Genesis 28:10-22 - Fighting For Relationship

Main Idea: Accept a personal, vibrant relationship with God through Jesus.

• God’s pursuing you, so accept His love.

• God plans to bless others through you, so receive His blessing.

• God personally cares for you, so let Him determine your actions.

• God preeminently deserves your worship, so give it all to Him.

Sermon Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)

Today, we are continuing our study in Genesis 25 through 36 called Family Feud. Basically, if you think you got a messed up family, not quite as messed up as this family.

And we have been following through how the family of Abraham through successive generations of Isaac and Jacob, how they have an incredible promise and mission from God that through their family lineage, the Messiah would come into the world.

All the world would be saved through the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, obviously culminating in Jesus Christ himself coming from that lineage.

But what we find is even though these are God's chosen people, that they are not behaving in the way that God's chosen people are called to. That's something that's not foreign to many of us.

If I were to ask anyone around you, you know, Jen, Jimmy's back there. Hey, Jimmy, was Jen perfect and flawless in all of her ways this last week? He might not say no, but his eyes might tell me.

All of us fail. We have cruelty and unkindness. We lie.

We slander. We're bitter. We are angry in ways that we should not be.

We do things because we feel like it as opposed to this is what God has said. All of us fail. And so, we know what it's like to be these people.

And part of the problem is that we don't just do that in our relationship with God. Like, we're not just sinning against him. We're sinning against other people.

And so, as we've been walking through this series, we can see time and time and time again how our actions make an impact. They make a difference on the lives of other people.

And we've seen how Jacob was the one that God said of Isaac and Rebecca's two kids, Jacob and Esau. Esau is the older one. He's one that is very accomplished.

He's a great hunter. Some of you guys are like, yeah, I want to be like Esau. We saw last week he's an incredibly hairy man that you might as well be petting a goat's skin as far as touching Esau's arm.

He's just a man's man. But God says, I'm going to have Jacob be the one that the Messiah comes through his lineage. But instead of relying on God to accomplish God's mission, Jacob and Rebecca tried to take things into their own hands.

That Jacob, through manipulation and trickery, he tricked his brother into giving him the birthright. He tricked his father into giving him the blessing. Rebecca was orchestrating all the strings behind it.

And we saw last week the devastation that came to their family as Esau became murderous in his rage. And he said, listen, as soon as dad's out of the picture, and as soon as he's passed off the scene, then I'm going to kill my brother Jacob.

And so Rebecca wanted Jacob to go back to her kind of home country there in Huron, and will arrive there next week. But as she does that, she sends Jacob away. She'll actually never see Jacob again.

It's the last time that she ever saw her son. And so Jacob is now heading away from family, away from, as far as we know, this is the first time that he has left this land of promise, where God's abundance and blessing were.

And so he is listening to his mom and dad, who are sending him back to his mom's ancestral country to find a spouse and to hopefully stay there for a little bit until Esau's temper dies down.

Jacob's all alone, going to a country that he's never been before. And that's where we find ourselves in Genesis chapter 28 and verse number 10. Genesis 28 verse number 10.

Today's message is entitled, Fighting for Relationship. Fighting for Relationship. Many of you in this room know what it's like to try and pursue a spouse, that you have a person that you love, and you want to be in a relationship with them.

By show of hands, if you have been married for longer than 40 years, can you raise your hand? Longer than 40 years. Okay.

Longer than 50 years? Okay. Longer than 55 years?

Oh, my goodness. Okay. So praise the Lord.

Amen. I'll say that 60 years? Wait, not you.

You have not been married 65 years. How long has it been for you, Jerry? Praise the Lord.

Sixty-nine years. I feel like that deserves a round of applause. I've been married six years.

He's been married 69 years. Praise the Lord. When you're pursuing a spouse, and if you will, you're finding for the relationship, you want the other person to know that you like them.

