Q&A Genesis 27

Hey everyone, thanks again for listening to Q&A with the Pastor. I'm sitting down with Keith Goad, and we're going to talk a little bit about his sermon from Genesis 27. Now, Keith, very briefly, what was Genesis 27 about, just in case I was not paying attention at all? Well, it's not the Cosby Show. Okay. Isaac is no Heathcliff Huxtable. Genesis 27 is about the sibling rivalry, which is really a covenant rivalry there. It's about a very dysfunctional family, a father who is manipulative, a wife who is deceptive and undermining, brothers who are trying to kill each other and lied about one another. Those easy synopsis is Jacob steals the blessing from Esau by lying to his father. And the great irony and the real sad part about that, he was stealing something that was already rightfully his because God said it would be. And that's the major... It just shows how sinful we really are, even if we are God's children. Essentially, we're trying to make blessings for ourselves and not just relying on God. Yeah. I mean, he's not trusting God to provide what he said he's going to provide. Neither is Rebecca, for that matter. Yeah, you also see the consequences of sin. Lies lead to more lies. The sin leads to a consequence of Jacob. Well, he's leaving the family. Okay, so at the beginning of the sermon you kind of gave a quintessential Americana view of a family and then you gave kind of the polar opposite. And you said Genesis 27 is much like the polar opposite. Now, while many of us come from rotten families, some of us come from pretty good families. I mean, we've got good parents who faithfully love us. Our kids are obedient and everything looks like the Huxtables in some way. How can we not let a good family disguise us from the necessity of the gospel? Well, we only have one member who really can dress anything like Heathcliff Huxtable. Who? Well, let's just leave him unnamed. He knows who he is. All right. All right. But a Claire Huxtable. Oh, it's a fantastic couple. Yeah. Yeah. I love the Huxtables. Anyway, what was your question again? I have no idea. Yeah. How can we not be distracted like we just were in idolizing? I know. I know. I'm on track. So, on track, a good family, the text is about a dysfunctional family. So, we have a lot of families who the parents are leading their children really well. I think the only response is they need to be thankful. They need to realize that when mom or dad does fail, when they do see their mom and dad sinning, when they see other children sinning, that that is, that's what's going to happen because we all are sinners. But we have to be equipped to make sure the gospel is covering those sins and we're letting that take place. So families, children who are in a healthy family, they just need to thank God that they can honor their parents by obeying God and they can obey God by honoring their parents. It's the real sticky situation that I have experienced before when I was a youth pastor where I would see children growing in Christ and they would outgrow their parents. because their parents are just dropping them off for that, you know, little spiritual moment to have. You know, there are typical, you know, soccer mom families where the life is just so busy and hectic and materialistic to really invest in your children, so you drop them off the youth pastor for, you know, a couple hours a week. There's nothing wrong with the youth ministry. There's something, the problem with that is actually the parents not being invested in scripture, invested in their children. And then letting the youth pastor build on top of that. The whole spirituality is the youth pastor does all the spiritual dealings. So thankfully, I don't think we have many or any dysfunctional families where the children are outgrowing the parents spiritually. But it is hard. It's kind of what we talked about last week in the sermon. When things are hard, it's easy to buckle down and trust God. When everything is good, that's when it's hard to see God's blessing all the time. You know, whenever you're raised in a family where you hear scripture regularly, talked about from your father when scripture is regularly read, it's hard to really appreciate how, what a blessing that is. Yeah. When you talked about hunger a lot in the physical sense, but also in the spiritual sense, what kind of Can you describe again having a hunger for God? Because you said the word delicious about seven times. I don't think you were describing God as being delicious, but would you like to elaborate on that? Yeah, well, delicious is the way the, I mean, six different times in the text it talks about delicious food that Isaac loved. That was actually the phrase that was so emphatic throughout the whole passage. Yeah, there I was trying to contrast, you know, what are our worldly hungers and what is our godly hunger? Because one will outweigh the other. One hunger will be stronger. And a godly hunger, what does it look like? It looks like a longing to experience God more. It's not being satisfied. Now, bless for those who hunger and thirst. for righteousness, which is in Christ, for they shall be satisfied. So God always does satisfy hunger, but in this world with sin and destruction and pain and guilt, we should always be wanting to see more of God. We should always want a better vision of God, of who He is and His love. And so someone, my fear is that people don't have a hunger for more of God. So they don't have a hunger for God because they've already gotten a ticket to heaven. They've prayed a prayer, they've come, they tithe regularly, they attend, and they're coming to church maybe even regularly, but they're not coming with a real purpose. It's two weeks now, I should have mentioned it