What about Jacob’s limp…. (That was actually my response around 12:30 Monday evening as I was lying there praying, and God told me to speak on Jacob’s limp this Sunday.. “What about Jacob’s limp”?)……So, I got up and wrote down a few thoughts as they came to me till about 1:45, because if I don’t write it down right away, it’s gone….vaporized. So, that’s how this message came about for today)….
Speaking of Jacob’s limp We have folks in our fellowship who have had parts removed, and parts installed. Winnie has had a hip installed, Scott is our bionic man, others have stints in their bodies and rods and bolts…In other words we are not the same as we were at one time…. It is estimated that the chemical elements of a human body are collectively worth $17.18. But when those chemicals are combined into vital organs, marrow, and platelets, the value of the average human body sores to approximately $45,618,575.82.(Hey, You are all millionaires)
I am sure you know that because of cellular attrition our bodies actually replace themselves every years. So every 7 years you get a new spouse without the messy process of leaving one for another. My wife is working on her 8th husband….and I’m working on my 8th wife….Children get new parents, Parents get new children, and as a pastor I get a new church, every 7 years. I’m saying this and realizing that I am in my 11th body. No wonder I feel so young!!!
Anyway, there are experiences in life that leave you a little different than you were before… and that’s what happened to Jacob in the bible…
Genesis 32:28-31. "And God said, your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for as a prince you have power with God and with men, and you have prevailed. v29 And Jacob asked Him, and said, Tell me, I pray, Your name. And God said, why is it that you ask my name? And He blessed him there. v30 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, for he said, I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. v31 And as he passed over Peniel the sun rose upon him, and he halted (tsay-la'h …to limp)because of his thigh which God had touched."
The covenant promise first given to his grandfather Abraham, would now flow through Jacob and his offspring by the touch of God upon him! He would now spend the rest of his life, marked by that blessing in the form of a limp.
God was declaring, “Because of my touch on his life, this man will walk different now, than he ever did before”….Everyone would see Jacob’s walk and say, there’s a man who has been touched and blessed by God!
The path to blessing is the path of brokenness… Jacob started out full of himself, he rebelled against his father and mother, his brother, and most of the folks he encountered along the way. Most of you know that Jacob was a twin, and when his brother was born before him, he came out but Jacob was holding on to his ankle as though he was trying to pull him back in….
But now Jacob has encountered someone he can’t beat, someone he can’t hood wink, and someone who knows him better than he knows himself. His arms are too short to box with God, and the good news is that when you lose to God, it’s the best victory you could ever experience. That’s what this brokenness is about…. I’ll lose to God every time, because even though I may walk away broken, I now see myself in His eyes, I know myself as He knows me, and it causes me to walk a different way than I walked before. I was counselling a lady when she stopped me and made a statement which no one had ever said to me…. She said “You’re speaking to me out of your own brokenness, aren’t you.”? In that moment, I realized that all of the things I was sharing with her, had come forth from God’s touch on my life from the valleys I had walked through, and it pierced into a deep place within her… It’s not about the number of days in our life, but it’s about the amount of life in our days!!!
Brokenness tears away the sham, the pretense, and the phoniness … and allows the real you that God intended all along to be released.
All four gospels contain the story of a certain little woman’s brokenness, which is unusual, but God wanted to give it special emphasis for all of us….I’m going to use the one from Mark’s gospel.
Mark 14:3 “And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as Jesus sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head. 4 And there were some that had indignation within themselves, and said, why was this waste of the ointment made? 5 For it might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor. And they murmured against her. 6 And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble her? she has wrought a good work on me”.
First, let me say that this alabaster box was made of translucent, white or tinted fine-grained gypsum which could be broken quite easily. These small flasks would be placed on a neckless to be worn around the neck of young women of marriage age. When their hand was given in marriage, they would break the flask and anoint their husband to be in order to honor him.
The word “gypsum” means (to take hold of) and in breaking the flask and anointing Jesus, she was declaring that there was no going back. She broke it so that once it was offered it was final….Next, the value of this broken container with it’s contents, was about 300 pence, which was nearly a year’s wages for a Roman laborer.
So something of value was involved here. This box represents something of value to us that we give to God with no intention of taking it back. Also, notice that they asked “why was this waste of ointment made”?.. Friend when we offer our brokenness to God, whatever it cost to bring us to our brokenness was not wasted, it was, as Jesus said “to bring about a good work, for His glory.”
Don’t despise the process of your brokenness, because it causes something valuable to be released in your life. A depth, and an insight, wisdom, discernment, humility, patience, compassion and maturity, which you did not possess before…And if we allow the process to come full circle, it leads us into Godliness…America is being broken because it needs to return to God… Without God we are a fragile nation….Revival is always conditional on a time of brokenness…
OK, The main character we’re looking at today is Jacob. And we want to look at Jacob’s limp. We have seen that his limp was because God touched him …. But the reality also is, that God uses this world with all of it's trials and troubles, pressures, and circumstances to bring us to our own places of brokenness before Him. And we’re usually kicking and screaming and fighting like Jacob, all the way…..But the Father is helping us to realize that we are no match for all that life throws at us in ourselves, without Him.
