Pastor Stan Mons + Membership Service Sermon
Sermon Transcription:
I'm incredibly excited, and I blame the Lord! If you've been here the last two days, you've seen the kind of deliverance and the kind of freedom God has been bringing people into. Sometimes it’s like that—sometimes you have to walk in your consistent commitment to what the Lord has placed before you. Sometimes, you're going to come for 10 weeks in a row, and though the Lord seems to be speaking, it feels like you're the one missing out. But then, finally, there’s a breakthrough—a real breakthrough spiritually. We saw this especially on Friday and again on Saturday. The same work continued in many lives and marriages. Many people didn’t see it coming, didn’t think God needed to change so much in their lives at all. But then, when the Holy Spirit shows up and reveals to our hearts and minds what Jesus actually has for us, all of a sudden, He’s willing to guide us right into it. Seeing how the Lord has started such a work in the last two days, I can’t help but be quite excited to see what God has in store as we continue with this series.
This series, which the Lord began last Sunday, is really about seeing God’s word. It's about being able to see it for yourself, receive it for yourself, and rejoice in it. It’s about going into your devotional life—the time you spend with the Lord every day—and opening the Word, where the Holy Spirit reveals things to you on every page. Every time you get alone with the Lord, you walk away with what God has given you. I call it "Kingdom privilege." It makes you feel so loved, so exclusively loved by the Lord. Nothing else can explain it. The Word says a peace that surpasses all understanding will settle on your life. You can’t fully understand it or explain it, but you can definitely walk in it and in that joy. Amen? Amen!
Would you pray with me one more time? Lord, I ask You, God, to continue to open our eyes. Reward us for how we’ve been seeking You faithfully, making ourselves available, adjusting our schedules, and striving to be teachable toward Your Holy Spirit and Your holy scriptures. Lord, we saw You do a work in the last two days, a work that went so deep and brought many of us into a new hope, even though we couldn’t imagine we needed it. You’ve brought us into a new journey, even though we thought we were doing great with You. Lord, thank You for digging wells in our lives. Whenever others are not in possession of living water or cannot find it, You are willing to dig a well in our lives so that there may always be living water. Your Word says that living water may flow from us, Lord Jesus, I ask You today to open our eyes. Give birth to a hunger in those who have counted the cost of following You and trust You with all their hearts. Open their eyes, open their hearts, and give them a hunger and desire to dwell in Your Word. Lord Jesus, You commanded us to abide in Your Word, and You promised to abide in us when we abide in it. Would You give us that hunger today? Show us something that will make our hearts rejoice. In Jesus’ name, Amen! Amen!
We’re going to get into the Word. Since this is part of the series the Lord has given us, I want to briefly recap last week’s message. The first part was titled, Once I Was Blind. Let me read you the key verse for that word: 2 Corinthians 3:14 – "But their minds were blinded. For until this day, the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament because the veil is taken away in Christ." We considered the question together: When you read the Old Testament, do you see Jesus? Do you see the cross? Not through your own intellectual ability or power, but because the Holy Spirit has lifted the veil from your eyes. You can’t help yourself—the Lord reveals Himself through the scriptures, in the Old Testament.
We learned together that there were two glories that came from heaven. The first was the law of commandments and conditions, also known as the Law of Moses, or the Ten Commandments. This was given from heaven, carrying the weight of heaven's glory. But we also learned that there is a second glory, which the Bible says is greater—the Son of God.
Here’s what 2 Corinthians 3:10 says: "For even what was made glorious (referring to the law) had no glory in this respect, because of the glory that excels." In other words, once Jesus came, the law was ready to pass away because a greater glory had come from heaven through which people were called to the Father.
We learned that when you ask Jesus with all your heart to save you from that blindness, He takes away the veil. Now you can see! God has made a way for us to know Him, to know His voice. We’re no longer in need of a prophet because God has made a way for us to know His presence. He’s made a way for us to know Him on every single page, in every story—each page is designed for us to see Jesus. This week, part two of the Seeing the Word series is titled Receiving Vision. First, once I was blind. A veil—every person ever born into this world experiences that veil until it is taken away by Christ. You can read the Old Testament all you want, but it seems like a dead book. It seems too complicated. There's no life in it; it's dead.