There's a kind of dating today where you just play coy, and you're waiting to see if the other person likes you before you express that you like them.

One of my friends, actually, who was out here in May, Dennis Fountain, when he was dating his wife, Hannah, they had kind of known of each other for probably seven years or so, known of each other, but they ended up at the same college, and they went

through a whole three months of dating, and Dennis, on the phone, told Hannah, I love you. And Hannah said, thanks, and hung up the phone. Brutal. Brutal.

He's pursuing, he wants this relationship. She does not really reciprocate. And I don't know if many of you have been in that circumstance where maybe you put your whole heart out on the line, and it just gets crushed to shreds.

I have been there. I feel you. If you are in that circumstance right now, it's okay.

I promise God will put you back together, and he will continue to do wonderful things. But as you're pursuing a spouse, you're fighting for a relationship, the goal is that as you pursue this other person, that they reciprocate it back.

Some of you have gone through storms in your marriage. Mr. Jerry, I don't know about you.

In 69 years of marriage, has there ever been any fights or squabbles? No, I didn't think so. But for most of us, we have things that you have to fight for your relationship.

But today, we're going to look at the fact that God wants a relationship with you. Now, some of you are like, okay, cool, I'm saved. I can check out for the rest of the message.

No, no, no, no, no. A relationship. He doesn't just want you to, you know, sign your name at the bottom of a thing and go, yeah, okay, I'm a Christian now.

That's not the kind of relationship that he wants with you. He wants a living, vibrant relationship with you. Today, the call to you is to accept a personal, vibrant relationship with God through Jesus.

That as Jesus has made a way for you to know God experientially, the call to you would be accept it. And if you have accepted him as your Savior, as your Lord, then walk like it and act like it in your life.

And so we're going to see some ways that we can do that even this morning.

But if you would, pray with me as we are about to dive into God's Word, and I want to encourage you, ask the Lord, God, whatever you have for me today, help my heart to be receptive. I want to listen to what you have to say.

And then believe as we look into the Word of God that God has something for you today. Let's pray together. Christ, thank you for your goodness to us.

Thank you for the fact that we are never alone. Thank you for the fact that your open arms are always calling out for us to return back to the place that we were made for, which is relationship with you.

God, I pray today that if there's someone here that does not yet know you as their Savior, that today would be the day that they choose to follow Jesus Christ, to accept him as their Lord and their Savior.

Lord, for those that are Christians here today, I pray that we would not settle for just being nominally Christians, but that we would actually live it out, that we would have a relationship with God that affects our relationship with others.

Love you, Lord, and I pray all of this in your name. Amen. If you have your Bible, turn over to Genesis chapter 28, verse number 10, we're going to read through the passage.

Jacob leaves Beersheba. This is the well of the seven. This is a place of blessing.

He's leaving his family behind. He says, and he went toward Haran. This would be a very, very long journey as he's heading to Mesopotamia from the southern part of Israel.

Verse 11 says, he reached a certain place and spent the night there because the sun had set. He took one of the stones from the place, put it there at his head, and lay down in that place.

I don't know if that seems like a particularly comfortable pillow for y'all. As I read through the commentaries, they're like, oh yeah, this was just super normal for people to do when you're on a journey.

You got to stick your head on something, and so a rock is fine. I'm glad I don't live during that time period. But here's what Jacob's doing.

He's tired. He's exhausted. We would see even from the place name later in the passage, he's gone about 40 miles from home.

So he's got a couple of days' journey already to this new location. Jacob dreamed a stairway was set on the ground with its top reaching the sky, and God's angels were going up and down on it.

Here the stairway would likely have been, kind of think of it like the stone that he's laying on, just keeps on going up and up and up. So think of stone stairway, not necessarily like a wooden ladder.

If you've ever heard the phrase before, Jacob's ladder, I was always thinking, you know, Gary, sometimes you'll get up onto something with a ladder. That was kind of what I had in my mind. This is more of like a staircase.

