Patience, Perseverance & Accommodation (Rock Springs UMC)

Our scripture reading today is Genesis 31 verses one through

13. Jacob heard that Laban's sons

were saying, Jacob has taken everything our father owned and

has gained all this wealth from what belonged to our father.

And Jacob noticed that Laban's attitude toward him was not what

it had been. Then the Lord said to Jacob, Go

back to the land of your father's and to your relatives,

and I will be with you. So Jacob sent word to Rachel and

Leah to continue out to come out to the fields where his flocks

were. He said to them, I see that your

father's attitude toward me is not what it was before, but the

God of my father has been with me.

You know that I've worked for your father with all my

strength, yet your father has cheated me by changing my wages

10 times. However, God has not allowed him

to harm me. If he said the speckled ones

will be your wages, then all the flocks gave birth to speckled

young. And if he said the street ones

will be your wages, then all the flocks bore streaked young.

So God has taken away your father's livestock and has given

them to me in breeding season. I once had a dream in which I

looked up and saw that the male goats mating with the flock were

streaked, speckled or spotted. The Angel of God said to me in

the dream, Jacob, I answered, Here I am.

And he said, look up and see that all the male goats mating

with the flocks or streaks speckled or spotted.

For I have seen all that layman has been doing to you.

I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar, where you

made a vow to me. Now leave this land at once and

go back to your native land. May the Lord add His blessing to

the reading and the hearing of His Word.

Following God is a struggle. Following Jesus is a struggle

and there's no way around that. Jesus made it clear.

He was very explicit about it in this world.

He said to his followers, in this world you will have

trouble, but take heart. I have overcome the world.

He said it when he said things like if anyone wants to be my

disciple, they need to deny themselves, take up their cross

daily and follow me. This is the life that we've been

called to, the life that we've agreed to.

When we get baptized it it is. And when we give our lives to

Christ, it is a beautiful and wonderful thing to think about

eternity with Jesus in heaven. It is also part of what we are

doing when we make those decisions to give our lives to

Christ to be baptized. We are picking sides in a war

and we are signing up to be part of the struggle.

We can expect a life of faith to be a life of struggle, which

requires patience and perseverance as well as

accommodation from God for our our sake.

And so those are the things we're going to look at here this

morning. First, we're going to take a

little closer look at Jacob, Leah and Rachel's long struggle.

And it was a long struggle. Jacob was with Laban for 20

years, and during that time, Laban, his stepfather, who was

the head of that household, the patriarch to whom Jacob owed

allegiance, allegiance and loyalty, lied to him, deceived

him about the most important sorts of things, and cheated him

over and over and over again for 20 years.

And God did. God protected Jacob to be sure,

but God did not insulate Jacob from pain and struggle and

suffering. That was in his life.

And it wasn't a quick thing. It wasn't a I'll be here for a

week long thing or a month long or a year long.

It was 20 years, 2 decades of this Laban lying to him.

Jacob wanted to marry Rachel and Laban deceiving him by sending

his older daughter Leah in to be his wife and then saying, Oh

yeah, you can, you can marry Rachel too, but you got to work.

Another seven years, 14 years, Jacob worked to be married to

the woman that he wanted to be married to and now had to care

for others that he did not want to be married to, but now owed

them his protection, his care, his service.

And his and and Laban's daughters, Lee and Rachel.

This was no walk in the park for them, used and manipulated and

in their own words, sold by their father, who then

mismanaged things so badly that he squandered all of the wealth

that he should have gotten from selling them and had little or

nothing left to give them. In the end.

When God told Jacob to go back to his homeland, that business

of he invited Rachel and Leah out to the flocks to give them

this news. God has told me to return to my

native land. He he did that to get them away

from Laban. He got them out into the fields

away from Layburn, and then they all left without telling Layburn

they were going. Layburn found out and chased

after them. That's another story.

We're not even sure we're going to get to that specific 1.

The point here is, is that this was not quick.

It was not easy. It's conceivable that Jacob, at

some point in his life, imagined that his life would be charmed

and unendingly blessed by God, that things would be smooth

sailing for him throughout his life.

His mother was told before he was ever born that he, Jacob the

younger son, would rule over his older brother, that he would be

the inheritor of the promise, the covenant that God made with

Abraham and the God made with Isaac.

That he would be in charge, that he would be the ruler, that his

descendants would fill all of that land and all of that land

would belong to him and his descendants.

That all the nations of the world would be blessed through

him with those kind of promises coming from God being told to

you from the time that you were little.