Jacob arrives at this God encounter, from a place of loss. And he is struggling with Losing someone special. The grave has it'slessons. It teaches us and reminds us how frail we are and how fragile life can be. It teaches us how dependent we are on one another. It teaches us that life is short! We don’t have forever down here to get it right! Some folks got up this morning, not realizing that today would be their last day on earth to get the answers they have spent their lifetime searching for.
Jacob’s loss has begun to weigh on him… He has lost his mom, his dad, and he comes to Bethel where the latest loss, his nurse from birth, who was around 130 years old, Is laid to rest at Bethel. She helped deliver his son Benjamin and his wife Rachael died giving birth to that son.
Jacob is struggling with those in his own household as well. He had sent his favored son Joseph, to find his brothers who were tending the cattle, and they stripped him of his robe, threw him in a pit, and sold him to a trader going to Egypt. Then they told Jacob that he had been killed by a wild animal. Their betrayal adds to another loss, the loss of trust.
The Jacob who came to Peniel was a man whom life had broken to the place that God was now ready to use him.
Peniel means “A face to face encounter with God”… It was show time, where the rubber meets the road, this guy was done fighting… It was a personal “Here I am God” time for Jacob….
When God touched him, he was still fighting, but the moment He touched him, he became a different man.
God said, “you shall no longer be called Jacob, but you shall be called Israel, which means, the prince who prevailed with God.”
It had been a long, hard road, but the time of surrender has come.
The fight has gone out of this man, and he’s ready to be used of God!
Little could Jacob know that a nation would come forth from him that would touch the world. That Jacob and 70 people would enter Egypt, but over 2 million would come out under Moses. But it could not have happened without the process of brokenness…
Jacob may have had a limp, but he is in good company….
Isaac was blind from the age of about 40…..Moses was a stutterer….Samson was born with a defect that affected both legs…. Ehud, one of the mighty deliverers of Israel, had a shriveled left hand…. In modern history, Albert Einstein was kicked out of school because his teacher thought he could not learn…..novelist Agatha Christie had a learning disability and could not write, she had someone else write all of her novels, plays, and stories while she dictated them…..Alexander Graham Bell had dyslexia….Thomas Edison had dyslexia and ADHD and had to be home schooled….. Franklin Delano Roosevelt suffered from polio
and could not stand or walk without crutches yet was elected four times as President of the United States, from 1932 to 1944, and guided this country through the “great depression” and World War II.
I for one am glad that God didn’t put up a sign at the entrance of His kingdom that said “No limping allowed.” No struggling, no questioning, no wrestling, no suffering, no brokenness, no shortcomings, no imperfections…. It doesn’t say…“Only six pack, muscular, triumphant, dominant, prosperous, rich Christians who have it all together are welcomed here.”
When I entered my first pastorate at age 33, I used to go down into the basement of the church and spend one hour just getting up the courage to go up and face the people for the service. I was handicapped by fear.
Jacob’s God would not buy into a loser’s limp and neither should any of us. Our limp, whatever it might be, changes the way we walk because it’s the walk of an overcomer. God said, Jacob, you’re not the same man, because you overcame all the odds, and you made it!!!
Jacob knew the old testament version of what Paul said…”It’sChrist in me the hope of Glory”…..
A while back I wrote a poem titled “Even now”, it says….
“Even now, I trust You Jesus.. Even now, I still believe…
Even now I know you’re with me. You are strong when I am weak.
The journey may get rough and hard. Sometimes I cannot see my way.
My heart feels like a house of cards. So I trust You Lord, for come what may. How much does it really matter. If I gain the world, it’s incomplete.
I could lose all I have gathered. But if I sow, I know I’ll reap.
So, even now I trust You Jesus. Even now I still believe.
Even now, I know You’re with me. You are strong when I am weak”.
How encouraging that Jesus said in John 10:10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.
Someone has said that our greatest potential lies just beyond the other side of our greatest fears. Jacob’s name before he met God face to face meant “loser”… but God said, I’m not having any of that, You shall be called Israel, for you have prevailed, you have overcome, you have overwhelmed what tried to overwhelm you!!!
Hey Jacob, why are you limping…. I’m limping because I let God have His way and I stopped struggling….
Hey Jacob, why are you limping…. I’m limping because God is reminding me, to put the past behind me, and be open to a brand new future…
Hey Jacob, why are you limping…. I’m limping because God is reminding me that I’m an overcomer, not a loser, He changed the way I walk!!
Hey Jacob, why are you limping…. This is to remind me that all the things I put my trust in will fail me, but He will never leave me or fail me….
