Feast and Follow with Knollwood

Fatherly Failure and God's Mercy

We have come to the final turn in our story of Genesis. We’ve been on quite a journey. We have seen how God has been faithful to three generations of Abraham’s family, and now we turn the corner to see how the story of Genesis concludes. 

At first glance, it would seem that now we are going to look at the life of Joseph as the main character going forward, but that would be a mistake. For sure, Joseph is going to be featured prominently in the chapters to follow, but the story really is about three men, not one. By keeping that fact in mind, we are going to have a much better idea why God includes the details that He does in the upcoming chapters. 

Today, we are going to take an overview of the section ahead of us, and because it is Father’s Day, we are going to look at it through the lens of three fathers, Jacob, Judah, and Joseph. They are going to compare and contrast in general, and we will see deeper details as we much through in the coming weeks. We are going to look at two points today that while addressing fathers in particular are nonetheless applicable to everyone. Fathers have a deep impact on their children yet Our impact is not beyond God’s mercy and control.

Esau's Family

How do you think about your enemies? It can be a complex question. On the one hand we are to be kind to our enemies, bless those who curse you and all of that. But how do you get to that point? How are you able to bless your enemies, even if they come from your own family? This passage doesn’t directly answer that question, but the rest of the story that this chapter sets up, does.

 

We will look at two points today: Your enemies are under God’s control and Your enemies can be made family in Christ.

Arise and Go Up to Bethel

How do you meet with God? How do you have a soul satisfying, hopeful relationship with God in this world? The question of hope and happiness has never seemed more elusive in a culture as prosperous as ours. We have never had more of our immediate needs taken for granted as we do today, and yet we find ourselves in the midst of the most anxious, psychologically burdened generation we’ve ever seen. Every day I am seeing best selling books and articles acknowledging this problem, sounding the alarm that all is not well in a world that just 150 years ago would have been considered a paradise.

 

This revelation is a mercy from God. It’s a mercy because we now have the surest evidence that we can stop wasting time thinking we are just one more discovery from finding hope. The answer to hope is found in God’s Word, and we will see how this chapter displays that for us.

 

Wonderfully, that hope is found in the midst of real life. As you no doubt noticed in the back half of the chapter, there isn’t a ton to be happy about. The hard things of dying in child birth and a scandalous son cannot overshadow the hope that God offers. No matter how modern we get, these are among the worst problems we can imagine. Yet God’s promises ring through even this and point to how we, too, can have a hopeful relationship with God.

 

Let’s look at this together in our two points Hope in God requires exclusive worship of God and Hope in God requires eternal waiting for God.

Vengeance Is Mine

Some sermons are harder to make than others. Some texts you read and think, “Well, that’s a sordid tale. Not much to uplift the soul here. Let’s move on.” There are others where you encounter a story like this, and those brave souls who attempt to spend some time in there can see multiple ways of looking at the story.

Unfortunately, this is a story that isn’t unfamiliar to our culture. Versions of this happen every day. Something like this may have even happened to you in this room. Because this topic is so familiar, it can blind us on how best to see it, because our various cultures and upbringings crowd around us as we read.

A mistake that we can make in looking at this text (and really many others) is to try to find the main villain. We try to make it simple and reduce the story to pure good guys versus pure bad guys. And that’s just not what we see here. As one commentator put it, there is “ostensibly nothing…commendable” in this chapter (Matthews). He’s right. Yes, there are some actions in this chapter that are worse than others, but there is something that everyone in this room can identify with.

This is a hard story, but there are two points for us to draw from it that Tim Keller, I believe, famously said: You are worse than you think but You are loved more than you know.

Lift Up Your Eyes

Introduction

Jacob has had quite a life thus far. There have been a multitude of twists and turns, deceptions and deals, and they have been leading up to this point, this last (?) conflict. The eventual confrontation with Esau has been a long time coming. It has been twenty years since he’s seen him last, and at that time, Esau was just waiting to kill Jacob.

We happen to know how this story is going to shape out, so I must put on my imagination to try to feel what Jacob had to be thinking about here. How many pleasant moments were interrupted by the sudden remembrance that Esau is still out there? How did it feel to successfully tell off Laban only to remember that there was someone else way more upset out there? Now lets imagine just the last 48 hours. Jacob found out that Esau is on his way, with 400 men! He’s been bustling about getting camps ready, sending advance servants with gifts, reordering his family to protect his favorites, and then capping it all off with an all-night wrestling match with God! By the time we get to our passage, it can be tough to imagine how Jacob is even seeing straight.