Then, when in Christ, the veil is taken away, it's as if you receive divine vision. You can see things you could never see before; you understand things you could never understand before.
We also mentioned—my wife brought this up at home—that it is important to look at the parables very clearly that Jesus gives when He talks about vision. We can understand the parable of physical world vision in our bodies, when we see versus when we are blind. We see some stuff—we're not all-seeing, amen? Just a reminder that when the veil is lifted, that doesn’t mean you will have all revelation all the time, but there will definitely be a great difference between when you were blind and now you can see some of the things that God is revealing by His Spirit to you this week, receiving vision. I want to give you a small parable, a small story. Every story will fail when we talk about the things of God, but I think it’s going to help you understand something and see something that made so much sense to my heart.
We see what we love. What I mean by that is—this may be more applicable for the men here than for the women, but you can explain it to your wives at home—there are these times, as boys and later on as men, we just love cars. Sometimes it's motorcycles, or it can be boats—as long as it goes fast, is very loud, or shines, we know how to wash it, keep it nice, and go to Cars and Coffee to compare the size of our exhausts with somebody else’s. We have the ability to just love a car sometimes. There’s that time when you get a new car. If you’ve ever owned a car, you’ve probably experienced this: You get that new car, maybe a Ram truck, and all of a sudden, you’re driving down the road, and you’ve never seen that many Ram trucks on the road in your life. You’ve never noticed them before, but now you see them parked in driveways, driving through Starbucks or Dutch Bros, and all of a sudden, you count seven on the way to church. You feel like, "I’ve never seen a Ram truck in my life, but now I’m seeing what I love. Now I’m recognizing what I love." And when I change my car to something else, all of a sudden, it looks like everybody bought one this weekend. You ever been there? I’ve been there.
We see what we love. When you fall in love with Jesus and you begin to open His Word, where you could never see Him before, all of a sudden, every turn you take, every page you flip, you begin to see Him and wonder, "Was He there all that time, and I never noticed it?" It is a divine opening of the eyes. The Holy Spirit gives understanding. The Holy Spirit gives—and the emotion or the experience of going through that in my life—I can only liken it to that car example. I never realized, but now anytime I look up, I can’t help but see the Lord in the Old Testament. When you fall in love with Jesus, you begin to see Him on those pages. The Holy Spirit does that work. Just a few weeks ago, we spoke about the life of Jacob. We’re going to look again at his life, a little earlier on in his life. But before we get into it, a little disclaimer: Jacob came from a dysfunctional family.
A dysfunctional family, even today as some of us may have experienced, is not a family that is unproductive, that doesn’t work together, or that doesn’t have good fruit or look put together on the outside. By biblical definition, a dysfunctional family is a family that functions other than what God intended—outside of what God intended. When lies are welcome, you become a dysfunctional family. When the woman leads instead of the man, you have a dysfunctional family. When children raise themselves, you enter into a dysfunctional family. Jacob came from a dysfunctional family. Rebecca, Jacob’s mother, finds out one day that Isaac, her husband—the famous Isaac, named all the time as the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob"—was planning to bless Esau, his oldest son. Rebecca goes behind Isaac’s back and persuades Jacob, her younger son, to deceive his blind father. Just another Monday. Jacob gets somewhat worried about the whole plan and tells his mom, “What if this all goes wrong? What if Dad sees right through this deception? He’ll realize what I’m doing, and instead of stealing the blessing, he’ll see right through it and curse me. What then?”
Mom says, "Don’t you worry. If that happens, let me be cursed instead of you. Let’s do this."
They work together. They deceive Father Isaac and rob the blessing that Isaac sought to give and intended to give to Esau. When Esau finds out, he is furious, filled with revenge and bitterness. Let me just read to you Genesis 27:41-42: "So Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing with which his father blessed him. And Esau said in his heart, 'The days of mourning for my father are at hand; then I will kill my brother Jacob.' And the words of Esau, her older son, were told to Rebecca. So she sent and called Jacob, her younger son, and said to him, 'Surely your brother Esau comforts himself concerning you by intending to kill you.'” Once again, Mom finds out what’s going on in the tent and tells her younger son. Jacob says, "I’m going to flee. I’m going to run for my life." Isaac tells him to go to Paddan Aram and marry one of his cousins, a daughter of his uncle on his mother’s side, Laban—that deceitful side of the family. You see, Jacob didn’t come up with all the schemes and deceitful things he did in his life. He came from a dysfunctional family. His mom’s side was quite dysfunctional.