Think of ziggurat. This is some place that's going up to a temple spot. This is where God is.

And here's what we see. The stairway is on the ground with its top reaching the sky, and God's angels were going up and down on it.

What a relief it would be, at least in my mind, to think about angels being all around me, that they are coming to be near where I am. I don't know if you guys have experienced this, but many times in life, you can feel just utterly alone.

You can feel as though no one understands, no one cares. There's no one to protect you. No one can offer you the words of comfort that you so desperately need.

But I'm grateful for what we read in scripture, that the Lord gives his angels, he sends his angels on missions to be able to comfort us. They are ministering servants, as we would read in the Psalms and in Hebrews chapter one and two.

That God, he says in Psalm 91, a passage that Satan tried to twist in Tempting Jesus, he says, God has given his angels orders about you, so that you can't even stub your foot without God's permission. I'm thankful for that.

That also means in my life, when my toe does get stubbed, I'm going, all right, Lord, why did you allow that to happen? Why was that one necessary? This isn't just random chance.

But the truth is that God is looking out for you. And in the moments when you think you are totally alone, you're 40 miles away from family, you're in a place that you've never been before, God's presence is right there with you.

And he is sending a spiritual help to encourage and to strengthen you. Even Christ, during his time of hardship in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was encouraged by the angels.

You can think about Elijah as he is running for his life from Ahab and Jezebel. He is given food by the angels.

And so God is intimately aware of your circumstances, your hardships, your relational difficulties, and he is not unfeeling or uncaring for you.

Know that wherever you are as a child of God, the Lord is there, and he wants to comfort and equip and courage you for what he has called you to do. So here these angels go up and down on this ladder.

And then it says, the Lord, Yahweh, was standing there beside him. I love the other, we sang Our God Today, a song by Chris Tomlin. I love the other Chris Tomlin song, Whom Shall I Fear?

The God of Angel Armies is always by my side. It can be cool to think about angels. You know, there's something we're very unfamiliar with, and so there's, you know, mystery and all that about them.

And so it can be encouraging to think, okay, the angels are protecting me from things that I don't even know about. But what a greater comfort to know that the Lord is beside us.

I think of Hebrews and where the writer there says, don't be covetous, be content with what you have, because God has said, I will never leave you or forsake you. You're never forgotten. You're never abandoned.

And you can know that this God that was beside Jacob, the trickster, the liar, the imperfect one, it didn't stop his God from being there beside him. That's not to encourage, you know, lying and trickery and all of that.

But what we ought to take away is, God, even in my brokenness and my fallenness, you don't throw me away. You are still with me. So the Lord is standing there beside him, saying, I am the Lord.

I'm Yahweh, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your offspring the land on which you are lying.

He's reiterating the promise that he made to Abraham and the promise that was given to Isaac is now being iterated from the mouth of God to Jacob. This is not just because he tricked Esau, he got this.

It's not because he tricked his dad that he got this. Instead, it is God doing, God accomplishing what God promised.

He says in verse 14, your offspring will be like the dust of the earth, and you'll spread out towards the west, the east, the north, and the south. All the peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.

Here again, this promise of the Messiah. Verse 15, look, I am with you, and will watch over you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised.

I'm so thankful that this is the same type of thing that the Lord tells us today. He is with us.

He watches over us wherever we go, and he will bring us back, even as we think, even given this week, about eternity, about what awaits us on the other side of our own deaths. I'm thankful that God will bring us back to himself.

As Jesus said, that he went to prepare a place for us. If it weren't so, he would have told us instead, he's going to prepare a place for you and for me, for every person that is trusted in Christ Jesus.

We have a land that we are going to, our true home. And I love here, I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.

Whereas Paul told the Ephesian Church that the Holy Spirit is the down payment of the inheritance until God purchases his possession.

That until the time that we get back to God, we have the Holy Spirit, and he will not leave us until he has done everything that he has promised us.

