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July 14 - July 29, 2019
We can’t know all the reasons that our Father is allowing bad things to happen to us, but like Jesus did, we can trust him in those difficult times.
Without a romantic relationship of some kind, even the wrong kind, their lives feel meaningless.
She had come to look to men for the kind of deep affirmation and acceptance that only God can provide.
Why? Jacob’s life was empty. He never had his father’s love, he had lost his beloved mother’s love, and he certainly had no sense of God’s love and care. Then
“If I had her, finally, something would be right in my miserable life. If I had her, it would fix things.” All the longings of his heart for meaning and affirmation were fixed on Rachel.
We maintain the fantasy that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed.
No lover, no human being, is qualified for that role. No one can live up to that. The inevitable result is bitter disillusionment.
dated.
There is growing peer pressure to engage in sex and not get too emotionally involved.
Once we get over our lingering Puritanism, the argument goes, sex will be no big deal. Don’t bet on it.
Sex and romantic love are therefore not “just an appetite” like food. They are far more meaningful to us than that.
If you are too afraid of love or too enamored by it, it has assumed godlike power, distorting your perceptions and your life.
Jacob’s behavior was that of an addict.
Our fears and inner barrenness make love a narcotic, a way to medicate ourselves, and addicts always make foolish, destructive choices.
That is what had happened to Jacob. Rachel was not just his wife, but his “savior.” He wanted and needed Rachel so profoundly that he heard and saw only the things he wanted to hear and see. That is why he became vulnerable to Laban’s deception. Later, Jacob’s idolatry of Rachel created decades of misery in his family. He adored and favored Rachel’s sons over Leah’s, spoiling and embittering the hearts of all his children, and poisoning the family system.
She set her heart’s hope on getting Jacob’s love.
She had set all of her hopes and dreams on her husband.
every birth pushed her down deeper into a hell of loneliness.
The reason for our confusion is that we usually read the Bible as a series of disconnected stories, each with a “moral” for how we should live our lives. It is not. Rather, it comprises a single story, telling us how the human race got into its present condition, and how God through Jesus Christ has come and will come to put things right. In other words, the Bible doesn’t give us a god at the top of a moral ladder saying, “If you try hard to summon up your strength and live right, you can make it up!” Instead, the Bible repeatedly shows us weak people who don’t deserve God’s grace, don’t seek
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With all due respect to this woman (from whom we have much to learn), it means that no matter what we put our hopes in, in the morning, it is always Leah, never Rachel.
I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we have grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.
No person, not even the best one, can give your soul all it needs.
This cosmic disappointment and disillusionment is there in all of life, but we especially feel it in the things upon which we most set our hopes.
The second thing you can do is blame yourself and beat yourself and say, “I have somehow been a failure. I see everybody else is happy. I don’t know why I am not happy. There is something wrong with me.” That’s the way of self-loathing and shame.
Lastly, you can, as C. S. Lewis says at the end of his great chapter on hope, reorient the entire focus of your life toward God.
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world [something supernatural and eternal].”35
We want to be rid of our faults, of our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know our existence has not been in vain. We want redemption—nothing less. Needless to say, human partners cannot give this.36
Both are a form of slavery, both blind us so we can’t make wise life choices, both distort our lives. So what can we do?
So even though she was struggling and confused, she was nonetheless reaching out to a personal God of grace.
“This time, I will praise the LORD.”
It appears that finally, she had taken her heart’s deepest hopes off of her husband and her children, and had put them on the Lord.
God had come to the girl that nobody wanted, the unloved, and made her the ancestral mother of Jesus. Salvation came into the world, not through beautiful Rachel, but through the unwanted one, the unloved one. Does
when the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he loved her. God was saying, “I am the real bridegroom. I am the husband of the husbandless. I am the father of the fatherless.” This is the God who saves by grace.
the God of the Bible is the one who comes down into this world to accomplish a salvation and give us a grace we could never attain ourselves.
He loves the unwanted, the weak and unloved. He is not just a king and we are the subjects; he is not just a shepherd and we are the sheep. He is a husband and we are his spouse. He is ravished with us—even those of us whom no one else notices.
“I am the true Bridegroom.
It’s not that you should try to love your spouse less, but rather that you should know and love God more.
By looking at the one to whom Leah’s life points.
Why did he become Leah’s son? Why did he become the man nobody wanted? For you and for me. He took upon himself our sins and died in our place. If we are deeply moved by the sight of his love for us, it detaches our hearts from other would-be saviors. We stop trying to redeem ourselves through our pursuits and relationships, because we are already redeemed. We stop trying to make others into saviors, because we have a Savior.
try every legitimate method of finding access to your hearts for the love of Him who is greater than the world.38
She came to realize that neither men nor career nor anything else should be “her life” or identity. What mattered was not what men thought of her, or career success, but what Christ had done for her and how he loved her.
you cannot ever be my life. Only Christ is my life.”
looking at Jesus on the Cross: “Thou art my loveliness, my life, my light, Beauty alone to me.”39
Why? It’s because greed and avarice are especially hard to see in ourselves.
nobody thinks they are greedy.
The money god’s modus operandi includes blindness to your own heart.
you will find yourself surrounded by quite a number of people who have more money than you. You don’t compare yourself to the rest of the world, you compare yourself to those in your bracket.
Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it.
How can we recognize and become free from the power of money to blind us?
What is greed? In the surrounding passages of Luke 11 and 12, Jesus warned people about worrying over their possessions. For Jesus, greed is not only love of money, but excessive anxiety about it.