His mom, the one that you know, knew how to talk him into some deceit. His father says, "Go to your mom's family." His mom's brother, made of the same cloth, then deceives Jacob. Jacob comes to his uncle, and his uncle says, "Oh, you're going to work here for free? What do you want?" Jacob says, "Oh, I've seen Rachel. Rachel is sure pretty to me." His uncle says, "That's great, you go ahead and work for me. You can marry Rachel." Eventually, the wedding night comes. His uncle, behind his back, deceives him and sends his older daughter, Leah, instead. In the morning, Jacob wakes up and says, "What happened? Leah? In my bed?" He comes to find out he's just like his mom. They come from the same deceitful family, full of dysfunction. He ends up with Rachel and Leah at the same time. Meanwhile, Esau goes to his uncle on his father's side, Ishmael, and marries one of his daughters, his cousin Mahalath. What a dysfunctional family! What a mess.
Now, Jacob—you've got to get the picture out of your mind that he's a 17 or 18-year-old making foolish decisions. He's 77 at the time. Jacob, in his mid-70s, is now running, fleeing on his way to his deceitful uncle, Laban. He’s fleeing from Beersheba toward Haran, which was a 500-mile journey on foot. After the first day of traveling, during which he covered an amazing distance—some estimate up to 70 miles on foot—Jacob stops. And that’s where we pick up the story.
Let’s read from Genesis 28:10-18: Now Jacob went out from Beersheba and went towards Haran. So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. He took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he laid down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven, and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, 'I am the Lord God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants. Also, your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread abroad to the west and the east, to the north and the south; and in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.'Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, 'Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.' And he was afraid and said, 'How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' Then Jacob rose early in the morning, took the stone that he had put at his head, set it up as a pillar, and poured oil on top of it.
Incredible story of what Jacob experiences at 77 years old. There are many things we can learn from this story, but today I want you to notice that stone in the story. Jacob had been through so much, had done so much, and was carrying all of it with him as he ran. He had lied, cheated, disgraced his father, and ruined his brother. His life was full of strife and distress. Genesis 35 recounts the same story, saying he was in distress. He was panicking, running, trying to make life work, trying to work things out, trying to regain control. And God? God had not met him once in 77 years. We know Jacob as one of the forefathers, one of those who walked with God, but not once had God met him in those 77 years. Jacob sought to make life work by his own doing all this time. There’s not one time recorded of God speaking or revealing anything to Jacob.
God didn’t give him vision when he cheated his brother out of his birthright and made Esau sell it for a bowl of soup. Jacob gained that birthright, but nothing changed. God didn’t respond to him. God didn’t open the heavens over Jacob’s life when he figured out how to get the blessing from his father, and Isaac laid his hands on him and blessed him. Still, nothing changed. God did not respond. There was no open heaven over his situation. Panic still drove him, stress was still upon his life, and now he was running. But when he came to the end of himself, after lying, cheating, and running, Jacob was tired. He placed his head to rest on that stone, and all of a sudden, God met him, seemingly out of nowhere.
Why does God have this story in your Old Testament? What is God seeking to tell you through this Old Testament story? Remember what the Bible says: "Still today when they read the Old Testament, the veil remains, and in Christ, that veil is taken away." So let's look at Jesus for a moment. Let me take you to Mark 12:10-11. This is what Jesus says: "Have you not even read this Scripture: 'The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in your eyes.'” And then in Acts 4:11-12, in the ESV: "This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."
That stone in the story represents our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and that story is so carefully recorded. Jacob knew it—you’re going to see it in a moment. He lays himself to rest on that stone, even going to sleep, representing that finally he’s no longer working in the flesh anymore. He stopped trying, stopped running, stopped trying to make anything happen. He has come to rest on this stone, and for the first time in his life, he can see, he can hear. He sees angels descending and ascending from heaven. He has an open heaven. He is intimate with the heavenlies. The Father speaks clearly into his life. He knows God's mind about him, about his situation. Everything has changed in one night. Everything about his life has changed—the expectancy, the direction, who he really is, and who he understands himself to be to God.
