Well folks, let me invite you to grab a Bible and come with me to Genesis chapter 27, which
is where we're going to be this morning.
And the Lord has so much to teach us in this section.
Just a heads up, we're going to read it together in about 10 minutes time.
I just thought it'd be useful to get a bit of a run up to it so that we kind of know
what we're looking out for so that we can see the wood from the trees.
So, there were 3,326 of them when I counted them this week.
That is episodes of the Jeremy Kyle show, which aired on British telly between 2005 and 2019.
Now, Jeremy Kyle was a show, if you don't know, that basically got people on to explore, and
you could argue exploit, their mess.
Okay, strained relationships, dashed dreams, neighbourhood dramas, and it was watched at
its peak by an average of 1 million people, they estimated, in the UK on a daily basis.
Now, here's the thing about shows like that.
Meet Jesus in the Gospels, and he'll tell you why they will never be short of guests nor material.
And encounter him in the Gospels, and he'll tell you why, in all honesty, any of us could
be on a show like that, and they would have plenty to talk about.
And it's all because of where Jesus says the biggest problem facing human beings is.
And it's not primarily the stuff that goes on outside of us.
Meet Jesus, and he says that it's the stuff that goes on inside each of our hearts,
which runs counter-cultural, doesn't it, in terms of what we are told each day in our
world, that the answer is inside of us, and the problems are outside of us.
Jesus says, no, no, no, you've got it all wrong.
And one of Jesus' most piercing and his sobering of remarks is that it is out of the abundance
of the heart that the mouth speaks, and human beings think and act.
And that might come at you this morning as a revolutionary idea.
And I take it it should, in every single generation and every single culture, that Christ should
never fit comfortably into any culture if we've got them right.
I think, though, it is one, if we are honest with ourselves in one way or another, we all know
this is kind of true.
Do you know there's a French philosopher called Émile Calais, I think I've got that right,
who was born in 1894, right?
This guy grows up with zero interest in the Christian faith.
He grows up with absolutely no interest in the notion of God.
But it was after spending time sitting in the trenches during World War I, makes him stop
and ask some pretty big questions of his atheistic worldview.
And I guess that kind of is what happens when you must have seen bullet after bullet and
casualty after casualty and friend after friend die.
It all made him ask, why, right?
Why do human beings do these kind of things to each other?
And he gets back to France after the war is finished and he goes searching for answers
and he's reading book after book.
He's talking to person after person on a quest to find it.
And he's got nothing.
And then one day a friend hands him a Bible and he opens it and he begins to read it and
he says of it, he says, at last, this was a book that would understand me.
So what he says is he opens the Bible.
It's a book that understands me.
In other words, Calais founded the pages of the Bible, a book that explained him, explained the world.
I must say it was one of my, my testimony coming to the Christian faith, met Jesus, heard him speak,
never heard anything like this before.
But the map that he's putting out in front of me seems to be what I'm seeing around me and is definitely what I'm seeing inside of me.
Here's a book that explains us.
And logically, we'd expect nothing else from the word of our creator.
Who made us in his image.
Right.
We are like if you go to the Louvre, you pick up a copy of the Mona Lisa.
Right.
We're like walking little copies of the Mona Lisa that people are meant to look at and think, oh, that's great.
But I tell you what, it really wants me to get to know the original.
OK, that's what we're meant to do.
We're meant to image God's greatness to the world.
But the problem is by nature, by very nature, we've all turned away from our creators.
What sin is.
It's our rebellion against and our defiance of our maker and his ways.
And if that's what sin is, then what sin has does is it has curved us in on ourselves.
And so instead of being that image that glorifies God, what we are about is self-seeking.
So our loves are disordered.
Our desires are tainted.
Our wants are twisted.
And here's what I love about Jesus.
He doesn't just tell me about my heart problem.
Right.
We've all got those friends, haven't we, who love to say after the event, I told you that was going to happen.
But Jesus does way more than that.
He doesn't just tell me I've got a heart problem.
He's come to die for my heart problem.
