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Well, happy mother's day.
You're welcome. You're welcome. I kind of paused like you were
gonna say that back, you know, and that would have been weird. So I'm glad
that you didn't. All right, if you have your bibles, and I hope you do, please
join me in Genesis, chapter 28 as
you turn there. I've been the pastor. father's Day will be eleven
years here, and I believe I've said the same thing for
every mother's, day that, God has blessed me
with the opportunity to be here. Today is a
wonderful day as we will celebrate
moms. my mother in law is here with us
today. Afterwards, we're gonna go out to dinner, to
celebrate her, to celebrate Erin, to, celebrate my sister
in law and her mom. They're all going to be there together
with us. Yesterday, Grayson, had a
track meet in Somerville, so we were down there. My
mom came and was a part of that and took her out
and celebrated her and just a wonderful time
of celebration of what that looks like on this
day, as moms are so valuable,
and precious to us. And so, on behalf of all of
us, just thank you, moms, for all that you do, for how you
serve, for how you care, for how you love.
we greatly appreciate it, and you are truly a, ah,
blessing from the Lord.
All right. so I wanna say that. But I also wanna say this. I
also wanna recognize that today, while it is a wonderful
day to celebrate moms, sometimes today is a
difficult day as well. All right. I grew up in a
home. I've shared this story many times. My mom's
mom, she passed away when my mom was 15.
my mom came home from school one day and she found her mom
there had passed away from a massive heart attack.
My wife and I, Aaron struggled with
miscarriage and infertility, and
Mother's Day was a hard day for her as
well. and so I grew up and have known,
mother's day to be a, day of great
joy, but also a day of mixed
emotions and grieving and processing. but also in
the almost eleven years that I've been here, I've
had the honor to serve some of our families
on some of the saddest days and weeks of their
life. as they've, moms and
dads have had to bury, their children.
So, today I come, with
two greetings, one, of
appreciation and blessing that moms are, but
also, if today is a heavy day for you
because of many different reasons, some,
that I just listed. please know that
our heart is for you. And I do
hope, that maybe today, God can use his
word to speak a word of encouragement to you.
If today is a little bit more difficult day, than
normal for you, before we go dive into the
Lord's word this morning, let's, go to the Lord in
prayer. God, I come to you today, Lord, and
I thank you, for today. It is such a
blessing and wonderful honor to be here,
Lord, to worship you, to sing
songs, to you, to sing songs about
you, or to open your word to gather
with our church family, Lord, what a wonderful
day it is, Lord. Lord, I thank you for the moms
that we have, moms that raised
us, moms that loved us, moms
that discipled us, moms that
cared for us. Lord, what a wonderful blessing
and picture of the gospel of them as they
came alongside and just did so many things
to point us to the truth of the gospel. Lord, I thank you for
the mom that you blessed with. I thank you for her
love, for you. I thank you for her love
for me. I thank you for her love for my dad,
and what that has looked like and how that has molded,
and shaped me to be the husband, father,
pastor, friend, follower of Christ that I am.
Lord, I thank you for my mother in law, for who she is,
how she invests. Lord, I thank you for my wife. I
thank you for her place in our
family, her leadership, her guidance, her love.
Lord, and I thank you for all the mothers that we. That we
have here in the room. God, I also lift up those
that today is a day of struggle. Today is a
day of tears, Lord. Today
cannot, replace what they are
missing. But, Lord, I pray that in their sorrow,
they will find comfort, in Christ and in Christ
alone. And so, God, as we open your word this
morning, as we gather together as a church family, or
may the truth of your word, not simply just
ring true as it does, but may it penetrate to
the deep areas of our heart, transforming
us for the work of the gospel. And may we live for your
glory in your name. And it's in Jesus name we
pray. Amen.
Well, as we continue on in
Genesis, we looked at last week. And you'll
see this is kind of a common theme as we look through the
Bible. it would be really, okay if we always
opened scripture and found really
functional, operating, well put together
families. But oftentimes what we find is we find
the dysfunction of a lot of the families that we see.
