the
shovel, and dig another well. Well, the good book says I
finally won. Pick up the shovel.
And dig another well. The devil got tired and he left
him alone. Pick up the shovel.
Take another. Well, and I know someday I'm
going to win, dude. Pick up the shovel.
Take another Well, the house. The good book tells me what to
do. Pick up the shovel and.
Take. Another well pick up.
The shovel. And take another well.
Pick up the shovel and take another well.
Pick up the shovel, dig another. Well, that was Isaac's response
to what was going on. But before we can really kind of
grasp and, and, and, and get a grip on the significance of this
passage, we need to make it a little more personal.
So I got a question for you. What's your well?
Now, I'm not talking about
what's something you'd really, really like to have or something
you really, really do have. I'm talking about what are the
what's the thing or things that you need in order for your life
to work and continue? Isaac needed water.
His family needed water. This was not some luxury item.
He needed this thing and it was being taken from him.
What is it that you need? There are a lot of things that
can be wells. Maybe it's a job, maybe it's a
relationship, maybe it's a talent OR an ability, maybe it's
a dream or a plan, maybe it's something else entirely.
But what is it that you feel like that you need or that you
know that you need? And if you don't get it, it's
done. Or if you've got it and you lose
it, man, God, you can take anything from me, but do not
take that. If I lose that, it's all over.
One of the people I think of when I think about this story, a
more contemporary person. I'm not sure if he's still
living or not, but I don't know if any of you know the name Dave
Drovecki. Is that a name that that rings a
bell for anyone? He was a Major League pitcher
back in the 80s, nineties and and he was successful.
He was not one of the greatest of all times, but he was very,
very good. Made it to an All Star game one
year, pitched a lot of innings, had a lot of success.
One point late in his career he was diagnosed.
He was a lefty, was diagnosed with cancer in his pitching arm,
up around his shoulder, in his upper arm.
And the doctor said to get that out, we have to do surgery and
where it is and what we have to take out to remove that cancer.
You can kiss your baseball career goodbye.
You're done. Highly unlikely you'll ever
pitch again, much less be able to pitch at that level.
I got to think, you don't get to be a Major League pitcher
without investing a lot of time, energy and without having a lot
of desire. You have to really want that.
You want to. I talked to kids.
You're not going to be a professional basketball player
and you could ask him when was the last time you played
basketball? Well, like 2 weeks ago.
You're not going to be a professional basketball player
unless unless playing basketball is something you need to do and
that you're driven to do. This is Dravecky, and now it's
gone. That aren't that ability to
throw a baseball. Dave Durvecki A well, what do we
need? What do you need?
That if you lose, life is done. And now imagine you've lost
that. That's been taken away from you,
and not in a nice way, not in a beautiful way.
It was just taken from you. Not in a just way, not in a
fairway. It was just taken from you like
Isaac's water was taken from him.
What can you do when your well gets filled with dirt?
Isaac had lots of options. We have lots of options as well.
One option is to quit. I'm done, I'm out of here.
Quit and run away. I'm done.
I'm out of here. It would have been very simple,
very easy for Isaac to say, look, God, I know you said to
stay here, but there's a famine and it was all right when I had
wells. Every time I dig a well, it gets
filled up. I'm I'm tired of this.
I don't want to fight over it. I don't want to do with this.
My family is at risk. We're going to Egypt.
I quit. I'm out.
We're done. I'm running away.
That's an option that Isaac has. It's an option that we have to
quit and to run away, to complain and blame.
This is my favorite, very good at complaining.
I've been doing it for a very long time and, and I've got lots
of experience and lots of practice and, and, and there's
something just fun about complaining.
I don't know, I enjoy it way too much, but this is this is this
is my one, one of my many issues is complaining and blaming.
And blaming is easy too. You just find someone up the
ladder, up the chain, and whatever it is, it's their
fault. It's that person, it's those
people, it's that group, it's that politician, is it?
And you complain, you blame, it's their fault.
It's all on them. My life is over and things are
terrible and it's someone else's fault.
Complain and blame, or you can fight.
That was also an option that Isaac had.
Abraham fought at times, at least one time when when his
nephew Lott and Lott's family were taking political prisoners
and Abraham raised his own private army and he went and he
took on an alliance of five kingdoms and he won.
He went and he fought. Isaac could have done that.
He could have said, forget this, waiting for God to give me this
land. I have as much right to be here
as anybody else. I dug these wells.
My father dug these wells. We're going to fight for him.
We're going to take him back. We're going to hold him by
violence if necessary. He could have fought like we can
fight and someone's taken our well or, or we can do what Isaac
did and dig another well. Yep, we have to be careful here
because every good thing in the scripture can get twisted and
become a bad thing. And I want to be clear that this
doesn't get twisted. The story about Isaac is not in
here to teach us some kind of bootstrap theology where God
expects us to just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps
and get on with life and fix our own problems and take care of
business on our own. That's not what this is.
And this is also not a suck it up and walk it off theology
where God says, I don't care how much it hurts.