And it would not be surprised. We don't know for sure, but it

would not be surprising if Jacob had thought that, man, this is

going to be great. God is clear in the way, making

the pads straight, leveling the mountains, it's all going to be

wonderful. And then suddenly he's running

for his life and he spends 2 decades being lied to, cheated,

manipulated and deceived by his father-in-law before having to

go back and face his brother who as far as he knows, still wants

to kill him. We will talk about that.

Life was a long and hard struggle for Jacob.

And that's the way life is for anyone who was part of God's

purpose and God's plan, particularly for those of us who

say, I want to follow Jesus, I want to be a disciple of Jesus.

We are not asking for a life insulated from pain.

We are volunteering for a life that is filled with challenges

and suffering and heartache. We can expect that the long

struggle of faith requires patience and perseverance

through the pain, not insulating from the pain.

I, I, I saw a thing online recently and I agreed with it,

so I didn't bother to Fact Check it.

You know how that goes and, and I don't know if it's true or

not. It sounds true to me.

Makes sense to me. Didn't bother to Fact Check it.

I should Fact Check it and I probably will at some point.

You can Fact Check it for me if you want, but I think you will

probably hear what it's saying and it just intuitively makes

sense, at least to me. There was a guy talking about

how we treat children now versus how we treated children, you

know, as a society 20304050 years ago.

And he was looking particularly at playground equipment.

Now I the playground I grew up with at Bidwell Elementary

School, we had the 1213 foot tall metal slide with no guard

rails, right? You walked up and by the grace

of God, you didn't fall down and break your neck.

It was hot when the sun was out and and you didn't want to go

down it in shorts in the summertime.

We had the really good swings. The ones that that were again,

they were really tall and they were chains.

You had to be careful or you pinched your fingers if you

gripped the chains wrong. And when we, when I started in

elementary school, they changed them gradually while I was

there. We had the flat board seats.

Those are the best 'cause you can jump from those.

I hated the curvy hugging your hips.

It's hard to jump out of those. We we'd swing as high as we.

Our goal was always to see if we could flip over, which as I

understand now is not physically possible to do that on your own

power. But that was our goal.

And we would jump out and we would sail through the air and

land on gravel. Gravel on a good day, not wood

chips, not little rubber chips, gravel on a bad day.

It was mud. I never liked the mud.

So I didn't jump from the swings on the bad days.

And the slide was on pavement. We fell off.

We were going to land hard on the pavement And, and, but we

did. We played and, and by somehow I

managed to not get injured doing those things other folks did.

I got injured in other ways. But then he, you know, went

through that and then he showed pictures of modern playgrounds

where where nothing is taller than that, you know, and, and

they are designed primarily so that no one can get hurt and sue

the people who are managing the playground equipment.

And he made this point and this is where the fact checking, and

I think this is worth fact checking.

I need to do it at some point that children need danger.

They need to be in situations even at a young age that we

don't want them to die. We don't want to, you know,

cover the playground with broken glass and, and, and, and rusty

nails. We don't want them to die, but

they need danger. They need to learn at a young

age how to recognize a dangerous situation and work through a

dangerous situation. Children need for their own

development to suffer, to experience pain, that broken

bones and injury and those kinds of things help children at a

young age learn how to work through injury and pain and

suffering. And that insulating our children

from all possible suffering and all possible pain doesn't help

them. It in the long run hinders them.

Now again, I didn't look up his data.

I don't know. Intuitively that makes sense to

me because that seems to be how God has designed this world.

It is not safe. There is ample opportunity for

pain. There is ample opportunity for

suffering, and the suffering and the pain and the persevering

through that are part of life in general for most people, but

especially part of the life of faith for people who choose to

be followers of God, followers of Jesus Christ.

Paul compares the life of faith to athletic competition, to

training for a race or training for a boxing match or a

wrestling match. That to go into training, to do

the training, to do the competition requires patience

and perseverance and suffering to get yourself in a position

where you can compete to win that prize, that trophy, that

crown. Now we're right in the middle of

the Winter Olympics right now. So we got lots of examples of

this full confession. I have not watched even a single

minute of the Winter Olympics. I used to watch the Winter

Olympics like crazy. For whatever reason this year, I

haven't tuned it in. Nothing against the Winter

Olympics, just hasn't been on my radar much this year.

But I've read and I've seen a lot of cool stories and I love

the back stories for the Winter Olympics and the pain and the

because for every gold medal we see, for every race, one, for

every record set, there's, there's hundreds, thousands of

falls and hurts and bruises and breaks and injuries and

disappointments and failures and mistakes and, and everyone I

love that, that the half pipe is one of those amazing things to

watch. You couldn't pay me enough money

to drop into one of those things.

For every beautiful flip and twin and spist twist that we see

on a halfpipe with a gorgeously graceful landing, there's been

100 falls by that same person where they've smacked and banged

and bruised and broken stuff. There's a story.