And I hope that brings you a little bit comfort.
Right? When you look at your family, when you look at where you came
from and your reality of what you deal with. And that's
what we saw last week. We see this family
chosen by God, but living in
dysfunction. And their dysfunction comes out
of the deception that is created and
that is fostered and that is nurtured and that is
continued on in their family. We see Isaac and
Esau plotting. We see Rebekah,
and Jacob plotting, and their plots become
exposed. We see parents grieve. and then
it ended with one brother pledging
to kill another. And so what we were able
to draw from what we look and see is we
see from scripture what we see bad guys,
but a good God. And this good God gives grace
and gives mercy, and his plan holds true.
True. And in spite of all that is
attempting to unfold, we see the
triumphal victory of God continually
all throughout. Like, when we look at the Bible and we see the narrative
of scripture, right, the victory of God just isn't found
in revelation, even though we see the victory of God
there. But the victory of God is all the way through. God
says, this is what I'm gonna do. God's gonna do it. He's gonna bring glory
and honor to his name, right? In Christ, we stand in
victory. This is who we are in him.
And so this is what we see. The victory of. God's not
dependent on bad guys trying to do enough good
things, but the victory of God is dependent on the goodness of
God and who he is. And the grace of God is that he
takes bad people, he makes them good. He uses them
in spite of their shortcomings, in spite of their sins,
in spite of their failures, for his name, for his glory, for
his power. And we stand in the good grace of
that, which is why we're here. None of us deserve the grace of
God, but God gives us to us, and. Yes, and amen.
He uses us for his name
and for his glory. And so we continue on
with this story of this family
and this family, while we can look at it on this
side and see the victory that's there. They're
living in the difficulty of the reality
of the events of this deceit that's
unfolded before them.
So let's continue on. We're gonna read, the first nine verses
of Genesis 28. It says, then
Isaac called Jacob and blessed him and directed
him, you must not take a wife from the
canaanite women. Arise and go to
Padnanim Aram, to the house of Bethel, your
mother's father, and take as your wife from
there one of the daughters of Laban, your
mother's brother. God almighty bless
you and make you fruitful and
multiply you. That you may become a company
of peoples. And he give, may
he give the blessing of Abraham to you and
to your offspring with you. That you may take
possession of the land of your sojournings
that God gave to Abraham. Thus, Isaac
sent Jacob away, and he went to Padna Maram, to
Laban, the son of Bethel, to Aramean, the
brother of Rebekah, Jacob's and Esau's
mother. Now, Esau saw that Isaac
had blessed Jacob and sent him away to Padna
Maram to take a wife from there. And that
as he blessed him, he directed him, you must not take a
wife from the canaanite women. And that Jacob had
obeyed his father and his mother and God to Padna
Aram. So when Esau saw that the
canaanite women did not please, Isaac, his
father, Esau went to Ishmael. That name
has now come back and took as his
wife. Besides the wives, he
had Mehletha, daughter of
Ishmael, Abraham's son, the
sister of Nebiath. So what
we see here is lies and
deceit have hit this family.
And what we see in these first nine
verses is not the great
happiness of what a mother and father hope
to. In this, we
see, Esau wants to kill Jacob.
Jacob sent away. Esau lives, chooses
to live in rebellion against his family,
against God of all that's there.