And in by doing so, he's come to change and transform my heart and free me and free you from the things that naturally grip and have a stranglehold on our hearts.
But talking of heart problems, here's what we're going to read.
Come with me to Genesis 27.
We'll start at the end of 26 and we'll work all the way through to the beginning of chapter 28.
This is where we're going to be.
This is what we're going to see today.
You might remember a few weeks ago we said that Moses, as he writes this, doesn't want his generation of Israelites who are wandering in the desert, nor does he want any of the readers of this book in the years to come to watch this and look at this like a play or a movie.
Remember that?
But sitting back, popcorn out, laughing and cringing away, what can only be described as we read it in a minute is absolute car crash telly.
No, he wants us to look deep into this like we would a mirror.
And he wants us to ask, do you see your heart?
Do you see yourself?
And I think the big message of this is that the only hope for human beings is not that we'd get our act together and start playing happy families.
Because that's never going to happen.
No, Moses' point is our only hope is that this God would keep his promises.
And he would send the serpent crusher promised in Genesis 3 who would come and who would defeat the devil, who would defeat our sin and our darkness and would free us from these things.
That's our only hope, that God is true to his promises.
So here's what I want you to do as we read this together.
And Sarah and Olivia are going to come up.
You guys can come up just now.
And they're going to read us this for us in a moment in kind of two sections.
Here's what I want you to look for.
There's four characters in this section.
We've got Isaac.
We've got his wife, Rebecca.
And then we've got the two boys who are Esau and Jacob.
And all make, you've got that phrase in our culture, a pig's ear of things, okay?
They get it completely wrong.
Here's the challenge.
See if you can count and try and name the problems in the hearts that are arising as we read about these people here.
Okay, folks, I hope you got that.
Imagine this family on Jeremy Cowell.
Imagine the viewing figures for this episode.
Imagine these four on a psychologist's couch being told to,
how are you feeling?
What's going on?
You would be there for a long, long time.
The kind of passage I remember first reading this to myself as a new Christian and thinking,
are you seriously telling me that this is in the Bible?
And it's times at this that we're reminded that the Bible is not first and foremost a moral guide, right?
It's about what God has done to save people from the effects of their sin.
What are the problems?
Well, here's, let's rattle through them quickly.
Isaac.
Isaac is so stubborn that he won't obey, right?
Verse 1 of chapter 27.
Come with me.
Let's explore this guy a bit more.
Isaac's getting older.
And he knows that his days are few.
Now, remember that God had said to Rebecca in the context of this story,
back at verse 23 of chapter 25,
that these two boys in the womb,
the older shall serve the younger.
Remember that?
The blessing was to pass from the,
to the youngest son and through his line.
But Jacob,
verse 28 of chapter 5,
he loved Esau.
Do you remember that implication?
He loved him more than his other son, Jacob.
Now, why did he love him more?
Well, I think you can read between the lines
that Jacob's a hunter.
Jacob's got muscles.
Jacob's good at catching animals.
Jacob's good at cooking.
And Isaac loves to eat.
Yeah?
And that's why he wants one more taste of this stew.
And it's unsurprisingly then,
when it comes to officially passing the baton of blessing on,
that he is backing Esau.
He wants this line to continue through Esau.
Now, custom in this day was to gather the whole family together for the blessing.
And I guess that way you know where everyone stands.
Everybody's heard everything.
But do you notice in the text how Isaac's gone ahead
and he's arranged a private one-to-one?
Do you see that?
Because he's so determined that Esau's getting this blessing,
not Jacob.
Now, what's his heart problem?
He's just really stubborn.
I know what God has said,
but I'm going to go with my gut on this one.
Subtext, God,
I'm pretty sure that I'm smarter than you.
I've got to say as we read this,
it's a mirror.
Do we see that in our own hearts?
I know what you've said, Lord,
but I'm backing myself to make a good decision here.
As Isaac, what about Rebecca?
Rebecca is so bitter that she won't trust.
So verse five,
while this little one-to-one is going on,
Rebecca is eavesdropping at the door.
Right?
I always remember trying that as a kid,
that old cup against the wall trick
to try and hear what people were saying in the next room.