I don't care how much it cost you just keep moving.
Just keep moving. Walk it off.
Get over it. It'll all be OK.
Just get over it. That's not what this is.
This is so much beyond that, so much better than that.
This this Isaac digging another. Well, there are two sides that
it's a, it's a, it's like a gold coin and it's got 2 beautiful
sides. One side is faith and the other
is generosity. On the one hand, Isaac is simply
acting out of faith. He has seen God provide for him.
He has seen God give him and his family everything they need.
Maybe not everything they want, but everything they need.
He's got it, He's received it, and he has this promise from
God. Your descendants are going to be
a great nation and all of this land is one day going to belong
to you. And God has blessed him.
Even in the midst of this famine, God has blessed him.
And so Isaac says, why do I need to worry?
If my well has been filled up with dirt, I'll just dig another
well. God hasn't brought me to this
point to abandon me. God hasn't brought me this far
into my life to forsake me. Isaacson is like 60s at this
point. He's lived a little.
He knows that his life is in God's hands.
He learned that in a very powerful way when he was lying
on the altar and his dad had a knife over his chest.
And God saved his life. And Isaac knew from that point
on, my life does not belong to me.
My life belongs to God, my life belongs to God, and God is God.
I have faith that God will keep his promises.
That's one side of it, the faith, the other side of it, I
think is, is, is just as incredible.
And that's generosity. There's a famine in the land and
these people out here who are his enemies, who are taking his
water away from him, who are trying to kick them out of of
their land, send them away, get rid of him.
And Isaac says, you know what, they need water too.
There's a famine in the land. My enemies need water too.
Let them keep that well. Let them keep it.
I'll dig another one. It'll be OK because, because
God's made a promise he'll give me water.
We're not going to die. God promised they can have the
water. They need it.
They need it too. I'll just dig another well, it's
not bootstrap. It's not suck it up and bear it
and get over it. It's faith and generosity that
lead Isaac to dig another well. Now, another piece we got to
take a look at here is where's the devil in this story?
And I bring that up because like I said, I was I the confession.
I'm not sure if I said this here yet or not.
I I first heard the story through the Psalm and, and I
went digging through the Bible looking for it and when I found
it I was like, where's the devil?
Where's the devil? The song says the devil filled
up Ike's wells with dirt and the Bible says the Philistines
filled up Isaac's wells with dirt.
Where's the devil? The devil is in the story.
The devil is in the story and he's in the story through 1
little word that has very significant consequences.
He, that is Isaac, had so many flocks and herds and servants
that the Philistines envied him. So all the wells that his
father's servants A dug at the time of his father Abraham, the
Philistines stopped up filling them with earth.
The devil was in the envy. That devil loves envy.
That's one of the places the devil dances and plays and
laughs and sings is an envy. And the devil was whispering in
the Philistines ears. Ah, you know, life's tough right
now. Life's tough right now.
You're struggling. You're struggling.
That guy Isaac, he's doing well, and he's a foreigner.
You're struggling. He's on your land and he's a
foreigner. That Isaac.
Isaac over there, you know, he's got all that money, He's got all
that wealth. He's got all those flocks.
Everything's going fine for him. He's on your land.
He's taking your water. You're going to stand for that.
No envy. Envy.
It's not fair. Isaac's got all of that.
He's doing so well while we're struggling in this famine.
It's not fair. We're going to take it.
Envy is a spiritual cancer.
Envy robs people of joy. Envy destroys even the
possibility of relationships. Try to be in a loving
relationship for someone that you envy.
Try. And maybe you've been in a
situation where people have envied you and you try to be
kind, you try to build relationship, but they envy.
It's, it's nearly impossible to be in any kind of meaningful
relationship of love and, and, and mutual encouragement with
when one person is envying the other or one group is envying
the other in that relationship. Envy is a spiritual cancer.
I'm not, you know, I, I believe the devil's real.
I believe demons are real and I think, I think that's, and I
don't think that's just mythology.
I think that's real. I also don't believe there's a
demon hiding behind every Bush. But I believe Paul when he says
this, when you're in a conflict, when you're in a fight, you need
to remember this. The battle is not against flesh
and blood. Those human beings are not your
real enemy. Your real enemy are the
principalities and powers, the spiritual forces of darkness in
this world. Those are your real enemies, and
they're whispering in people's ears, just like sometimes they
whisper in our ears. And one of the things they try
to inspire is envy. Other things too.
Hatred, lust, contempt, despair. There's a lot of things the
devil tries to inspire, but Envy's one of them.
Wrecks people's lives, wrecks relationships, wrecks
communities. And Isaac, even though the devil
is never mentioned in this passage, Isaac behaves like
someone who understands that the Philistines, even they're
though, even though they're the ones filling up his wells, even
though they're the ones stealing his wells, that they're not
really the enemy. They're not really the enemy.
And so he can show grace to them and generosity to them and
compassion to them and just dig another well, knowing that God's
going to take care of him, just just dig another well.