Maybe you’ve been here. Hopefully you’ve not had conflict where you fear for your life, but perhaps you’ve encountered such conflict, you can’t imagine it ever going away. Maybe you are even the reason that the conflict is there. No matter which position you find yourself in, I think this passage holds out hope for you today.

As we will see today, and I’m leaning heavily on my old seminary prof, Alan Ross for this main point, Reconciliation is a gift from God.

He Will Not Forget

Mother’s Day is a mixed blessing for many. On the one hand, it is a wonderful occasion for families to show their appreciation for God’ precious gift to them. It’s a hard job, and setting aside time to honor and acknowledge such effort is a good and necessary thing to do. Mom’s deserve their honor, and today is a day of great blessing.

 

However, this can be a hard day for many. Today is a reminder to many not of what they had but what they lost, or maybe never got to experience. Even for those who did get to experience both sides of motherhood, today can be tinged with guilt for past or maybe even current failures.

 

The text that is before us today speaks to both of these categories and to the rest of us. Fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, regretful or rejoicing, we can all find comfort and encouragement from our text today.

 

Isaiah is a prophet in Judah about 700 years before Christ was born. He was confronting sin and warning of coming judgment to the nation of Judah, the southern part of Israel. Israel (the northern kingdom) had experienced an exile about halfway through Isaiah’s time. Judah wouldn’t experience their final exile for another almost 150 years. Isaiah alternates throughout the book between statements of coming judgment and future restoration after that judgment. That future restoration happened in part through God’s working through secular politics. They at one point got to return to their land, but the major fulfillment of the nation’s hope was in the coming of Christ which Isaiah also predicts. This coming of Christ isn’t just said in the famous passages that we read at Christmas and Easter time. Christ also figures in with this chapter as well.

 

We are going to look at two points this morning, God will never forget you and Jesus is the reminder

A Noble Calling

If there is anything a human being distrusts it is authority. And there is actually good, Biblical reason for that. One of the very first things we learn about ourselves since toddlerhood is that we break rules. As we get older, we realize that people continue to break rules, and this is a reality that God Himself confirms.

 

So can we reason that since we humans are all sinners, does that mean we should get rid of all human leaders, or at the very least make the Church a pure democracy? The Bible tells us, no. God, Our Ultimate Authority, decided to work through human leaders to help His people, and believe it or not, that is actually a better way to do it. Why? Because that is the way He does it. He could have decided to just speak straight from heaven, live streaming Jesus directly into our sanctuaries and church officer meetings.

 

God decided to do something better. If He lead the Church with Zoom call Jesus, anytime He would tell us to do something, we would respond, “Well, He’s Jesus. He’s perfect! We’ll never be able to reach that.” Instead, He decides to transform sinful men by the Power of the Holy Spirit through their use of the Word and prayer to be examples (however imperfect) of what every Christian should look like. The response of, “I could never be like that” is taken away. The human elder is faithful to his wife, so you, a fellow human, can be, too. The human deacon isn’t captivated by a love of money, so you can, too. Likewise, the elder and the deacon aren’t sinlessly perfect, so they confess and repent of their sins when they arise. So you should, too.

 

These men are meant to be examples that are actually possible to imitate and learn from (1 Cor. 11:1). So as we go through this list of qualifications, this sermon isn’t limited to the three guys on our ballot this afternoon. All of you must pay attention. These are the marks of a qualified church leader, and it is your responsibility to identify such men and vote for their ascension to this work. It is also your responsibility to expect nothing less than these qualifications, knowing that no one fills them perfectly. It is also your responsibility to live up to these character qualities as well, because that is what these leaders are leading you towards. We don’t vote because a candidate is a friend or would have their feelings hurt. We vote for them because we are saying, “This man is worthy, according to God, of my imitation and trust to lead Christ’s church.” That is a heavy responsibility for all parties involved. So let us listen carefully to what the text has to say to us today.

 

Thankfully, God has not left us to formulate the ideal candidate on our own. God has graciously given to us the profile of a church leader that transcends time, culture, and our individual ideals. You will notice that the list God leaves us with here looks quite different than what we might see on a job requirements list today, even among church job postings. There is no mention of a dynamic personality or success in business, or even previous leadership experience except the candidate’s own household. This list emphasizes character above ability.