There's other kinds of suffering as well.

There were injuries that I I believe this guy is from

England. I can't remember for sure.

He's one of the skeleton competitors, which you got to be

a little bit touched in the head to do the skeleton racing

anyway, going what, 80 miles an hour on a metal sled down an ice

chute. One of their competitors has

survived not once, recovered not once, but from two different

times breaking his back. He broke his back and it

initially ruined his Taekwondo career.

So he apparently decided, well I can't do Taekwondo anymore I'll

look for a safer sport and do skeleton.

And he broke his back again. And he's recovered from 2 back.

Literal back breaking injuries to be an Olympic competitor.

It was a woman and I believe it was cross country skiing.

A 10K cross country skiing, which again, how is that a

sport? I do not understand how anyone

enjoys cross country skiing. It looks like punishment to me

rather than joy. But this woman competed and I

believe meddled in cross country skiing when she took it, had

taken a bad fall the week before and had seriously bruised ribs.

I fell down my steps and I stayed in my easy chair for

three days. She went and did a 10K on her

skis. Suffering pain, heartache,

hardship is part of it. Have you heard about the German

ski jumper this year who literally afraid of heights?

He he needed psychological counseling and therapy to

because particularly on the higher jumps, there were times

when he just couldn't do it because he was terrified.

He's ski jumping. He's ski jumping.

And then of course, the perseverance and the pain and

the heartache of failure and disappointment.

Ilia, was it Melanin, the US figure skater who had won 14

competitions in a row and then fell, what, two or three times

in his long program? The perseverance and the pain

and the patients that he's going to need to, to come back from

that disappointment. When it's one thing when you're

the underdog, but when you're the one that's expected to win

and and you fall that hard, the perseverance, the patience, the

willingness to suffer. If you're going to compete at

that level, you have to be willing to suffer.

You have to now, I know we're we're a week out now from what

in my opinion is the most boring Super Bowl in history, but we're

a week out. I'm going to switch from the

Olympics to football then, because my favorite example of

perseverance in sports is not from the Olympics, but from

football. You remember Rudy Rudiger?

Remember that name? They made a movie about him

years ago called Rudy. And the the actor that you know

that Rudy was played by Sam Wise Gangi, which was an interesting

thing. He did a great job.

No one laughed at that at Chester either.

But you know, if you're a real nerd, you'll get the joke.

Look it up. It's funny.

Trust me, it's funny. But Rudy was an undersized,

under talented kid from Indiana who had a lifelong dream of

playing for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team

and, and he wanted that so bad. And everyone told him, you don't

have a prayer, Rudy, you're not big enough, you're not fast

enough, you're not strong enough.

And it's one thing if you've got friends and family saying that

to you when the coaches of the team are saying that to you,

it's really tough to get on the team.

He had another problem. He wasn't smart enough either.

He wasn't a good enough student to get into Notre Dame in order

to even try out for the team. But he worked and he worked and

he worked. And what he managed to do, he

got a tutor, he got help. He got his grades up.

He got into the school and he got on the practice team where

he got to spend 4 years getting the snot beat out of him by the

starters with not a single ounce of glory or praise or

affirmation from the crowd. And that's what he did for four

years. Got the heartwarming ending.

True life that in like I think the last game of his senior

year, the coach put him in for one of the final plays of the

game and he got to make a tackle.

But he didn't get there without an incredible amount of pain and

heartache and suffering. And it was the physical pain of

the practice. It was the physical pain of

getting hit over and over and over again by people a lot

bigger and faster and stronger than him.

The emotional pain of having people not believe in him and

tell him you can't, you can't do it, you can't do it.

But he persevered. He did it for that one moment on

the football field where he got to make a tackle.

These Olympians do it for that moment of glory, for that medal

that they can win and they can hold up.

But Bible tells us Paul says the prize we are competing for is so

much greater eternity with God in heaven.

And if folks are willing to sacrifice and suffer and endure

and persevere for a crown or a trophy or a medal that they can

hang on their shelf, that that in, in, in, in, in a month or a

year or a decade will become insignificant and forgotten by

most of the world. If they're willing to suffer

that way for that prize, how much more should we be willing

to suffer for the sake of Jesus Christ, to persevere through

heartache and pain, to welcome? But Paul says, and I'm not here

yet. I'm not here yet.

Paul says he glories and rejoices in suffering, 'cause,

you know, suffering produces perseverance and perseverance

produces character and hope. And these I'm, I'm not there.

I just got to confess, there has not been one moment of suffering

in my life where I laughed and said, boy, this is so much fun.

