AMEN!

January 15th, 2012 “AMEN!”

Music, Testimonies & Announcements, Offering

Prayer & Shema

“AMEN!” Amen indeed!… this is generally what we say at the end of our prayer and at the end of a message that we agree with… AMEN! Jesus sometimes BEGAN His messages that way, tho: “Amen Amen I say to you…” He would say. What does “Amen” mean? (ask) Often translated at “Truly, truly” or “verily verily”… it is a Hebrew term, from AMAN which means to make stable or establish with certainty, to make firm, to make or to declare to be solid and believable, trustworthy. From it comes the word “EMET” which means that which is TRUE. When Jesus started a statement with “Amen, Amen” He was saying “listen up, this is something you can stand on, something you can build on, something firm, solid, foundational” Of course, being Himself “the Truth” it’s not like everything else He said wasn’t true; but sometimes He made a point of highlighting a particular teaching to be remembered and built upon. He also told His disciples, if your remember, that if we hold to His teaching, that would mark us as His disciples, and that we would know the… what? The TRUTH, and the truth would set us free. If we hold to His teaching… what teaching? Where is it found? Right here, in the Word… this is why the emphasis on the Word in the churches… we talked about that a couple weeks ago, and we also memorized a verse together, didn’t we? Do you remember it? Where was it? (ask) 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness…” Very good.
The Scripture is our all-sufficient source of Truth from God. In the Scripture we find story after story of people clinging to untruth, making decisions based on fear that is rooted in lies, and then experiencing the consequences of rejecting the Truth. We’re going to look at one of these stories today, hopefully letting it be a cautionary tale for us so that we can walk with God and with each other in the Truth that brings freedom. Sound good? Okay, let’s go!
Text: Genesis 33:1-17 (read) Sounds like a wonderful family reunion, doesn’t it? This is sometimes referred to as the “reconciliation of Jacob and Esau”… and if you know what had gone on before, it seems like a happy ending to a difficult story. What had happened up to this point? If you’ve been reading along, you’ll remember that the last time these brothers were together, Esau was threatening to kill Jacob for not only taking His birthright but also the blessing that their father Isaac intended to give to Esau. If you don’t know the story, GO BACK AND READ IT! It will help you make sense of much of the rest of the Bible, including the New Testament.
Ok, so Jacob had left his family and gone back to the land where his grandfather Abraham has grown up, and there he found a wife… two wives, actually, plus two maids, who altogether gave him 13 children. That’s a whole other series of family issues that you should read about more than once… if nothing else it should give you comfort about your own dysfunctional family! But here in Genesis 33, Jacob is on his way back to Canaan, where his father and his brother live, and it’s been over 20 years. God had told Jacob to go back to Canaan, so he went, but not without a whole lot of fear. In Genesis 32:11 we read of Jacob’s prayer asking God to protect him: “Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau; for I fear him, lest he come and attack me, the mothers with the children” I love verse 12 here, too, because Jacob gets his courage to go forward from the Truth, from what God had told him: “For Thou didst say, ‘I will surely prosper you, and make your descendants as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.’” Very useful illustration for us, when we’re in the midst of fear; bring up what you KNOW, the Truth, and ride that truth right into the face of what you fear.
Ok, so good one on Jacob there, but let’s consider that fear for a moment. Some say “time heals all wounds” but I’m not so sure that’s true… and it certainly doesn’t seem to be the case here as Jacob hasn’t forgotten that Esau wanted to kill him, and he certainly didn’t seem to expect Esau to have forgotten what had happened. You see, for issues that have not been resolved, for wounds that haven’t healed, time stands still. Most of us are carrying around these issues from years ago, and we tell ourselves, “Oh, I’m over that, it was so long ago…” but if we let God show us the truth of the matter, we’ll find that we’re NOT over it, we still carry bitterness and fear, pain and anger from past disappointments, and shame over things we’ve done to hurt others… and those unresolved issues won’t just go away. Let’s go back to the text and see the evidence of this…
Gen 33:14-17… Jacob says “I will proceed at my leisure… until I come to my lord at Seir” (which is where Esau now lived, an area southeast of the Dead Sea and of Israel that became known as Edom). So Jacob says--or at least lets it seem like--he’s planning to following along after Esau. But what does he actually do? V: 17 tells us he headed to Succoth… which we suppose is near Shechem… which is northwest of the Dead Sea, some distance from Esau and his family. Hm. What’s up with that, I wonder?
Well. Maybe God had told him to go there… but we only know for sure in Gen 31:3 that God said: “Return to the land of your fathers and to your relatives, and I will be with you.” At any rate, if God had told him to head for Shechem, why did he give Esau the idea that he would come to Seir? Why didn’t he just say, “No, my brother, my God and your God has told me to go to Shechem, and so it’s off to Shechem I go!” Or, if God hadn’t told him to go to Shechem, perhaps he could have said “No, my brother, I’ve got my heart set on this other area up here” for whatever reason…
Does it matter? Isn’t this just a little white lie, not a big deal, a little “social lie” that we do to keep the peace, to smooth things over? Am I making a big deal out of nothing here? I really don’t think so, and here’s why… we know from later passages that the relationship was NOT good between Jacob’s family and Esau’s family… we see them burying Isaac together later on in Genesis 35, but every other encounter between Jacob (now known as Israel) and Esau (now known as Edom) shows that hostility continued between them… sometimes violent, as when the Amalekites (Amalek was Esau’s grandson Gen 36:12) attacked the Israelites when they came out of Egypt years later (Ex 17), sometimes a little more subtly but still clearly threatening, as when Edomites refused to let Israel pass through their land even when they offered to pay (Num 20).
I think it does matter, how we reconcile with each other over issues that come up… and you know those issues will come up, we step on each other, sometimes by mistake sometimes not so much. I think that, even if for the moment is feels like we’ve done well by “smoothing things over” with some evasive little lies, I think that there will be consequences of those little lies, and we end up enslaved and troubled by the barrier that remains. I believe God is not pleased with this half-baked reconciliation, not so much because He’s just this judging God who just hates lies as a matter of principal, but I believe He hates deceitfulness because it ensnares His people, it keeps us in bondage, and it makes fellowship difficult and troublesome, between us and Him and between us and each other.
This truth goes all the way back to the garden of Eden, in Genesis 3… another must-read story! Remember how the enemy, whom Jesus called the “father of lies,” lied to Adam and Eve, and how their response to his lies was to first break God’s command, and to then hide from God and try to deceive Him! This damaged their relationship with God, and resulted in their exile from the garden.
There’s good news though! Thank God for the Gospel, the Good News! Recall that, even though they were exiled from the garden, fellowship with God was still possible. This is important… even though there were consequences of their sin, all was not lost, and fellowship with God was still possible for them. This is important for us today because it’s true for us today: even though we make mistakes, even though we fall short, we still have fellowship with God, and we can still have fellowship with each other.
Let me say that again another way, because I believe this is His Word for us right now, today… The Lord wants to set some of us free with this truth today: even if there is a falling-out, even if there has been a breaking of trust, a disappointment, a hurt… all is not lost, there may be consequences, but reconciliation is available. Keep in mind this reconciliation doesn’t mean saying what the other person did was right, just as it doesn’t mean saying that what YOU did was right; it also doesn’t mean that you have to live next door to the other person and be best friends with them… God had a different destiny for Jacob and it didn’t involve him living with Esau… but even if God doesn’t necessarily require us to be super close to each other, I do know that His requires us to be honest with one another.
How do I know that? Glad you asked. Turn to Eph 4:25, and we’re going to conclude once we’ve looked at this passage.
Ephesians 4:25 Therefore, laying aside falsehood, SPEAK TRUTH EACH ONE of you WITH HIS NEIGHBOR, for we are members of one another.