So what does that mean for your life today? What do we learn from the dysfunctional story of Jacob in the Old Testament?
Church, you can be a liar. You can struggle with the fact that you’re so easily influenced by others, only to find out they had deceitful purposes. You may have hurt people, stolen, and be running, trying to fix your life in your own strength. But if you are tired, and if you come to Jesus and finally lay yourself to rest on Him, no matter what you’ve done, no matter where you’re coming from, heaven will open up over your situation. Heaven will open up over you, and all of a sudden, God will speak into your life. When you get up from that place, you will never be the same. God will do it through that stone.
Jacob knew it. The moment he wakes up, he takes that stone, sets it upright, anoints it, and says, “God met me in this place.” For 77 years, he sought the blessing of God upon his life. He did everything he could do—every scheme, every work, all the help he could find—but it wasn’t until he realized, "When I lay myself to rest on this stone and there is nothing more that I can contribute," that all of a sudden, God responds. Now heaven opens up over his life. Now the promises become his. Now the blessing is spoken over his life by God, not just by his father.
Have you stopped running yet? Have you come to rest on the stone that was rejected yet?
You’ve got to understand: this stone is rejected. The Word tells us that the temple builders—the religious people seeking to build God’s kingdom—reject this stone. How could it be that just a stone, such a seemingly common object, could make a difference? The Word tells us Jesus had no stately form that we should desire Him—He looked like a regular guy, not a leader, not the Son of God. He didn’t look like it. This stone was rejected by so many because it’s just a stone. "What are you talking about? It’s just a stone in the story."
The veil remains until Christ takes it away, and He begins to show you every story in this Word, every word written down, every word that was inspired, every story about a stone placed under the head and anointed afterward. Every story is trying to tell you something about how much I love you, how I care for you, how you can come to me, and how I will respond to you. Has heaven opened over your life? Do you know God’s voice? Has God given you vision? He sure wants to. He sure wants to give it to your life, to your heart. Isaiah prophesied this. Isaiah 28:16, in the NIV: "So this is what the Sovereign Lord says: 'See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who relies on it, or rests on it, will never be stricken with panic.'”
There's an invitation today for each and every person here. There's an invitation: He promises that anyone who comes to rest on this stone will never again be stricken with panic. Fear will never drive you. Panic will never touch you. Panic will never be in your heart or on your mind once heaven has been opened to you. Once you have seen that God commands His angels for you, once you have heard in your heart that God speaks over your life with clear words, with clear communication, that you may know what Christ accomplished on the cross has eradicated every boundary that ever existed between you and the Father. There’s an invitation today. If you are running, if you have a situation and you’re trying to stay ahead of it, maybe you say, "Once I was spiritually blind; I came forward last week, but I have not heard His voice yet. He has not given me vision yet." Wherever you are today, if you are ready to finally stop, to stop working at it, to stop running, and to rest fully on Jesus, heaven will open over your situation.
For no other reason than that you came to rest on the right stone, heaven will open up over your situation. God will open up your spiritual vision, and you will never again be stricken with panic. You will never again be stricken with panic. If you desire to come to Jesus today, it is that simple. Today, for you online and for everyone here in person, if you desire to come to Jesus today, I want to invite you to come to the front, and we will pray together. Hallelujah.
Hallelujah. Hallelujah. If you desire to come to rest on Jesus today and never again be stricken with panic, this is not wishful thinking, Church. There’s no such thing as a promise that God will not keep to someone who says, “It makes no sense to me to just go to sleep right now, to just lay myself to rest right now. It feels like my life is going to spin out of control if I stop fighting this thing.” But the Lord shows us: "If you would just come to rest on this stone, I’ll open heaven up over the situation. It won’t hunt you down." Remember, Jacob was in distress. He was panicking. He comes to lay on that stone, and no more panic—never again be stricken with panic.
-Pastor Stan Mons