Whereas Paul wrote to the Philippian Church, he said, being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. God has no unfinished projects.

It's not going to come to Judgment Day, and he'll go, oh no, I forgot to make Cathy everything that I intended. No, no, no.

On that day, we stand before him faultless, blameless, in the presence of his glory because of what Jesus has accomplished on our behalf. And if God began that work of salvation in you, he will bring it to completion.

If you believe in Christ as your Savior and your Lord, you can know with certainty that heaven is your home. That's the end goal that you are going towards. So here's this wonderful dream.

There's angels, the Lord, God's promises all come to Jacob. And in verse 16, when Jacob awoke from his sleep, he said, surely Yahweh is in this place, and I didn't know it.

It was very common during that time period to think that a God was centralized to some locations. So, you know, maybe Baal lives in Gaza or in Ashkelon or in, you know, any one of the other Philistine cities.

You would think Marduk lives in Babylon, like that capital city of the Babylonians. But here, Jacob is far away from home, and he discovers, oh, God is omnipresent. He is everywhere he desires to be.

He's not limited to one locale. Can I tell you guys, I love being at church on a Sunday morning at 11 a.m. as God's people are praying together, as we're singing his praises, as we're opening the word.

God is in this place. But God is also in your car on Monday morning as you're going to work. God is in your bathroom with you when you're crying, and the kids will not leave you alone.

And you're wondering, Lord, what did I get myself into? God's there with you. God is there in the doctor's office when you get that diagnosis.

God is with you in the courtroom when your heart breaks. There is no place where God is not. And so here is Jacob thinks about, oh, God is even in this location.

Remember that God, the Holy Spirit, lives inside of you. Everywhere you go, you bring God with you. The challenge then is where are you bringing God?

What conversations are you bringing the Holy Spirit into? Let's bring him into good places. Let's bring the Holy Spirit into holy places.

Let's have holy conversations. But remember that God is always with you. Then verse 17, He was afraid and said, what an awesome place this is.

This is none other than the house of God. Beth-el would be what this is in Hebrew. He says, this is the gate of heaven.

He says, if I want to find out where God lives, I might go right here to Beth-el. Early in the morning, Jacob took the stone that was near his head, and he set it up as a marker.

He poured oil on top of it and named the place Bethel, though previously the city was named Luz. So Beth or bet would be house, and then el would be a shortened phrase for Elohim or God. So Beth-el, house of God, is this place.

Then Jacob made a vow. If God will be with me and watch over me during this journey I'm making, if he provides me with food to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safely to my father's family, then Yahweh will be my God.

If I had a personal dream from God promising me generations of blessings, I don't know that I would be going, okay, God, if you do everything that I want, then you'll be my God. But Jacob works on his theology as we get through some of the years.

This is an imperfect prayer, but God receives it anyway. So he says, if God accomplishes, if he's faithful to his word, if he does everything that he said he will do, then he will be my God.

Verse 22, this stone that I have set up as a marker will be God's house, and I will give to you a tenth of all that you give me.

He says, God, the money, the animals, the possessions that I have, 10% of this, a tithe would be kind of the older word for this. It just means a tenth. He says, 10% of everything that I have will go to you.

Today, God's fighting for a relationship with you. So what does that look like?

What does it look like to accept this personal, vibrant relationship with God through Jesus Christ, even as we reflect on this story and what Jacob found as God pursued a relationship with him?

You notice it wasn't that Jacob was praying at the stone, and then God answered him. It was God initiated. Or as John the Apostle would tell us, we love him because he first loved us.

Or as Paul told the Roman church, there's no one wise, there's no one that understands, there's no one who seeks after God. Instead, God has pursued us.

You are not saved today if you know the Lord because you pursued God, but because God pursued you. He wanted a relationship with you, and that's a relationship that he still wants you to enjoy.

