Get On With It!

Genesis 35

Okay.  You have said you want to purpose God’s purpose for your life.  You are weary of where you are and the thing you are doing.  You want to seek His will and move forward.  If only you could get just a little nudge.  Here’s your nudge:  “Get on with it, already!”

We have been following the life of Jacob for months now and we have seen that he is a fighter.   Our cat Oscar we were told got his name because of his fascination with the garbage can.  But we fancied the name because he was like the boxer “Oscar DeLehoya”.   He too was a scrapper who never backed down or gave up. But then Oscar could also be called Jacob. He was heel grabber as well!

Jacob never got anywhere in life by fighting.  It was only when he fully surrendered to God (in Genesis 35) that he gets on with it!

What did Jacob surrender?

1.   Jacob surrendered his dreams. (Genesis 33:18)

Genesis 33:18

Now Jacob came safely to the city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, when he came from Paddan-aram, and camped before the city.

Jacob came into the land of Canaan. All of his talking life into his own hands had worked to drive him away from his destiny. Yielding to God his dreams led him where God had always wanted him to be.    What do you want to do with your remaining days? Buy a home? Go on a trip to Europe?  Write a book? Become Independently Wealthy?

For some of us, our dreams and how we might attain them are something we are not ready to surrender.  But God would have all of you…even your dreams.   There are a lot a directions you can go in this life, but have you surrendered to the one God wants us for you?

2.  Jacob surrendered himself to the Dream Maker. (33:20)

Genesis 33:20

Then he erected there an altar and called it El-Elohe-Israel. (God, the God of Israel)

The name of the altar: The God of Israel. This is a far cry from “God of my Fathers.” Or “God that I will bargain with.” That was how Jacob had viewed God until this moment.  This is now the “God of ME.”  He has now personalized His God. How about you? Is God just something your grandparents were into? Is He just something left on the flannel graph board in the mind of your childhood?

I was a youth minister for a number of years and I will tell the greatest joy in that position is seeing the light bulb go off in their mind when they realize that God wants THEM. When they finally attend church and youth group not because they HAVE to, but because they WANT to. He goes from “God of My Parents” to the “God of me.”

3.  Jacob surrendered his idols. (35:2-3)

Genesis 35:1-4

   Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, “Put away the foreign gods which are among you, and purify yourselves and change your garments; [3] and let us arise and go up to Bethel, and I will make an altar there to God

Jacob had finally came to the place where he staked his claim with God. He got rid of any rival and formed an allegiance with his Maker.

What do you have to surrender to God in the way of idols? Your work? Your hobby? Your paycheck? You know, we die a little each time we bow down to them.

4.  Jacob surrendered his skepticism. (35:9-13)

Jacob had received a promise at birth from God, himself. God has never broken a single promise he has ever made. He cannot! And yet Jacob still lived just about his whole life keeping God’s promise at arm’s length. So on this great moment in Jacob’s life, God restates his promise to him:

35:9-13:

   Then God appeared to Jacob again when he came from Paddan-aram, and He blessed him. [10] God said to him, “Your name is Jacob; You shall no longer be called Jacob,        But Israel shall be your name.”  Thus He called him Israel. [11] God also said to him,        “I am God Almighty; Be fruitful and multiply; A nation and a company of nations shall come from you, And kings shall come forth from you.  [12] “The land which I gave to Abraham and Isaac, I will give it to you, And I will give the land to your descendants after you.”  [13] Then God went up from him in the place where He had spoken with him.

Jacob hears it this time and this time believes it (shown by his worship that followed.  v.14-15).

Charles Colson, in his book The Good Life shared about the time right after he got out of prison for his role in the Watergate scandal:  “I had some very tempting offers in business and in law. I wanted to do something that was far less public. I wanted to be with my kids and spend some time getting my life together. Yet I kept feeling a persistent urge that I should be doing something for prisoners. That was not what I wanted to do. It’s not a very glamorous way to spend your life. A Washington acquaintance who befriended me during this period and organized a small prayer group for my support wanted me to work with political leaders through Bible studies. That certainly would have been logical. 

         Still, I couldn’t shake off the conviction that I was being called into prisons. Like Jacob of the Old Testament, I wrestled with God until the break of day. Jacob ended up with a bad hip; I ended up with a conviction that I should be in the prisons.”

Still wrestling with God?  Remember that God still has a wonderful plan for you.  And it is time to “get on with it!”  What’s holding you back?  Your view of God?  Your skepticism?  Your idols?  Surrender them all… and get a move on!  Your adventure awaits!

Blessings!

 

Good Grief

Genesis 23

“Good Grief.”  It was a favorite saying of the Charles Schultz character, Charlie Brown.  And it is a curious expression.  What kind of grief is “good”?