 

The Reason for Our Passion

Today we welcome a guest speaker on the podcast, Theodore Woo, as he brings us the word out of Luke 24:13-35. 

Not a New Day but THE New Day

This week, we have looked at a number of places that people place their hope. We can hope in politics rather than worship, riches rather than sacrifice, even sin rather than holiness. Today we are going to look a one more, extremely common place people put their hope: a new day.

 

We have come up with a lot of ways to cope with the busyness of modern life, and one of the most popular is the line, “things will slow down in a couple weeks.” Things then don’t, in fact, slow down in two weeks, so we repeat the lie again, hoping this time, it is in fact true.

 

Now, that is meant to be funny because this is something that we do all the time, but many of us cope with much more serious things this way and use it as an excuse to view pieces of our lives as meaningless and without a job. We look at our lives as a series of “just gotta get through this” moments. We turn our lives as always just two weeks away from fulfilling. Or turning just after potty training as when life really begins, or just after the kids are married, or just after this medical scan, or just after this wedding.

 

Do you see what that does to your life? Raising children in the fear and admonition of the Lord turns into something you just gotta get through, which means, really, it is a waste of time. Fulfilling your marriage vows before God and caring for a spouse as a picture of the gospel as you await medical results becomes a chore-filled, meaningless, busy work. Joy is always somewhere over there.

 

This passage, however, should change literally everything, and in fact, it did. Even secular life, non-Christian people have reoriented the calendar around this. It is the year 2025, because it has been (more or less) 2025 years since Jesus was born. For the Christian, however, this passage should change every single part of your life, including those parts that you say, “I just gotta get through this, and then things will be better.”

 

How?

 

Well, before I answer that, I need to clear up a few things first.

 

Number one, I’m not saying that the resurrection makes life easy. It doesn’t (yet). It’s still a fallen world (for now). I’m not saying that the resurrection turns waiting on a cancer diagnosis fun. I’m not even saying that we can’t grieve when sad things happen in our lives, and we look forward to the pain fading. What I am saying is that the Resurrection gives us the hope, the full assurance, mind you, of THE New day when all things are made new, when all things are resurrected from their dying state. On that day, all of these things that are unpleasant and sad and terrible will be redefined as the very things that lead us to the joy of heaven (Romans 8:28). We will see, with redeemed minds with the greatest hindsight capability possible, will look back over our lives from the heavenly point of view, and see that every single struggle eventually led us to this moment. So again, I am not saying that it makes life fun, but it will make life understandable.

 

Number two, I’m not just giving you a longer time to wait. In other words, you might be saying, “Ok, so you’re just telling us to stop putting hope in two weeks from now but rather 100 years from now when I’m dead? Aren’t you just telling us to do the same thing, hoping for the future, but make it longer?” That’s an insightful question, but no.

 

Putting your ultimate hope in eternity is very different because, number one, that future is actually guaranteed to you if you are in Christ. Two weeks from now being better isn’t it. In fact, it almost certainly will be the opposite. And number two, life slowing down in two weeks doesn’t change anything about today. Knowing that we will know whether or not it is cancer in a month does nothing for today except remind us of how much we don’t know.

 

Jesus rising from the dead actually changes everything about today, because it proves that there is a new King Who rules the world, and He has something for us to do during the waiting times. Not only that, but He is also the God of the universe, who brings all things into our lives for a specific, and good—in all meanings of that term—reason.

 

Let’s walk through this passage to see what this means.

Not in Politics, but Worship

We find ourselves once again at Palm Sunday and the entrance to the city of Jerusalem. This is a significant moment in Jesus’ ministry not just because it begins the road to the cross but because this scene has much to teach us today. So much is happening in this moment that if we don’t stop to look at the details we can miss what Jesus is saying and not saying about His ministry and its startling relevance to 21st century American politics.

 

Jesus is here to set the record straight in the two areas of life that we supposedly can’t bring up in polite conversation: worship and politics. These are sensitive issues because we tend to wrap our identity both personally and as a group around them. Both are actually important. Jesus has a role to fill in both of them, but we will be able to see which one Jesus prioritizes and will guide our thoughts for the rest of this week.

 

This week we are going to look at hope and where it is found. We will look at one area that we tend to find hope because that is our cultural default, and see how Christ offers the better alternative. Today, we are going to see that our hope is not in politics but in worship.