First today, we can see how do we accept this personal, vibrant relationship? God's pursuing you, so accept his love. The biggest way that God has pursued us is in the person of Jesus Christ.

That 2,000 years ago, Jesus became man. He took on humanity, and he was born to the Virgin Mary in the town of Bethlehem. Something we celebrate every year during the Christmas season.

But Jesus didn't just come so he could experience everything that you and I experienced, though he experienced the best and worst of humanity.

Instead, he came to live a perfect, sinless life, and to give his life as the substitute for our sinful lives.

That on the cross, all of the sin of humanity was placed on him, and he paid the cost for the wrong things that you and I have said and done. Paul told the Roman church that the wages of sin, the earnings that we get for the sin that we do, is death.

So Jesus came to take death in our place, that he became sin for us. He, the one that knew no sin, so that we would be made the righteousness of God in him.

He was buried, and three days later, he rose again from the dead, triumphant, because death could not contain the king of glory.

And as he rose in victory and then ascended into heaven forty days later, he now offers the choice to you and to me to enter into relationship with him. That he is the king and the lord of all. We have been rebels against his rule.

We have thought and said and done things against the nature and character and law of God. But God wants to offer forgiveness. He wants to offer us new life.

He wants to transform us from the inside out through placing his Holy Spirit in our lives.

And the Bible says that if we confess Jesus as Lord, that he is the master, he is the one in charge of our life, we recognize the price that he paid on the cross. And as we repent of our sin, we say, God, I'm sorry.

I know that I have sinned against you. Please come into my heart and save me and help me to live for you. The Bible says, whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

I'm so thankful that whether like me, you got saved, you know, when you were a kid, if you got saved when you were a teenager, I know we have many in this room that got saved as adults.

Whatever your age, whatever your sins, whatever your past has contained, God wants to extend salvation to you. Jesus is pursuing you. He pursued you on the cross.

He pursued you in his resurrection, in his ascension, and right now, if you are listening to my voice, he wants you to repent of your sin and to turn to him as Savior. That is true for every person that hears the sound of my voice.

I want to challenge you today. Will you accept his love? Will you accept Christ as your Savior?

And then practical application for those of you that do know Christ. If God pursues the unloving or the unlovely and offers them salvation and relationship, can't you pursue others with the love of God even this week?

And secondly, today, God plans to bless others through you, so receive his blessing. So God initiates this relationship with Jacob, and he tells him that he wants him to be a blessing.

Both him and his family would be a blessing to all the nations of the world. And the same is true for you today, though the Messiah will not come from your lineage. He was already born long ago.

God wants to make you into a picture of what he is like for those around you, that at your workplace, at Northeastern, at, you know, any cake making places, Amy, wherever you are, God wants you to be a light to show other people what God is like, how

he loves, how he cares. He wants to make you like himself with his characteristics, so that you'll generously treat others like he has treated you. I go, OK, what would it mean to receive the blessing of God? Well, it means becoming like him.

So find out what he's like in his word. Regularly partake in the things that God has given you to bless you spiritually.

Spend time in the word, spend time in fellowship, spend time in prayer, spend time singing to God or listening to music, praising the Lord, partake in the Lord's supper. Join in with fellowship and times together.

God has given all of those things to you so that you would be blessed, you would know what God is like, so then you can pass that on to others.

I want to encourage you today, be thankful for what God has given you and the skills and resources that he has equipped you specifically with.

You're not less than someone else if all you can do is pray or all you can do is teach or all you can do is lawn care or all you can do is sing or all you can do is encourage others.

God has given you the skills that you have because he wants you to help other people personally through them. So maybe God hasn't given you some gift that he's given to some other person.

He's given, you know, John some abilities in, you know, construction and all that, that he has not given yet to Bryon Self. And so God wants John to do some things with his gifts and with his skills that he hasn't yet called me to do.