A family, the family of promise,
the family of this is what God is going to do,
is choosing to live in the midst of their sin
and in their deceit. And we see that
tragedy is here, the
rebellion that we find. But, what
we find in scripture of what
God does, of how God works and what God is doing
is God doesn't just look at tragedy and leave
tragedy there for tragedy's sake. What God works and does
is God turns tragedy into
triumph. God takes what is
the Mess and says, watch how I'm going to
work and watch what I'm going to do. God
takes the deepest, darkest days of your
life and of your reality and says, I'm not going to
waste that. I'm going to take this and I'm going to work,
and I'm going to move, and this is what I'm going to do. This is what
you've created, but this is what I'm going to
allow. This is what I'm going to cause to become for my
name and for my glory. And the Bible is filled with
this, not just found in Genesis, but the Bible is filled
with God taking what looks like defeat
and turning the defeat into
victory, but victory for his
name and for his name's sake. Right? The
overall story, the sin of David with
BAthSHeba, and what comes from that
in that moment of everything that's there,
of the death, of the lies, of the destruction of what's
there. But on this side, what we can look and see is some
of the most heart heavy passages that we
find in scripture about forgiveness
and grace are found as a result of David
walking through this. And then God and his goodness and his
kindness and his grace and his mercy, drawing
David to repentance, bringing David into
the relationship of, forgiveness. What we see
in the New Testament, we see Saul, who would become the
apostle Paul, but as Saul, the mastermind,
more knowledge of the Old Testament, staunch
jewish leader who was persecuting christians
imprisonment and in death. And what God
does is he says, let me take this tragedy
of what's. And I'm gonna take Saul, and I'm gonna make him
Paul. And what Paul becomes in the power and
the goodness of Christ is two things. The greatest church
planner the world has ever known, to see the
gospel spread all over the known
world in these moments, and arguably the
greatest theologian that we could hold
to the power and the work of God, of what God is
doing. Saul didn't earn this. Saul
didn't earn becoming Paul. God said, I'm gonna take you, and I'm gonna turn you from
Saul to Paul, and this is what I'm gonna do.
We see Jesus with the woman at the well,
the samaritan woman, the sinful
woman, the woman who no one
would want to talk to, the woman who no one would want to be a part of. And then
she meets Christ,
and they have a conversation. And
he takes the person who was
afraid to speak to anyone,
hiding herself during the heat of the
day, and he turns her into an evangelist
for his city. See the work of
what God does. We see Jesus
friend Lazarus dead for four
days. The Bible says that he had begun to
stink, and Jesus
raises him from dead. We see the
IsRaelites led from captivity into freedom.
Pharaoh's army pursues them. When the army
reaches them, there's nowhere for them to turn.
Blocks them. The army, of
the Egyptians, is on the other side. We see
what is going to happen, what is going to take place. And so God
steps into the moment, and he parts the seas, and
they walk, and God leads them to freedom.
The Bible is not a story
of tragedy. Your
life and my life are not
stories of tragedy. When
we are found in
Christ, when the tragedy
is there, it's done and it's over with.
But when there's Christ, there's
victory. And it's hard for us to see
that. My father in law is
here with my mother in law this morning.
my wife told me years ago, and y'all know this, that I had to get clearance
to tell stories about her and my
kids, and so I get permission for that. My
father in law has never said that to me. So I would like
to tell a story of my father in law, that
he's got that grin like, boy, I can still take
you. And I think he can. All
right. but, Aaron and I, when we met in
college, my father in law, retired
pastor, and retired from the military,
and when we met, my father in law was not
long for being deployed, to
Iraq, during the war that was
there. And so, actually, we dated for
several months, and then we got engaged. And my father in law was
deployed, and was gone for
almost all of our engagement. He came back about a month
before we got married to officiate the
wedding. and my father in law,
I like to, like, graciously describe
him as, like,
redneck MacGyver,
right? He can take
anything and fix it.
Like, he has been that for me
so often, in our marriage, especially
early on. But still to this day, he can take
anything and fix it. And it might not be the
way that the factory would fix it, but it's the way that
Mark Reiser fixes it, you know? And
so he gets it, and he gets it done, and he gets the job
there over and over and over again. He has been
that guy to. When the emergency, when the
break happens, I can call him, he's there, he takes care of it, he
fixes it. He's driven to numerous times, to
Sumter, to Irmo, to Lexington
faithful, over and over and over again. But, like, the longer
I've been married, the longer, like, I'm like. But I want
to fix it. I
want to learn. Like, I love my father
in law, but he won't always be around. And I need
to know how to do some things, too. And so
I remember we were living in Aiken, and I had a weed eater
that was broke, and I'd seen my father in law fix
things like this all the time. And I thought, I can fix
this. And so I started
trying to assess the problem.