Still to this day,
no idea if that works or not.
But Rebecca's having a shot.
You see it?
It's what she's doing.
She's paranoid.
She's listening.
She doesn't trust anyone.
And how did she get there
is the question I think we're meant to ask.
Well, not only has she had years and years
of living with Isaac's favoritism of Esau,
but she's had years and years
of living with the hurt of Esau's flagrant disregard
for the things of the Lord.
Notice the details we're told in the text.
You see it verse 34 of chapter 26.
How Esau took Hittite wives.
So Esau knows what God has said
about how he's to only marry an Israelite gal
so that his heart would not go astray.
But he thinks I'm wiser
and I prefer it my way.
And he thinks nothing of it
as he goes and marries these people outside of Israel.
And these women,
what do they make life for Isaac and Rebecca?
And I take it they're just flaunting the fact
that they've got the heart of his son.
They make her,
do you see the word?
Bitter.
So whatever they're doing,
they're ripping her apart inside
to the point that she says right at the end of verse 46.
She says,
I loathe my life.
And you've got to hear the angst in her voice
as she says that.
Rebecca's really deeply hurt.
And she's carrying wounds around with her.
And we've all got hurt wounds in our lives,
but I think this is what we need to see
from how Rebecca acts here.
What the hurt has done
as it eats away
and burrows itself through her heart
is it's birthed in her
a deep hardness
and a cynicism
towards the Lord
and his care of her.
You know, Alex, my wife,
she spends a long time each night
brushing our girls' hair.
Right?
Daddy's been told so often,
I don't get to do their hair.
Okay?
The girls, let me do their hair.
Alex is brushing their hair.
So the jobs at night are,
I do brushing of teeth,
Alex does brushing of hair.
And every night,
let me tell you,
she gets the far harder job.
Because we sit there
and every single brush,
you hear it,
ow, ow, ow,
ow, why are you doing it?
Ow, why are you doing it?
And the reason that they're ow-ing
is because their hair's got so knotted.
You kind of brush the knots out
and it's sore,
but it's just knotted everywhere.
And that's Rebecca's heart.
It's just knotted.
It's callous.
Right?
She's wearing the religious t-shirt,
but deep down she's thinking,
I'm wasting my time
praying and trusting the Lord.
It makes zero difference.
Friends, that might be exactly
where you are today.
She thinks,
I'm taking this into my own hands
and she comes up with this scheme,
channeling her inner Lady Macbeth,
Cruella de Vil,
mashed into one
to outwit her husband.
And it centers on,
and see her manipulation here,
it centers on what she knows
is the way to her husband's heart,
which is through what?
His stomach.
And she'll have planned this
in her mind for years
and years and years.
Rehearsing every move,
fine-tuning the conversation,
playing it out.
So when the moment comes,
she takes her opportunity.
And you've got to say,
that's what hurt does
so often in our lives.
We just rehearse conversations.
We play out how we're going
to speak back to people.
I know what my own life is so true.
What is her heart problem?
It's bitterness.
What about Jacob?
Well, he's so weak
that he won't challenge.
His mum's come up with this plan.
And do you notice how he doesn't say,
mum, you're a genius.
I would never have thought of that myself.
Let's go.
What does he say?
He says, verse 11,
mum, this is never going to work.
I might bring a curse on myself.
He knows that he's in the wrong,
but he doesn't have the courage to say,
this is not the right thing to do.
The ends do not justify the means
before the Lord.
Knowing what the right thing is to do,
but being too cowardly to do it,
that is how he has so easily
been led astray.
And what happens in this guy's life
is that lie that he tells
because he's been led astray,
what happens to it?
It spirals and it spirals
and it spirals out of control.
And he finds himself in a hole
that he cannot get himself out of.
And it resorts just to bare face lying.
Right?
And time and time again,
like a jet pilot,
he could have pressed that ejector seat button
and boom, he would have got out of there.
But he chooses not to do it.
It's so often what we say of politicians,
isn't it?
Right?
Imagine the hypothetical situation.