But you're not less than someone else. You're not less than Amy, because maybe you don't have a Mike singing Our God on Sunday. You know, Mike, you're not less than, you know, you're not less than Lori, because you can't bake.

Can you bake? Okay. You're not less than her, because you can't bake.

That's right. God's given you your skills for what he wants you to do. So treasure that.

We can spend so much of our time going, God, why didn't you make me this other person? Why didn't you give me this other skill set? God says, because I already have one of them, you're the only one of you that I have.

So find value and purpose in that, that what God has given you, he has given to you for a purpose. You are blessed by God to bless others. If you know how to be saved, it's so you can tell someone else how to be saved.

If you've been taught the Bible by someone, it's so you can talk to someone else about that Bible passage.

Too often, we're like the Dead Sea when it comes to God's spiritual blessings, that everything that goes into the Dead Sea, it just stays there. And so it's totally full of minerals, but nothing can live there, because everything is just trapped.

That's not what God wants us to be with the blessings that he's given to us. Instead, he wants us to be a river, a conduit, a channel, that we take his blessings, and we pass it on to someone else.

I want to encourage you today, think about it, write down one thing that God has blessed you with, one skill, one ability, one thing you've learned.

Write down something that God has blessed you with, and how you will use that to bless someone else with it this week. Third today, God personally cares for you, so let him determine your actions.

God cared for Jacob, and so he told him, I want you to go and do this, and the end result of this is going to be the blessing of the whole world.

And for you and I today, if God cares about us, if he has blessed us and equipped us, if he's pursued us in the person of Jesus, then the least that we can do is let him determine our actions.

So often, we get scared that if we let God take the reins, that we're going to have a miserable life. But can I ask you this?

When you've held on to the reins in your life, when you've snapped at that other person, when you chose to get into that relationship that you had no business being in, when you chose to take that shortcut in perhaps your finances or your taxes or

your business or your dealings with someone else, how'd that turn out for you? All of us could give example after example of our life where when we took the reins and we did what we wanted to do, it all ended horribly wrong.

And the truth is that God wants to guide us in a good way. God's way is the way that we're supposed to live. It is the good life that He has created us for.

If God's going to be with you, protect you, and care for you, it only makes sense to let Him be the one to guide your steps. I'll tell you this. All of us get that.

We might perhaps mentally assent to it and go, yeah, of course, I'll let God determine my actions. The problem is, it's really, really, really hard to determine on our own if we're actually following God in our actions.

Because our conscience can lie to us. It can say, oh yeah, you're doing great. Nothing to worry about here.

And our automatic posture since the Garden of Eden is to justify all of our actions and words and to blame wrongdoing on others.

It's Adam going, listen, the snake, the woman that you gave me, it's pointing the finger everywhere else, except for where it needs to be.

The truth is today, you need brothers and sisters in the Lord that you have allowed access into your life so that they can tell you when you're going off the rails.

The difficult truth is that you are going off the rails, whether or not anyone is telling you. The needed action is to find someone who will tell you.

As your pastor, that's one reason that I'm here, same with the rest of the elders, but in addition to those God-given authorities, God's also given you your church family to be there for you. But can I encourage you, invite the rebuke in.

Don't just wait for someone to finally lose their patience with you enough to be like, listen, you're really messing up in this way.

Invite it in so that way, it's not just when it has gotten to too terrible of a place that people's niceties have finally all eroded. Instead, go to someone else.

Like, really, go to your pastor, go to your wife, go to, you know, your best friend and go, hey, I'm not perfect, so I'm messing up in some ways. I'm not being like Jesus in some of my conversations or in some of my actions. Would you tell me where?

And I promise you, if the other person loves you, like, biblically loves you, they'll tell you. It will be hard to hear, but it will be so valuable for your soul. Because the truth is, your sin is not who you are.

Your temper, your lack of self-control, it is not what defines you. What defines you is Jesus. And the sin is an unwelcome visitor.