Let me go back to the opening scripture for a moment…. When God tells Jacob who he is, He wasn’t looking for a name that described his past, his failings, or his short comings….
He was naming him according to his potential and his destiny!God will not name you according to your issues…. But according to His intentions. We were beneath, but now we are above. We were sick, but now we are healed. When God changes us, we will not be what people remember from our past but what God declares about our future!!! Lazarus refused to be called “Stinky” even though he was in the tomb long enough to stink…. But everywhere he went, they said “this is the man who was dead, but now he lives”!!!
Hey church, remember that Kamikaze pilots had a lot of potential.
But it turned out they were all one hit wonders. Don’t be a one hit wonder A tall, lanky, struggling student who was new at the school, was standing at the edge of the 3rd story roof of a school building and was about jump off and commit suicide.
When suddenly from the school grounds the basketball teacher yells to him, "Don't jump, I see you've got lots of potential, just let me work with you!" He saw what all the others had missed. You can’t judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, and you can’t judge a pig by how well it flies! (unless it’s an elephant)
David had no social standing or public claim to fame, before he went up against Goliath. At that time, no one wrote of how he had beaten back a bear or laid a lion out like a prize fighter. When the famous prophet Nathan had shown up at the family home, even David’s own father overlooked him. He worked in faithful obscurity, but when he stood before Goliath, the nation learned that superficial, shallow human perceptions of this Giant killer disguised as a shepherd, were irrelevant when compared to his God-given potential when it was set free and released.
The obstacles that we all encounter are simply preparation for what comes next, in this life and in the next. The bear and lion we confront, are only rehearsals for the real fight which will reveal our potential. The obscure service is the proving ground where humility, patience and faithfulness are forged on the anvil of real life experience. Potential is like mining for gold, you have to dig through a lot of dirt to get to it, and bring it forth….but it’s well worth the effort.
God is empowering his people to be change agents regardless of where they might find themselves at the moment. This once unsung hero eventually wrote much of the Hebrew hymnal. And though he grew up undistinguished, God made him the standard by which all other kings would be judged.
As I was writing this message, the Lord said this to me….
This is a season when the Spirit of the lord is signaling that it’s time to launch out into the deeper water. Many have been satisfied to splash around in the waters near the shore, but a cry is going forth… “launch out into the deep, let go of the shoreline”… It’s time to do what you’ve been putting off, and what you’ve known in your spirit, but your mind gets in the way. It is in the deeper waters that the secrets of the Lord are revealed. It is in the deeper waters that the Divine flow is strongest. Go where the full current of the supernatural is drawing you, and allow it to take you where you’ve never been before. If you’ve only felt the river of God at ankle level, the knee deeplevel is calling. If you’ve only felt that river at waist level, the shoulder deep level is calling you. Fear will hold you back if you listen to it…. Know the shepherd’s voice and follow no other… For once you launch forth, you will never go back again. This is what you’ve hoped, dreamed and longed for, so let go now, and let the current take you, draw you, and bring you there….The deeper place is waiting…..
If you’re ready to walk in the new name that God has for you, and make that break once and for all, your potential is calling, and it’s louder than the voice of your past, it’s louder than the voice of your mistakes. You’ve been standing in that place where you wanted to take the leap, but you kept talking yourself out of it. Jacob decided it was time, David decided it was time, the woman with the alabaster box decided it was time. How about you….If that’s you would you stand this morning, right where you are…..
Prayer together…..Father, I thank You that You created us to reach our potential. In truth, You’re the only One who knows what we can achieve or who we can become. You know the plans You have for us, plans for good and not for evil, to give us a future and a hope. Our potential, like our lives, is shaped and fashioned for Your glory. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we exist to give You alone that glory. Lord, we can’t achieve that potential without knowing You. So for those who don’t know You, I pray that You would draw them to Yourself and bring them in. Let them come to know You as their all-in-all so they may find their everything in You.
And for those who do know You, Father, I ask that they would know You more and learn more about Your ways and Your desires. In that knowledge we can forgive ourselves and others who have wronged us as our lives line up with Your deep desires for us. Lord, You will never push us away or hold us back. You discipline us only for the purpose of renewal and restoration. You may move us to the wilderness for a season, but You always bring us out in love. You bless us that we might declare Your goodness and mercy. You burden us that we might press harder into You.
For those who don’t see their potential, whose eyes the enemy has blinded, I ask You to grant transparency, wisdom and vision. Let them throw off the old and burst forth into the new. Let their lives push past the pain and move over into the promise. And let them—let each of us—keep our eyes on Youas we press toward our true potential, the mark of our high and holy calling in Christ Jesus, in whose glorious name I pray—AMEN.
God desires for you to be healed and whole and free!
Could we all just stand with someone today and together take the journey of faith into a new walk in His strength, and covenant blessing….This is the latter rain!!