Let me ask you: What image comes to your mind when you think of the term “grief”?

• Perhaps a bouquet of flowers being laid on a freshly dug grave.
• Maybe a night of holding a loved one’s pillow, trying in vain to get some sleep.
• Maybe it’s the tears that seem to flow endlessly, or a pain in the gut that is too deep to describe in words.

A good friend of mine from California, Louise Johnson once shared with me a poem her daughter had written about a grief experience in her own life.

This is an apt picture of how grief can feel.   So, how can an emotion that feels that bad… ever be called “good”?

Genesis 23 records the death of Abraham’s wife, Sarah.

Sarah died.  Stop and think that over for a moment.  It is so easy to read a passage from the Bible, like this one, and not even attempt to feel what the Biblical personalities are emoting.  If you want your Bible reading and study to come alive… you need to do more than just parse verbs or examine sentence structure, you need to use your senses and emotions as you read.

Picture what Abraham is going through.  He is wailing in pain over the loss of the great love of his life.  Abraham was a man that proved his faith in God over and over again throughout his long life.  Will he remain faithful to God after he lays the one he loves to rest?  A good question for us would be this: What can we learn from how a godly person deals with grief?

1)  We can accept that grief is a healthy and normal part of life.  The Bible displays this over and over.

• When the Patriarch Jacob died, they mourned for him 7 days.
• The OT book of Lamentations, depicts the mourning of the prophet Jeremiah over the destruction of Jerusalem.
• By the graveside of Lazarus it is recorded in the book of John that “Jesus wept.”
• In the book of Revelation, though God will in the end wipe them all away, there will be, until that moment, tears in the eyes of his saints.

As the old Gordon Jenson song said: “Tears are a language, God understands.”

2)  The second lesson we learn from this text is that we are to remember to move from personal grief to public memorial.

The text here doesn’t say how long Abraham grieved for Sarah. It may have been weeks or months. It does, however, have this to say in Genesis 23:3: “Then Abraham rose from before his dead…”

There came a time to emerge from private grief.  He reached a moment when he summoned the courage to step up from mourning in solitude and say something to the world.  Ray Stedman writes that verse 3 “signified a squaring of the shoulder, a lifting up of the eye, a firming of the step, a facing of life again…” And as he emerged from that private grief… the first thing Abraham decided to do was to create a memorial for Sarah.

Genesis 23:3-6                                                                                                                                                                Then Abraham rose from before his dead, and spoke to the sons of Heth, saying, [4] “I am a stranger and a sojourner among you; give me a burial site among you that I may bury my dead out of my sight.” [5] The sons of Heth answered Abraham, saying to him, [6] “Hear us, my lord, you are a mighty prince among us; bury your dead in the choicest of our graves; none of us will refuse you his grave for burying your dead.”

You may ask yourself, reading this text, why all the detail about the burial place?  It is written to tell us to what great lengths Abraham was willing to go to make sure Sarah’s memory would be preserved.  He did a great job picking out the plot by the way.  Sarah’s grave is one of the few in Palestine that has been authenticated today.  This cave, which was the burial place of Abraham, Jacob and Leah as well as Sarah, can still be visited today.  There is a mosque over the location, but it is believed to be the site of the cave.  Abraham succeeded in reminding the world of who Sarah was.

3)  The next thing grief can do is to help us continue to walk the path the Lord has laid out for us.

Did you catch how Abraham went on with God’s purpose for his life in this passage?  It’s subtle.

Genesis 23:17-18                                                                                                                                                             So Ephron’s field, which was in Machpelah, which faced Mamre, the field and cave which was in it, and all the trees which were in the field, that were within all the confines of its border, were deeded over [18] to Abraham for a possession in the presence of the sons of Heth, before all who went in at the gate of his city.

Did you catch it?

God had made two promises to Abraham.  One was that he would give him and Sarah a son.  That son would father a multitude of people.  That promise had been fulfilled 37 years ago.

The second promise God made to Abraham was land. He was going to give him the land of Canaan as a possession for his descendants.  Abraham is now 137 years old. Up to chapter 22, how much of the land of Canaan did Abraham own?   Zero.   By purchasing this land, Abraham is advancing the purposes of God.

When we lose someone it is so easy to not want to go on. It is hard without their support and love. But if God still has us here on planet earth, it is because He still has a purpose for us down here and we had best get at it.

And grief can actually help sharpen our focus in life. We understand now how fragile life is. We know that we have a limited time to fulfill our purpose for being here. Grief can spur us to serve those around us.

“Good” grief?  Absolutely.  It is an emotion created by God with much benefit to our souls.  Don’t struggle.  Don’t run and hide.  Trust God to see you through it.

Blessings!