So I went and got my tools, screwdrivers,
wrenches, and I start taking the weed
eater apart. I got the
weed eater completely taken
apart. All the screws were laid
out. All the parts are spread out
all over the garage floor.
And I looked at it and I thought,
I have no clue what is
wrong with this weed eater.
But here's what I did know.
I knew that my father in law could fix it,
but here was the problem. I didn't
know how to put it back together again, right?
So Aaron knew that I was attempting to fix the weed eater.
She came out like, two days later, I'm still out
there looking at the weed eater, and she says, what are we going to
do? And I said, we're going to Lowe's.
So they have a part. I was like, yeah, they have a part. They have
a whole brand new weed eater, right?
And that's what we're going to do. We're going to take this mess
that I've created and throw it away.
We're not going to talk about it. We're not going to tell your dad what I
tried to do. We're going to trash it, and
we're going to go buy me another weed
eater. And she looked at me with a smile on her face.
Yes, honey, let's go, let's go, let's go.
Right? That's kind of how we work sometimes. At least that's how
I work. That's probably not how a lot of you work, but that's how I work. We
take our mess sometimes and we just throw it away because we can
start over. And I think
what's interesting about the story of God
is God takes the mess that we've created,
the tragedy that sits at our feet.
And when we're found in Christ, who we are and what
God does, God says, watch what I
do as I take your mess
and I use it for my victory. I take
your mess and I use it
for my triumph. So
how does God do this? How does God
turn tragedy into triumph? Like what we see
here in Genesis
28, here's what we see. God will
reveal himself, you see,
turning your mass into the
victory of God is not about
you. It's not about me.
It's about him and who he is.
In John 14, we
see what everyone other than
Christ sees as
tragedy. The
crucifixion of Christ
is imminent. Those
around Christ know this.
And I want you to. I'm gonna read these words in John
14, four through nine, and I want you to look at
the impending tragedy of what's there, but what
begins to happen and take place. Jesus shares them. He
shares, I'm gonna leave. And he says, and
you know the way in verse four to where
I'm going. Thomas said to
him, lord, we do not
know where you are going. How can we know the
way? Jesus said to
him, I am the way and the
truth and the life. No one comes to the father
except through me. If you had known me,
you would have known my father also. From
now on, you do know him and have
seen him. Philip said to him, lord, show
us the Father, and it is enough for us.
And Jesus said to him, I have been with you so
long, and you still do not know me. Philip,
whoever has seen me has
seen the father. How can you say,
show us the father?
What Thomas and Philip see is
the mess. What Thomas and
Philip see is the
tragedy. But jesus
says, I'm, leaving. So Thomas was like,
hey, help us
know what we need to do
in order so we can do
for ourselves what needs to happen
so that we can be
where you are.
Philip says,
show us God.
And in both instances,
the will and the way
are, found in the person
of Christ. Jesus is
like,
you want to know where I'm going?
And stop trying to figure out what you need to do
and understand who I am.
Jesus says to Philip, you
want to know who God is? You
want me to show you who he is. Philip.
Philip, look at me. Look at
me. And in this moment,
Jesus is
revealing himself.
When tragedy, huh? Hits.
And I don't care if it's
self inflicted tragedy
or bystander tragedy,
whether you did it to yourself or whether someone else
did it to you.
Where. What.
Who do you run to?
When we had our miscarriage and the
battles and everything that we faced
for a couple years, Aaron and
I
went down a difficult road.
A difficult road spiritually in our walk with
the Lord, difficult
road in the health of our
marriage. And what we both
thought was that on.