But we can be willing, at least as followers of Jesus, to

acknowledge that however much we're suffering, Jesus has

suffered more, and to acknowledge that our suffering

is going someplace, that God is using that suffering to shape us

and mold us and make us. God is using that suffering in

ways that we might never even fully understand or comprehend.

This is the life that God calls us to.

But God doesn't leave us alone in it.

God doesn't leave us alone. He doesn't throw us off the

throw us into the deep end and then let us sink or swim on our

own through the long struggle. God accommodates our weaknesses

and our frailties. We hear a lot about

accommodation these days, particularly when it comes to

different kinds of of disability, weaknesses and

frailties that we as human beings have different sort of

accommodations for physical. Limitations.

And so, you know, new sidewalks, when they're put in now at the

edge, they'll have a ramp so that folks in wheelchairs can

get up and down on that sidewalk.

We have buildings being built need chair lifts or if they're

more than one Storey or elevators to accommodate people

that can't climb stairs, accommodations for folks with

mental health and mental illness.

We have lots of that in schools with Ieps and other things that

are there to accommodate human frailties in a world that

doesn't always take those frailties into account.

And the good news is this God does the exact same thing for

us. He did that for Jacob in this

story. We didn't read that part.

It was, again, it's a really long reading if you read the

whole story. But but Jacob went to Laban and

said, Hey, you know, I'm going to be leaving in a few years.

I want my wages. And then Laban, we heard a

little bit about that. Well, you know, you're, you're

in charge of the sheep and the goats.

I tell you what, when whatever a speckled sheep is born or a

street sheep, you know, you can keep that one and and I'll keep

the ones that aren't. And Laban kept changing it

because the sheep and goats kept being born in the way that Laban

said Jacob got to keep them. So Jake Laban kept changing the

rules on it, But Jacob had a plan when Layman gave him that.

He had a plan because it was widely believed back then that

that if the whatever the female was looking at when she became

impregnated would affect her child.

So Laban gots or Jacob got sticks and some of me stripped

bark off of them when it was strips.

So they were looking at striped sticks when they got pregnant

because that would make the baby striped or, or spotted sticks

because that would make the baby spotted.

Now we know that's nonsense, that that's not how it works.

But that was a widely held belief back then and, and Jacob

believed it and God was going, no, doesn't work that way.

Jacob, you don't understand genetics yet, but I do.

But God didn't scold Jacob for doing something that God knew

was silly and ridiculous and entirely unhelpful.

God blessed Jacob. God didn't reprimand him.

He didn't punish him any more than God punished Rachel when

she ate the Mandrakes, believing it would make her more fertile

so that she could have a baby. God accommodated their

weaknesses. They were doing the best they

could with the information and the resources that they had

available with him. They were doing the best that

they could. And God said, you know what?

I can work with that. I can work with that.

And eventually God made it clear to Jacob, your sheep and your

goats came out speckled and streaked because I did that, not

because your sticks did that. But that didn't happen until

after the fact. God knows that we're broken.

God knows that we're weak. God knows that that that there

are things that we believe now and are absolutely convinced of

that we're just as silly as mandrakes and stripe sticks.

But God says, you know what? I love them and I can work with

that. And they're doing the best they

can with what they have in order to be faithful to me.

And I can work with that. Rudy has that as part of his

story, too. We don't know it as well because

it happened after the movie, or at least after the events of the

movie ended. Rudy achieved his dream in his

senior year at Notre Dame. Everything he'd ever wanted,

everything he'd ever longed for, every goal, every dream he had

ever had came true. And then he had nothing left to

work for and strive for. And the bottom fell out of his

life. And within a few years, he was

not just broke, he was deeply in debt.

He was homeless, he was living in his car.

But God, God saw Rudy there. And Rudy's faith in God grew.

And Rudy gave his life to Christ.

And God helped him struggle through the poverty and through

the depression that afflicted him.

And he he got a new vision and a new dream to share hope and

motivation and encouragement with others.

And that's what he had spent the rest of his life doing.

I think he's still alive. God knew Rudy did not have a

career as a professional football player in front of him,

and God knew that Rudy was going to crash and burn after he got

his dream that early in his life.

But God didn't give up on Rudy. God understood Rudy's frailties

and his weaknesses, and God accommodated that.

And God made a way for that. And God brought him back and he

does the same thing for us. He accommodates our weaknesses

and he makes a way for us to be faithful and follow even when we

mess up, even when we fall, even when we fail.

For every every landed triple Axel on the skating rink,

there's 150, maybe 1050 falls behind it.

And the same is true for our life of faith.

We are called by God and invited by God to be patient and to

persevere, and God will accommodate our weaknesses and

our frailties and make a way for our efforts to make a difference

in the Kingdom of God and in the lives of the people around us.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Amen.