He reads chapter eleven, verse twenty-one. By faith Jacob, when he was a dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff. That's all we read there. We'll be speaking out it in a minute or two. Perhaps we should just pass one or two remarks about the verse, and then when we move over into the book of Genesis, we'll be able just to follow what we're thinking about without interruption there. So joining us tonight we are looking at the patriarchs as an illustration of some of the truths at least that we find in Hebrews chapter eleven. But more particularly as this has to do with the life of faith in different aspects of course. And so in Abraham, the study of the first night, we looked at the obedience of faith because it seems that just reading through that life, that while there are many, many other factors involved, the outstanding thing about Abraham was signaled by that one reference to him at the very beginning in Hebrews chapter eleven when it says, by faith Abraham, when he was called to go out, he obeyed. And he went up. That would seem to be characteristic of the man. Then we looked at, by the way, we saw his life in the framework of seven great or eight great interviews with God. Each one of them, a revelation, a further revelation of God and his plans to that man. And each one of those interviews and revelations demanding a response on Abraham's part and leading him into a higher level of spiritual development. As he passed each test, that test, his response rather to the test, his reaction to it, his obedience to what God revealed to him, lifted him up onto a higher level, where after a little time he got a higher revelation of what God had to do, and he obeyed that, and that lifted them up a little higher. He was going through the school of God in the life of faith. And as he obeyed, he went up, and he went forward. And on the occasions where he disobeyed, He went down and he went back. And I think we have to notice that. Then we looked at Isaac. And Isaac, of course, is the great exemplar of patience. And we saw in him the patience of faith. Now, this doesn't mean that Abraham didn't have patience. He was a very patient man in many regards. Nor does it indicate that Jacob had no patience, though certainly to begin with, he was a bit short on that commodity. But it does mean that each one of these men give us had different view of the life of faith. Abraham, the obedience of faith, perhaps. And Isaac, the patience of faith. Parents waited twenty years for him to be born. Now, that wasn't his patience, it was theirs. But maybe they told him about it. I'm sure they did. And that helped him because he had to wait twenty years for his first child. And that was one instance at least for a rising generation to learn something from the previous generation. Through all his lifetime, this man was called upon by God to show and to experience, to develop rather, patience, patience, not passive patience only, though I'm sure there was much of that, but just a dogged perseverance going on. The Egyptians plugged the well, the Philistines rather, it plugged the well. He unplugged them. They did it again, and he cleaned them again, and they did it again, and he cleaned them again. He was a man that wasn't easy to put down. He was a man who didn't sulk and pout and get in a corner and say, all right, if they're doing that, the only thing to do is just give up. He was a great example of the temptation to faith. Now, this is what we went through. Tonight, we're going to be looking at Jacob, and as the notes suggest at the top, we're going to look at him in the framework of the discipline of faith. Now, we suggested... the last five nights, three weeks ago, three weeks, four weeks ago really, the last two nights in between, we, three weeks ago, we looked at the fact that almost all the mistakes that Abraham and Jacob made were through lack of patience. They just failed in a number of occasions, Jacob a good deal more than Abraham, in waiting for God's time. They thought they had to give God a little push. They thought they had to wind things up, get it moving. You remember the case, of course, of Ishmael, Hagar rather, and Ishmael, the outcome of that. You remember the rush down into Egypt. You remember a number of things, not too many, but they were there, and almost all the mistakes that Abraham made were traceable to a lack of patience, just waiting God's time, following God's leading. accepting God's program. Jacob, of course, from the very beginning, he seems to have been an extremely impatient man, urgent, pushing. He was after the right thing. This is why, from the very beginning, we see that even though he stumbled and fell and pushed when he shouldn't have been pushing, still he was the man that brought life. Jacob had brought life. In spite of it all, he was going after the right thing, but he fairly frequently went after it in the wrong way. And this man, a very unlikely character, for God to take up, God took up nonetheless. And I'm very encouraged myself in thinking about Jacob. If we did not have the later part of his life, if we did not have Hebrews chapter eleven, and we looked at this arrogant, strutting individual, cheating, pushing, lying occasionally, always ahead of God, always trusting, always after the blessing for himself, he was very, very unpromising material, very unpromising material. But when we see him in the end of his days, and I just wish someday that some real artist, I would love to see a good painting of Jacob going into the presence of Pharaoh that last time, and not asking a single thing for himself, for he could easily have a painted, I'm sure. We'll be talking about that shortly. And that old man, the old patriarch, far advanced in years now, saying, Few and short, the day of my pilgrimage. And then he lifted up his hands, already almost blind with age, and he blessed Pharaoh, the head of one of the greatest nations and empires the world has ever known. And the scripture assures us that the lesser... is blessed by the greater. Now, in between there was this long life of discipline, and that's what we're going to talk about tonight. Not punishment, training, drilling, polishing. I mean drilling in the sense of soldiers, polishing this man, molding him into God's