On that day, in that miscarriage, there was a
void, and that a
baby. A baby would fill that
void. A baby would fill that
void. And I want to tell you a couple
things that. That's.
That's a tragic. That's
a tragic place to find yourself,
and it's a tragic conclusion to come to
for a couple reasons. Number
one, Emma and
Grayson and your children
and your spouse and everyone else
that you have in your life were
never intended or created to be void
filler in your heart.
But, Jesus is. Jesus
is. Only
Jesus can fill us.
Only Jesus can take what is broken
and make it whole. Only Jesus can take
every bit of suffering, every bit of tragedy, every bit
of pain, every bit of suffering that
you've endured in this cruel, cruel world that pours
it out over and over and over again and fill
that. So, in this
moment, how does God.
Back to, Genesis 28. How does
God reveal himself in this strategy? How
does God. In this tragic moment of what we see,
what does God do? How does God
show up? So let's read. We're gonna read
verse ten down through verse 22.
And so Jacob left
Beersheba and went toward
Haran. And he came to a certain
place and stayed there that night because the sun
had set. Taking one of the stones
of the place, he put it under his head and lay
down, in that place to sleep.
And he dreamed. And behold,
there was a ladder set up on the earth,
and the top of it reached heaven.
And behold, the angels of
God were ascending and
descending on it. And
behold, the Lord stood
above it and said,
I am the Lord, the God of
Abraham, your father, and the God of Isaac.
The land on which you lie, I will give to you in
your offspring. Your offspring shall be like
the dust of the earth. And you shall spread abroad to
the west and to the east and to the north and to
the south. And in you and your offspring,
shall all the families of the earth be
blessed. Behold, I am with you and will
keep you wherever you go and will bring you
back to this land, for I will not leave you until
I have done all that I have promised
you. Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and
said, surely the Lord is in this place, and I did
not know it. And he was afraid and
said, how awesome is this place? There
is none other than the house of God.
And this is the gate of heaven. So
early in the morning, Jacob took the stone that he had
put under his head and set it up for a
pillar and poured oil on top of
it. And he called the name of the place
Bethel, but the name of the city was
Luz at the first. Then
Jacob made a vow, saying, if God
will be with me and will keep me in this way that
I go. And will give me bread to eat and
clothing to wear. So that I come again to my father's
house in peace. And m the Lord shall be my
God. And this stone which I have
set up for a pillar shall be God's
house. And of all that I give and all
that you give me, I will give a full
10th to you. I think it's
interesting that when God speaks to Jacob
in the midst of all that has happened, in the midst of all that
has been there, in the midst of all that is going on,
he doesn't rebuke him, he, doesn't scold
him.
There's Christ. And this is who we believe
he's interacting with here,
reveals himself,
speaks to Jacob. He
reminds him of the promise and the
assurance, the promise and the
assurance of who God is
and what God has promised to
do. Just as God revealed himself to Abraham
in a vision, God revealed himself to Jacob in a dream.
And in this dream, God promises Jacob the three things
he promised Abraham. The gift of land, great
prosperity, and a blessing to all nations.
The goodness of God. The promises of God did
not fail in the tent where the lies were created. But
the promises of God continue on
as the God of promises turns the
tragedy into the triumph of who
he is.
In the days of Jacob, if someone left
their home as he
had, that person
also left their God behind. It's
time to find new. It's time to start over. It was time to
create for themselves what they would create.
But God promised Jacob
that he would remain ever present with Jacob, that he
would protect Jacob. And that one day
Jacob would return to his home.
And God made this promise, not out of Jacob's goodness, but
out of God's, in
Christ. Regardless of the mess
that we find ourselves in, regardless
of the situation where we find ourselves,
we can guarantee that God is with us,
that God is holding us, and that God has
a home for us. And
that I love within this
is that there's this moment that happens.
There's this moment that takes place
as the goodness of God
is revealed. And
sinful man, with his
failures and his shortcomings,
responds to that holy God.