again maybe, but as we're coming to Jefferson Park every Sunday to worship together, we need to be preparing our hearts to hear a word from God. We should be longing for a deeper, more a deeper experience of God, more conviction of sin, more clarity of the gospel. I would just pray that we as a church long in hunger for God more. It was actually, I forget where I saw the quote, I think it may have been Christendom, but it was, or Tozer, I'm sorry, it was Tozer who said this, you know, if you're not hungry, you're not healthy. And that was just a really convicting statement, because if you're not growing in Christ, you have to ask yourself, do I have Christ? Because He's going to complete that work you began in Him. So, that was just very personally challenging to think through, you know, what am I hungry for? Every morning, I wake up longing for my coffee. Because I just can't, I'm a coffee addict, I'll admit it. I wake up wanting to drink it first thing in the morning because it gets me going and wakes me up. I should have, it's a worldly hunger and there's nothing wrong with it in itself, maybe. But do I long for God, who truly satisfies? That same kind of as soon as I get up in the morning. Something that I was going to try to build off on was we usually find ourselves hungering for God when we're starving. And so how do we not experience what David felt in the Psalms where he is like a deer panting for water? Now his was a physical separation, but how do we It seems like we can get caught up into just checking things off the list. Like, well, I've been going to church every week. I come to church on Wednesday night. My kids go to BBS. I'm doing the right things. But am I hungry for God? And we don't want people to notice that when they're starving. So how do I keep myself on top of my spiritual game, if you will, of hungry after God, and making sure that I don't slip here and there. Is that where the spiritual disciplines come into play? I mean, is that a good way to feed the beast? Yeah, no, the beast. Interesting metaphor. We'll talk about that later. Yeah, God is infinite. The more you see him, the more you understand him, the more you're going to want. So the spiritual disciplines is how you experience more of God. So yeah, prayer, Bible study, Meditation on the Gospel, it's actually a very simple I don't want to call it a formula, because it's more spiritual than a formula. But if you think about God rightly, you're going to want to think about God more. You can't ever get enough. Now, he's always satisfying, but you also, the more you try to wrap your finite head around that infinite, beautiful God, the more you're going to want to do it. So, how? Yeah, it's practicing the disciplines. It's fellowshipping, it's reading scripture, it's meditating on the cross, it's prayer. You know, one of the ways I think people should probably pursue it is, you know, prepare yourself on Sunday by reading the passage beforehand and go ahead and start asking questions that I may or should answer. Go ahead and, you know, one of the problems we have is we avoid hard things. Ask hard questions of Scripture. Look for the hard, difficult doctrines and, you know, entertain yourself with the doctrines of God. The other thing I think is, I think God oftentimes will reveal himself most in suffering. And we avoid suffering. We try to medicate ourselves through suffering, you know, through actual medication or buying something, entertaining ourselves, things like that, instead of hungering down with God. But we would always say that the result of suffering seems to bring us closer to God. Some people have suffered in a lot of hard ways, and they would usually admit, if they're Christian at least, that that has brought them to a better experience with God, brought them closer to a knowledge of Him. So, how can you want that knowledge without wanting to suffer? Is it just expecting suffering? I brought that up because you mentioned David. I mean, David's suffering is what brought about such sweet proclamations in the Psalms. I don't think you go looking for suffering. I think you expect it if you're a Christian. And again, I think the bigger problem in America is that we have ways of avoiding it. And it's stopping those things. It's allowing yourself to spiritually work through the suffering instead of avoiding it with medication. So, yeah, don't go looking for it. That's whenever your own problems with asceticism and whatnot. I would say Americans first, stop avoiding it. I'm going to let you get away with bashing America because it's the 5th of July, not the 4th. If this was one day ago, we would have had problems. Let's talk about lying a little bit. Sorry, my church is in America. I'm speaking to church folk. Well, all right. We are in Virginia. Let's talk about lying a little bit. Now, you talked about... What do you want to tell me? Reoccurring. This is not confession. This is not confession for me. You talked about Jacob Lyne consistently, but you even talked about the art within his line and how that changed within one conversation and how that was manipulating to the process, but also a little bit of him manipulating himself because he knew that he was getting deeper and deeper in emotional debt. Was that revealing to you in any way or how did you read that and go, man, I do this too? Like, we can lie ourselves into a bigger pit than we originally thought. I'm not necessarily asking you to confess here, but... Yeah, I think we were talking about this last week or the week before, we talked about lying a lot, because, well, we're dealing with a couple of liars here. Like, when I'm late somewhere, like, I try to think of a way to explain my way out of it, and I always run into the issue that, oh