There's a PR manager for the PM
who takes a drive
to another part of the country
to test their eyesight, hypothetically.
And when quizzed on it,
they just will not say,
I got it wrong.
I'm sorry, I made a mistake.
And it just gets further
and further and further,
deep down into the hole.
And before you know it,
everyone's falling out over this lie
that could have been sorted like that.
The devil will convince us,
dear friends,
that it's safer to live in the lie.
It is better to be in the darkness.
It is safer to live your life in the hole.
But the gospel says
that while the consequences for that are real,
and hear me right on that,
true freedom is to be found
by coming into the light
and saying,
God, I've got it wrong.
I am coming to you
and asking for your wisdom
and forgiveness and grace.
What is his heart problem?
His heart problem is fear.
It's fear.
I know the right thing to do,
but I'm too scared of my mom,
too scared of human beings
to do the right thing
in the sight of the Lord.
And what about Esau?
Well, he's so angry
that he won't change.
When he learns he's been double-crossed,
this is like the ultimate version
of the hustle, right?
He cries, verse 36.
He cries.
He's angry.
But I think you read the New Testament
and it forces us to see
that his tears are crocodile tears,
not true repentance before the Lord.
Right?
He's way more upset
that he's been conned
than it is that he's sinned
against the Lord.
And so hear and feel the ice
in those three chilling words
you get at verse 41.
How did he feel towards his brother?
He hated Jacob.
And there's murder in his heart
and there's revenge in his mind.
And Rebecca gets Jacob out of there
because verse 42, she says,
Esau is comforting himself
by planning to kill you.
Why did she send him away?
Verse 45, what's her hope?
That buying time
will mean that he will do what?
He will forget.
Forget that he was angry
against his brother.
We've got that phrase in our culture,
don't we, that time is a healer?
Friends, if you've ever been wronged,
you know that that is not the case.
Yes, it's wise not to hit send
quickly on an angry email.
Don't hear me wrong.
Sometimes it is wise to step back
and just cool down.
But hear me right in saying that
amnesia is never the cure to anger.
And so do you see yourself
in the hearts of these people?
Imagine these four on Jeremy Kyle.
Imagine these four trying to talk out
their problems.
Pride, deceit, cowardice, lies, anger, doubt.
And what we're going to see
in the rest of Genesis
is that this stuff,
it spreads like wildfire
through this family
and it causes utter chaos everywhere.
This is in the Bible,
you better believe that it is.
And Moses is saying to this generation
who are wandering in the wilderness,
our hope is not that we are going to get
our hearts act together.
Kidding ourselves into thinking,
and we do this every single year,
don't we,
in January the 1st,
thinking this year is going to be different.
This year I'm going to turn over
our new leaf.
No, our hope is in the Lord
and Him alone being faithful
to His promise to save
His wayward people.
To bless the nation,
says Moses,
not because of who we are,
but despite of who we are,
to send someone to both deal with
and free us from the sin
that ravages our hearts.
And here's what I love
as you read the prophets
in the Old Testament.
One of the things that God says
He's going to do for His people,
the blessings of the new covenant,
what Jesus is going to bring in,
is He's going to give them,
He's going to give them new hearts.
Hearts that long not to live for themselves.
Hearts that long to lovingly obey Him
and worship Him.
And that's what Jesus is.
And that's what Jesus does.
He comes from this line
into this mess
and He sets His face like flint
to go to the cross
for all the dross,
for all the ugliness
that centers in my heart
and in my life.
He dies for it.
That sin that I should have been paying for
before a holy God,
Jesus pays His penalty on my behalf
and your behalf.
And in so doing,
He breaks,
and if you picked this up
in the first song that we sang,
He breaks the power of sin
and darkness.
He wrestles control
from sin that it had on my life.
He wrestles control
and He says,
you are mine.
I set you free to live and worship me.
And here's what I mean by that.
He changes us.
He's in the business
by His Spirit living in us
of transforming our hearts
to be more like His.
It's what they often say,
isn't it,
that happens when mothers,
they hold their infants
close to their chest.