way, getting him to think God's thoughts, getting him to see a little less of Jacob or a lot less of Jacob and a lot more of God. because in between those two points is a discipline. The heading of it all up, of course, is here in Hebrews eleven, where, as you'll notice, I think perhaps we should read the first paragraph of the note there just so we can keep ourselves lined up. I sometimes forget all about the note and discover that I'm away off somewhere or other. Jacob was not a particularly obedient man, nor was he especially patient. That is referring to the outstanding characteristics of the others. His history is rather one of God's working in discipline with an unpromising personality in order to make Jacob the person God could use. If in Abraham we have a life framed within a series of interviews with God and Isaac outlined in a series of revelations of deepening patience in Jacob we have a life painted for us in a series of great disciplining. Only the chief of which we have space or time to deal with. Genesis twenty-six and twenty-seven, we have the raw material, a headstrong, impulsive mind, always seeking blessing and benefit for self. Now in the hands of a God who says, I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. I'll refer to that in a minute or two. The reference is to Genesis twenty-eighth, fifteen. In Hebrews eleven, we have the finished article, summed up in the words, the four verbs, dying, blessing, worshiping, leaning. Between Genesis twenty-five and Genesis forty-seven, we have the process that is training in God's school. The raw material, the finished article, the process. Now the process was a very painful process. And it certainly backed Jacob into a corner. It left him a limping man. instead of a slaggering man. He went on a kind of a crutch from that to the end of the day. It left him a man who would say to his brother, when Esau wanted him to drive on with him to my steer, he said, No, sir, I must keep pace with the slowest of the flock. Now that was a new angle on Jacob. You ever heard him saying anything even approaching that before? He was a man who trampled all over everybody. And if they couldn't go as fast as he wanted to go, he either pushed them down and walked over them or else pushed them to one side. Or maybe he was smart enough to get them to push him from behind and they didn't even know they were doing it. That's the kind of man he was, a smartie. But now you see, he is in the hand of God and God is molding him and polishing him. Now at one of those opening points, chapter twenty-eight, God gave him a little revelation of what he was going to do with him and to him. And he added this rather shaking word, I will not leave thee. I won't let you go until I have done, accomplished, finished, that which I have spoken to thee of. Now that which he had spoken to him of was making him a blessing to others. But up to that time, Jacob had always been looking for a blessing for himself, which the multitude of Christians, incidentally, in which the multitude of Christians follow him. You hear people saying, well, I go to such and such a place because that's where I really get blessing. You get the point? Now, there's nothing wrong with getting blessing. It depends on what you're using, of course. We need blessing constantly, twenty-four hours a day. But when the end of our lives is to receive blessing without any thought of being a blessing, then we've got the cart before the horse and it's about timing and thought. Things are together. And so this man is constantly thinking of the blessings himself. God says, I'm going to bring you back to this place. And I'm going to tell you a lot that I'll do with you. And I'm not going to let you go until I finish the job. That would make him think, wouldn't it? Because if he had known the long, long period of years in between those two points. And that God was going to hold on to him in effect saying, you can squirm and you can scream. You can try to run away. You can do whatever you like, but I'm holding on to you. I am going to mold you. I am going to break you. You are mine. I have purposes and plans for you, and you are now beginning at kindergarten. And you're going to go right through the whole school, and I'm going to be right there, and I'm going to hold on to you. I won't leave you. I won't let you go until the job is completed. Now, the parallel passage, of course, to this is in the New Testament in Philippians chapter one, where the Apostle Paul says to those New Testament believers, when we love severely, I am persuaded, I am confident in this thing, that he which has begun it with working will perform it, complete it, consummate it, until the day of Jesus Christ. I'm really glad of that, aren't you? If I'd had to work with material such as God has had to work with in me, some other people I know, none of them here, of course, I would have thrown rubbish like that in the corner long ago and said, You just plagued my heart. And I could get better than you. And when I want to do something with you, as often as not, you try to get out of it. And you try to take some other way. I would have been so tired, I would have pushed the likes of me into a corner and said, I can get others far better. But I'm glad that when he took me up in Christ, he said, I will never leave you. And that good work which I have begun in you, not through you, God never does anything through you until he does something in you. That good work which I have begun, or says the Holy Spirit which God has begun, he will accomplish. He'll work it out. He'll finish it, even if it takes him to the day of Christ. Now, the day of Christ is the coming, and of course, at that moment we shall be like him, or we shall see him as he is. It would be nice if God had a little less radical changing to do at the coming, wouldn't it? If he could just change us a little bit day by day as we go along, and we were a little more yielding, Now look at these four verbs, if you will, just for a moment. In Hebrews chapter eleven, they are dying, blessing, both the sons of Joseph, worshiping and leaning. And I think they're all suggestive. We can't go into them in any kind of detail, but they are very suggestive, dying. You know, that's where we all have to begin as