It says that Jacob woke up
in fear that when God
had revealed himself
to Jacob, that
Jacob's response
was to respond in the
reverence, in the awe of God,
in the beauty, in the
majesty and a little bit
of the mystery of what always
there. He responded in
reverence to God. As
God revealed himself to
Jacob. He made a marker
which is not something that we do often,
especially in our context,
but we've definitely seen this in Genesis so
far, and we'll continue. So what is he doing? What is he doing with
this stone and this oil and a
pillar? He's setting a place
of worship, and he's worshiping
God. So in the revealing of
God, he is
reverently worshiping him.
And he makes a vow. He makes a
vow. He dedicates
himself to God. The
past is the past, and this
is who I am in you as I go
forward. And he pledged
to give a 10th of all that he
had. He made a
sacrifice. He presented an
offering.
M when we take all of
these things, in
Jacob's response to this
holy God,
in spite of his shortcomings and his failures,
in spite of his sin and all that he had created,
what did he do?
He had church. He
had church.
We come to worship
for a lot of different reasons.
But the beauty when we
come in the midst of our
tragedy, Lord, this is who we
are, and this is what we've created. And
I do not deserve anything but
the mess that is there and the wrath
that you have given, that you could give. But,
o Lord, in the reverence of
who you are and in your power and your
mercy, the reverence before a
holy God, the willingness to
come and not worship
ourselves, but to worship him
about who he is, about what he has done,
about his goodness, about his mercy, about his
grace. And we sing and we pray and we speak
and we profess all those things of who he is
that we come. And in the midst of this, we
recognize that I'm going to dedicate myself to you,
that this day moving forward, Lord, as more
and more of you is revealed to me, more and more as you extend
me your grace and your truth, or that these are the steps of
obedience that I'm committing you, that I'm gonna take on this day
forward, and the beauty of our
sacrifice, of our time,
of our talent, of our money,
of all of who we are,
all of these things, not because we're
good, not because we figured it
out, not because of what we made of
ourselves, but of
who he is.
Maybe today is a
difficult day for you. Today
is a day where you feel
the continual reminder of who you
are is surrounded by the
tragedy that you find yourself in.
Today is the day that we
worship a holy,
loving good
God who takes your
tragedy and turns it into
triumph, who turns it into
victory,
even death.
It's hard for us when
we attend a
funeral, when we have
someone close to us die.
It's a very difficult day.
It's a very difficult day, even if you're a follower of
Jesus, because you're
processing your feelings, your love,
your affection, of all that you have.
But in these, what we must remember, what
we cling to, is that every
bit of the sting of the pain of what
the world feels, is the finality of
death in
Christ. In Christ.
That service is not
about the tragedy. That
service is about the triumph
that's found in Christ
and in Christ alone. That he
takes all the tragedy,
all the impossible, all of the
finality of what the world sees
and says. I'm going to use it to make you
whole, to bring you into my
presence, and to take every
bit of suffering and remove it from you no
more.
That's the God we worship. Would you pray with
me?
Jesus, I thank you for today.
I thank you that, Lord. So many times
we find ourselves in moments
like this in scripture.
The situation changes,
the tragedy looks
different, but it's the
mess that, ah, we've
created.
It's the mess that the world
has laid out before us.
It's the tragedy of this life.
But, God, you take that.
You take all that's there,
all of what we find. You
say, I'm going to use this.
Use this for my name and
for my glory.
God, if we search
for victory
anywhere, in
anything or
anyone other than
Jesus, it
will fail.
It will end. It will come
to ruin. And so, God,
I pray that all of us
here, regardless of
where we find ourselves,
would take our eyes
off of the tragedy
and put it on the victor.
The one who brings triumphs,
the one who's all powerful,
the one whose word is ever true.
Jesus, you are the
way, the truth,
and the life. And it's
in your name we pray. Amen.
Thanks again for listening, and be sure to check back
next week for another episode. In the meantime,
you can visit us@willowridgechurch.org or
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