The baby's heartbeat
begins to match
the pace of mums.
I always love that scene in Narnia.
Maybe you can think of it
this way as well.
The place in Narnia.
I love C.S. Lewis.
You might have picked that up
over the years.
Lewis writes to the Narnia,
it's always winter
but never Christmas.
But when Aslan comes on the scene,
things begin to melt.
And it's the warmth of his breath
as he goes around the statues,
it's the warmth of his breath
that begins to free
and bring statues to life.
What is the cure for people like Isaac
with hearts who are just full of pride
is knowing the forgiveness
and the changing power
of the effect of the humility of Jesus.
What's the cure for deeply hurt hearts
like Rebekah's?
It's knowing the peace of Jesus
that transcends all understanding.
What's the cure for people
who are weak like Isaac
is the truth of Jesus.
What is the cure for hearts
that are brimming with anger
like Esau's?
It's the forgiveness
and the melting grace of Jesus.
And on that one,
let me just do some pastoral
and apologetic work
on this whole issue of forgiveness
because I understand
that it's really hard
for many of us.
I say as Christians,
we want to really care about justice.
I think we're called to do that
as we read the Bible
to really care about justice.
But all wrongs being put to right.
We really care about justice.
But we should also really care
about forgiveness.
These should be like two train tracks
running right next to each other
in our lives.
Our culture says it's one or the other.
Pick which one you're going for.
But the Christian says
we want to and we can do both.
Is forgiveness just brushing things
under the carpet?
Does it ignore the wrongdoing?
Can I suggest that it doesn't?
Forgiveness doesn't undermine it.
No, it underlines it.
The cross of Jesus says to you
that what happened to you
is not trivial.
That it was so serious, in fact,
that it required the suffering
and death of the Son of God
to pay for it.
It really matters.
But we should look at Jesus
on the cross
and we should almost hear him say,
I know what it is to be wronged.
I know what it is to have people
who were closest to me betray me.
I know what it is to have family
think I'm crazy.
And it's only because of our belief
in the eternal justice of God
that one day we can know for certain
that he will come back
in the person of Jesus
and he will have all wrongs righted.
And that's why we can
leave it with him.
And it's only the grace of Jesus
that says it may be a very long
and it may be a very painful road.
But today can be the day
as we look to him
that we turn
and we say,
I do not want my life
to be dominated by anger
and bitterness
and hate.
Dear friends,
that may be exactly
what you need to do
off the back of this sermon today.
To come to Jesus
and say,
Lord Jesus,
help me with this.
So much of my thinking
on this has been shaped
by two people.
Firstly,
by Tim Keller.
He's got a great book
that he released
before he died
called Forgiveness.
I lent my copy away to someone
so I can't get it to you.
I don't know what it is,
but wonderful book
thinking about this whole topic.
And another lady
is called Amy Orr Ewing.
She gave an address
at the National Parliamentary
Prayer Breakfast
this week down in London.
In the audience
was a complete mixture
of church leaders,
parliamentary leaders,
and she's speaking
about this whole issue
of forgiveness.
And she said this,
and I think she is
bang on the money.
She said,
I believe the power
to forgive
and receive forgiveness
may just be
the greatest power
the Christian story
can offer
our age.
And into a world
that seems to be
increasingly divided
and just becoming
more increasingly
polar opposite
on things
and just throwing rocks
at each other
rather than lovingly
dialoguing
with each other.
Do you see how we've got
a wonderful opportunity here
as the church of Jesus
to demonstrate
the difference
that he makes
in our lives?
I always love it
and you can have this
for free.
I was thinking this week,
we get,
as Jesus works
in our lives,
I love how Paul
in Galatians chapter 5,
just to stretch you a bit,
he contrasts
the works of the flesh
with the fruit
of the Spirit.
Right at the end
of chapter 5.
And my attention
had always gone to
the flesh and the Spirit,
but actually
I was encouraged
this week
to think about
the adjectives,
right?
The works
and the fruit.
Have you ever wondered
why he doesn't call them
the works of the flesh
and the work of the Spirit?