no, that's lying, I can't say that. You know, trying to make it sound better than just I'm late. Everybody knows that when I was a child, I lied when I was a child, and I would always run into having to cover a lie with a lie and a lie. Thankfully, the Spirit can fix me whenever that temptation ever arises. And so, you know, that's God's sanctifying work of protecting and keeping. It almost seems like here, Jacob has his own will. He wants an outcome, a certain outcome. And rather than having the continual questioning of Isaac bring him towards God's will, he is incessantly trying to pursue his own will, even if that means lying more, rather than just getting caught once with the Father continually asking. Maybe Isaac didn't know what was happening. Maybe he was so old and so sick that he couldn't see. Jacob was essentially pursuing his own will rather than just repenting and going towards God's will. So it's like a war of two wills. Yeah, I think if there's something that was personally convicting it is not trusting God to bring out his will to try to manipulate it. The manipulation in this story is such a blatant lie. It just gets gross. But we need to, the real thing that I think we're all guilty of is trying to make sure we get the blessings God has promised us our way. Yeah. And in our time. That's really the sin behind the sin there. It's just the lying is so blatantly in front of you. It's gross. Well, a lot of times it seems like we certainly hunger, but we hunger for ourselves rather than hungry for God. Here, Jacob was hungry and after something that certainly wasn't Godliness. It's easy for us to say now, but in his circumstance, hopefully we would act differently. On top of that, You talked about the wedding feast, getting into heaven, Christ is the only way to heaven going through him. Are you amazed at the amount of people who still think if you just live well that you will wind up in heaven rather than seeing the wedding feast as only brought about by Christ? Because you talk to a lot of younger people. I hear you asking them questions. How do you go to heaven? Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm amazed. I think actually I've just gotten to the point where I expect people to think the way to heaven is something plus Jesus. Or, you know, Jesus was a teacher. Jesus was a good ruler. Yeah, I think I've gotten to the point now where I don't expect people to have gospel clarity. because we're always adding and subtracting and confusing. So, is it sad how many people claim to be Christians, but yet don't depend solely upon Christ for salvation? Yeah, it's weird, actually. Because we're really just moralists. I mean, a lot of Christians are just moralists. If you're a good person, God will not send you to hell. You know, the only people that go to hell are Hitler and terrorists. So yeah, it is an amazingly sad situation, and I think it's a lack of clear preaching of the gospel in pulpits. But yeah, so the wedding feast, it just struck me that Jacob, even though the blessing is already his to be in the kingdom, he's lying his way into it. And I think the great fear we all have to have is, how am I trying to manipulate myself in? Because if I'm coming in boasting anything on myself, you're like Jacob or Esau. One of the questions you asked us through the Little Listener papers that we hand out, which I always try to answer. One of the questions you asked was, how are we supposed to enter the kingdom of God? So I would ask you, as a Little Listener, how am I supposed to enter the kingdom of God? through Christ. Christ is the one who takes off our filthy rags and puts on a new wardrobe, puts on a new robe that is fitting, that is fit for the kingdom. That's the only way to realize it. There's nothing about us that is fit for the wedding feast at all. We are not supposed to be there. We're not equipped. Our sin is disgusting and offensive there. But when Christ comes, he takes away what is offensive and he puts on the proper gown is what he refers to it as. So it's only through Christ that we get the invitation and the proper attire to come in. Now this coming Sunday, you're going to be talking on Genesis 28. That's correct. What are you talking about? A stairway to heaven. could be the rock song, could be Jacob's Ladder. Could be both. Makes me very hungry. Can't wait to... Now, is the music going to change at all? You know, I don't know if we're going to be able to pull off some Zeppelin. I'm almost sure we can't pull off Zeppelin for reasons outside of ourselves. We'll see. Hopefully we will not be able to. We may at least show the Wayne's World We have a video projector in there. How was VBS? Did you enjoy that? VBS is fantastic. I was very impressed with how personal it all was. The fact that all of our families are all involved, husbands and wives. So many men that seem to be helping out. Yeah, I don't know who thought of it, but doing it in the evening was a great idea. Hannah did an incredible job of organization. The parents served so willingly. Had a couple really great actors. And some bad ones. Well, you weren't that convincing. It's not a gift. It's not a gift. Okay. I agree. Yeah. Here I am serving stuff in a Jewish temple and I don't know how. I do remember when you did spill the salt water on the kid. On a child. All over his back. Yeah. You're gifted. Well, in many ways. In many ways. The VBS was fantastic. I'm very appreciative. Next job, we can get more. Lots of people from all over town. Yeah. Yeah. It's very good. I also met some good folk from the neighborhood. Very good. All right. Well, Keith, any last words of wisdom before we bust out of here? Let the lead out. I have no idea. All right. Well, thanks for your time, anyway. Thanks.