So get the visitor out and help people, invite people into your life, to help you see where those unwelcome visitors are. And then lastly, today, God preeminently deserves your worship, so give it all to him.

Jacob realized the same truth that Abraham learned in his life. A generous giving, providing God, deserves for us to reciprocate with generosity towards him.

That's not a particularly popular view these days, but the truth from God's word is that when we are generous back to our Heavenly Father, it shows hearts that are genuinely connected with God and thankful to him.

Abraham did this as he rescued Lot and all of the people from Sodom and Gomorrah that had been kidnapped by the kings from Mesopotamia. They took the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot and his family with them, and they had gone away.

Abraham went, pursued, God gave victory, and he brought back the spoils. And as Abraham interacted with a priest of the Lord, Melchizedek, he gave him a tenth, a tithe, of what God had blessed him with.

And so Jacob here, a couple of generations later, is doing this exact same thing in his life, that he's giving back to the Lord a portion of what God has given to him.

Jesus told us that where your treasure is, that is where your finances are, there is where your heart is also.

If I were to look at your checkbook or your credit card statement from this past month, what percentage would you be giving back to God from what he's constantly giving to you? What Abraham gave was one-tenth of what God blessed him with.

That's the same amount Jacob promised, and the same amount that God commanded the children of Israel to give to the tabernacle and temple work in the Old Testament.

Just as God has commanded us to set aside one-seventh of our week to him, he commanded his people to set aside one-tenth of their profits to give back to him. He's given us everything, and he asked for less of it back than the US government does.

And as we would read in Malachi, he told them that God says his blessing will come on those that are generous, that trust that as they give back to God, he will take care of them.

Or in 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul says that God provides more and more for us the more generous we are so that we can be more generous with the greater amount.

The New Testament in the local church, God doesn't have outlined for us a specific amount. Instead, as Paul told the Corinthian church, whatever God lays on your heart, give that.

Many Christians throughout the years have said, OK, well, since what God had in the Old Testament was 10% of what their profits were, all give 10% as well.

And if you are one that has tithed, I know there's many people in our church that have regularly given 10% of their income for years and years. And I have heard the amazing stories of how God has provided for their needs over and over and over again.

But whether you're like, OK, I can't give 10% of my income, but I can give 1% of my income, or I can give $5. That's what I've got in my wallet. And Lord, you have given me this $5, and I'll give you $5.

The point is this. God has been generous to you. He's given you everything that you have.

Will you choose to, in an act of worship, give back to Him? This is true even as the pastor of the church.

I give to God's work both here at Tabernacle, and I give to some other ministries that help grow me and my spiritual walk even throughout the week. I don't know if you guys know this.

I don't have a pastor above me that I get to hear preaching from, so I have to go to some other places to hear some preaching.

And so I am so thankful that as I've given to the Lord's work time and again, that I've not missed a bill, that I've not missed any meals. And no one say amen. That my kids have always had clothing to wear and food to eat.

And I'm so thankful that God is over and over and over again proved that He can take care of me as I give to Him. I want to encourage you guys. That's not to say, hey, here's some rigid line that you need to meet.

And if you're not meeting my expectations of it, I'm going to come knocking at your house and be like, listen, Zoe, you didn't drop in your 10 bucks this week, and you really need to step up. No.

Bible says God loves a cheerful giver, not a forced giver. But I want to encourage you. Your God is worthy of 100% of what you have.

So respond to Him in some way, whether that's in your actions, in your words, in your time, in the utilization of your skills, and in your finances. What will you give back to God as a result of what he has given to you?

Today, God is fighting for a relationship with you. He has pursued you in the person of Jesus. He has blessed you.

He has given you everything that you have. He wants to guide you in the right way that you would show other people what he is like. You would follow his instructions and the direction that he has for you.

Will you accept that relationship? He's saying, I love you. Are you going to say, I love you, or thank you and hang up?

Today, God wants a personal relationship with you. What will your response be to him?