In context He is describing who we OUGHT to be, setting aside the old way of our fathers, including the way of Jacob and many of the others described in Scripture. Instead of hiding in falseness, he says to “speak truth” to each other.
Do any of you have a text where “Speak truth each one with his neighbor” is in all caps? What does that mean? OT reference here is Zechariah 8:16, where God is describing what He wants for His “City of Truth” (Zech 8:1).
Even though the story of God’s people, in the Scripture and right here with the church of today, even though our story is full of examples of people lying to each other, I believe God is still giving us a vision of this “City of Truth,” He is calling us up into that vision, to BE that City of Truth, where we won’t hide behind social pleasantness and “little white lies” but where we’ll go ahead and let there be awkwardness as we try to be honest with each other. Echo, let’s refuse to be satisfied to live in the self-protective shadows of half-truths, and instead live in the light, as He is in the light.
How do we do that? We start with ourselves, our own relationships, those people in our lives that we haven’t been able to reconcile with. Let the Lord shed His light on the situation, and be open to acting on what He shows you. Sometimes it’s out of our power to reconcile, but most of us can admit that we are partly responsible… and we fail to truly reconcile for various reasons: we don’t want to acknowledge where we were wrong, we don’t want to let the other person or people off the hook, we just don’t like them and how they live… whatever. Sometimes we have trouble getting over how others have lied to us or disappointed us… we know Father’s heart on that matter: all sin is sin against God, so we can decide to not take it personally, we can forgive and we can get over it.
As we spend a little time now in silence, reflect on these things and let the Lord illuminate them for you. Let Him show you where the lie is, and let Him show you the truth, and let Him give you the grace to walk in the truth.
[2-3 minutes silence, followed by song]
Jesus said in John 3:21 that those who live by the truth come into the light so that it may be seen clearly that what he has done has been done by God. Not only does God show you the truth of anything wrong in your life, but He shows you that He is greater than the wrong, and that He loves you and WILL do great things through you. Get into the Word, pray and listen for Father’s voice… this is how we cultivate relationship with Him and each other, this is how we harvest spiritual fruit in ourselves and in each other, and this is how we overcome the works of the enemy in our lives, in our church, and in the world.
And all who would be set free by receive THAT truth, please indicate so by saying “AMEN!”

Closing Prayer: Let’s pray…

Benediction