Isaac understood and lived like, or you know, lived like, you
understood. We have the benefit of we don't
only know Isaac's story, we also know all of Abraham's story,
Isaac's story, all of descendants to, we know Jacob
and Esau, we know Jesus, we know all of those stories.
Isaac just, you know, he didn't have as much information as we
have, but he lived like he understood this too, that the
devil's attacks always have to bow to God, God's sovereignty,
whenever the devil comes at us, no matter who he's coming at us
through, whether it's friend, family, enemy, whatever, that,
that the devil's attacks always have to bow to God's
sovereignty, whatever God has promised, God will fulfill.
And because we know Jesus's story, we know that even if our
enemy conspires to achieve our death, God gives us our life
back in the end. God's sovereignty always wins.
God's will always triumphs, always triumphs in the end.
And the devil's attacks always have to bow to that.
And we see in Isaac's attitude that God wasn't going to bow to
the OR, that Isaac wasn't going to bow to the devil.
He wasn't going to quit, he wasn't going to run away, He
wasn't going to blame and complain, and he wasn't going to
fight. He was just going to dig another
well, just going to dig another well and the end of the story.
This is what we see. God renews his promise to Isaac.
The night, that night, the night that Isaac dug a well and no one
took it from him. So good night in the Isaac
household dug a well and no one took it from him.
God appeared to him again with with an affirmation.
I am the God of your father, Abraham.
Do not be afraid. You need to fear.
Don't. You're right, Isaac, you don't
need to fear the Philistines. You don't need to fear what they
can do to you, for I am with you.
I will bless you. I will increase the number of
your descendants for the sake of my servant Abraham.
God renewed the promise and Isaac worshipped.
Isaac built an altar there, and he called on the name of the
Lord. Isaac wasn't going to bow down
to the devil. He wasn't going to give in to
the Philistines. Isaac bowed down to God and
said, once again, I am yours, my life is in your hands.
And he dug another well there. He pitched his tent and there
his servants dug a well. We worship, we dig another well.
This is the response. This is Thanksgiving week.
I probably should mention that it's Thanksgiving week.
Good thing, good thing to mention.
I, I, I believe that it is impossible to hold both envy and
gratitude simultaneously in our spirits, that we can't hold both
of those. Envy drives out gratitude,
gratitude drives out envy. Isaac seemed to have lived with
gratitude, gratitude for the blessings that he'd received
from God, gratitude for all that God had given him.
And, and he didn't give in to envy.
He could have envied the Philistines right back.
Yeah, God's blessed me now. But you own all of his land.
God, I don't have anything to call my own here other than what
I can carry around in a wagon. This all belongs to you.
Why can't I have what you have? Why can't I have the security of
of owning the land, of defining my own borders, of securing
those borders against my enemies?
Why can't I get to do that? Isaac could have played that
game, but instead he looked at all that God had given him, and
he was filled with gratitude, and he was able to bless even
his enemies. It was enough not only to bless
his family, but also to bless his enemies.
Isaac was filled with gratitude and Isaac dug the wells.
This wasn't God providing water from a rock.
There was work Isaac had to do too.
He had to dig the wells. He had to dig the wells.
But he did it with faith. He did it with gratitude.
He did it with hope and God. And we can do the same thing.
We can worship. We can dig another well.
Dave Durvecki learned that he was a man of faith still.
I don't know whether he's still alive or not.
My a man of faith, he came back after the doctor said this is
not you're done, you're pitching, career is over.
He came back, he went to rehab, he trained, he trained, he
trained, he trained. He went back.
He pitched again in the major leagues for the Giants, his
first game back and this is this almost unheard of these days.
He pitched 8 innings, gave up one run in eight innings when he
was told he would never pitch again.
In his second game back, he got to the 6th inning and he he
reared back and he threw a pitch and his arm snapped the torque
and the force of throwing the pitch.
His arm was weakened by the treatments that he'd received
and the bone just broke in the pitch.
You can find video footage of it.
I didn't see the game. I wasn't watching the game when
it happened, but I remember seeing the replays on TV at the
time and the cancer returned. And this time a year later they
had to take his whole arm and that well full of dirt.
He was done. And for Durvecki to keep going
with a sense of hope and purpose, he had to find another
well. He had to find another well.
And he, he wrote some books and he did some interviews.
I'm going to read just a couple of short excerpts from an
interview that he did. Deidre Becky said.
I used to depend on myself. Now I depend more on God through
my own suffering. I've become more aware of his
and I love him more as a result. I realized my life wasn't in my
hands anymore. My life was in God's hands.
It was always in God's hands. Isaac had to dig new wells.
Durvecki had to dig new wells. All of us at some point in our
lives have to dig new wells. When the thing that we need gets
taken away, we can fight, we can quit, we can run away, We can
blame and complain. Or with the hope that comes from
trusting in a God who keeps his promises, we can dig another
well. We can live in gratitude for all
that God has done and dig another well in Jesus name.
Amen. Amen.