He says,
the works of the flesh
and the fruit of the Spirit.
In other words,
the works of the flesh,
these things,
are the things
that we just work out,
just come naturally to us
and what comes out of us,
that's works.
But fruit
is something
that grows
and comes
out of us
as Jesus changes us
by his Spirit.
Because all glory
goes to him
and you start reading
those words
in Galatians chapter 5,
the fruit of the Spirit
is love
and it's joy
and it's peace
and it's patience
and it's kindness
and it's gentleness
and it's self-control.
And you read those words
and you think,
I want them in my life.
And the only way
that it can happen
is if the Spirit of God
works in us
and we produce
the fruit
to Jesus' glory,
that he would come in
and he would change my heart
because I see this stuff
all over my heart
all the time
and I hate it.
And I take it
the very fact
that you see it
in your life
and you hate it
is a sign
of the Spirit
working in you.
Now just as we close
and
can I just tell you
about what I've been
really struggling with
in June?
And lots of you
will be in the trenches
with me here
as we bring Lys to a close.
I have been struggling
so much
with my hay fever.
Anyone else struggling
with their hay fever
in June?
Right?
I feel like I'm
every night
I'm hunting
for an antihistamine tablet.
I feel like
the Met Office website
is now in my bookmarks
on my phone.
My nose
was like a tap
in June.
Felt like I was Rudolph
walking about everywhere
with a red nose.
But the question is
why?
Why was that
happening in June?
Right?
And the answer is
really simply
I think
that the sun
was out.
And because the sun
was out
the flowers
began to open.
Yeah?
And because the flowers
began to open
pollen began to spread
everywhere.
And it only happened
because the sun
was out.
Now
think about
Genesis 27
the verses
that we've taken
in today.
Here is the response
I think we need
to make to this
today.
Keep that image
in your head.
Sun hits the flowers
flowers open.
The only thing
that's going to birth
this kind of stuff
in our lives
that's going to
help us change
is us
like the flower
looking at the sun
and allowing the sun
to open us.
That's what the Bible
means when it says
behold the sun
behold the glory
of God
in other words
look at him
and as you take him
in allow him
to transform you
into his likeness.
And so that's what
we need to do
off the back
of this today.
Not try harder.
Right?
Not come up with
a swear jar
so that every time
we get something
wrong we chuck
something.
No, no, no.
The application of this
is to look to the sun
and to live.
In case you're wondering
where I've got that
imagery from
I've nicked it
from one of the
greatest Christian hymns
down the ages.
It goes like this
joyful, joyful
we adore you
God of glory
Lord of love
hearts unfold
like flowers
before you
opening to
the sun above
melt the clouds
of sin
and sadness
drive the dark
of doubt away
giver of
immortal gladness
fill us
with the light
of day
they don't like
writing like the old ones
now do they?
How incredible is that?
Fill us with the light
of day
that's what we need
to do in response
to this.
We're going to pray
and then we're going
to spend a little
time taking communion
together
to allow us a bit
more time to think
about the gospel
today
and listen
if you want to pray
about anything
that we've talked
about there
because I realise
we covered a lot
of ground
and I take it
one of the reasons
that this is here
is to say
it's okay
to come to me
as in God
with your mess
and I care enough
this is real life
to transform you
we'd love to
as an elders team
or anyone
that you've seen
here today
we'd love to pray
and think about
that more with you
so please do grab us
after the service
and we'll make that
happen
but let's pray
will we?
Father we thank you
so much for this
morning
we thank you
for your word
Father thank you
that you love us
and Father thank you
for your commitment
to us
your people
in the person
of Jesus
and so Father
we look to him
today
our all conquering
champion
we look to him
today as the one
who has paid
the penalty
of our sin
on the cross
as we're going to
remember in just a moment
and we look to him
as the one
who is able
to transform
our hearts
that we would
bear more
of his image
in our lives
and so Father
by your spirit
be moving amongst us
this morning
be convicting
be challenging
be comforting
as we pray
for the glory
of Jesus
in our lives
and in this city
we pray
in his precious name
Amen