believers. The world says, You've really got to develop yourself. You've really got to sell yourself. Don't sell yourself short. Put yourself over. Unfortunately, this is rubbing off on some of our gospel preaching these days, as I'm sure I have mentioned before, because it's something which concerns me a very great deal. We make the sinner... the center and hub and circumference sometimes of the gospel instead of Christ. And we keep telling people, just open your heart to Jesus, and he'll solve everything for you and do everything for you, and he'll bring out all the potential in you. When we should be telling them, if you accept Jesus Christ as Lord, the very first thing is that you will see yourself nailed to a cross. The total utter absolute judgment of all that you are, the good, the bad, and the indifferent, and he's going to make a new man in Christ. And you're going to say from this day forward, not I, but Christ liveth in me. And so God was going to break this down. Now he had to learn, the first thing he had to learn is dying. We see this in Samson, for example, it says that the dead that he slew in his dying... were more than those that he flew during his life. And I sometimes think it's a pity, it was a pity rather, that Samson didn't learn to die a little bit sooner. I don't necessarily mean physically, but Samson was always so full of Samson, wasn't he? And this is where he got himself into trouble. But when he bowed his head, shaved, blind, aflade, degraded and broken, and possibly with tears coming out of those sites of sockets that he had poked his eyes on. Bought his head and he said, Oh Lord, just this once, and he prayed for the first time in many, many chapters, just this once. And God heard that prayer, but of course he died in the doing of it. We really ought to begin our Christian life with understanding what it means to die with Christ. Unfortunately, we don't always do that. Sometimes it takes it well, sometimes. It takes us years, perhaps, to understand it even in our minds from the scriptures thoroughly. And then, even when we understand it, don't we have to learn it over and over and over every day we live? We should read something about it before we eat breakfast every morning. Just that one thing, if we could afford the time to read all the things we ought to eat before breakfast. But there it is. Not I. Help me to remember that I have been crucified. Help me to die. Help me to put this body in the place where you, Lord, have put it, in the place of death. Oh, you say that we're resurrected. Of course we're resurrected, but not the old man, not the eye, not the ego. What was resurrected was a new man in Christ. Where there is neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free. There's no nationality, there's no economic status, there's no privileged class, there's no anything but a new man in Christ. And that's where we have to start. Now it took Jacob years and years to get to that. And you notice that it's when he realized that he was in the process of dying. That, by the way, is what that old English word, a dying means. It's not just... when he was dying, that he was in the process. He lived for quite a little while after this. But he realized the world was receding. The things round about him were no longer as important as they once had been. And so in the process of dying, seeing like a dying man everything else receding from him and the things of God becoming more and more real, this is when he really was a blessing. And so he had to learn to die. And then the next was blessing. As we've said already, from the very beginning of his life, he had been a man always after the blessing himself. Now this is a good thing, except that he went after it too hard and he went after it for himself. God's promise to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob was, thou shalt be a blessing. Thou shalt be a blessing. I will bless thee, and through you I will bless others. You will be a blessing. Now Jacob spent an inordinately long time getting blessings for himself, and then at the end he just poured out blessings. I've mentioned before, I think even here, the fact that has struck me through the years more and more as I read it, that this old man, who is a younger man with such a miserable piece of raw material, we see him in a group of succeeding chapters blessing people. He started off with Pharaoh. And that was one. And knowing the character of this man, we can imagine what he would have done, had he been introduced to Pharaoh twenty or thirty or forty years earlier, in the full knowledge, my son is this emperor's closest friend, most trusted helper and cabinet minister. My son Joseph is the biggest man in this whole empire. And I am being introduced. Now, what can I get out of this for myself? And he would have gone in there, and I tell you, Pharaoh would have been a very fortunate man if he hadn't come out of the path of the kingdom under his own, because that's what he did in most other situations like that. Even his father-in-law, Laban, thought he had cheated him out of one of his girls, but he went off with both of them in the long run. This is the way this man worked. This is the way he operated. But now when he's taken into the presence of Pharaoh, not a thing that he asked for. Not one. He doesn't say, now, if it please your majesty, you know my son has told me, and I'm an old man, and I've got no less than twelve sons, and we'd like a nice little piece of land and all the rest of it, and if you could stock it for us, not a bit of it. He lifted up his hands, and he blessed Pharaoh. He blessed Pharaoh. Very shortly after that, we see him doing what is mentioned here. He blessed both the sons of Joseph. Now, that's an increase of a hundred percent. Well, you say from one to two is not much. It's still an increase of a hundred percent. And if you were a blessing to somebody last week and were a blessing to twice that number this week, and then twice that number next week, you would really be going, wouldn't you? And so the next time it's two, and we don't want to go into the fact that he didn't bless them according to men's way of doing it. Joseph juggled them around so that the eldest would be at his right hand and the youngest on his left, because that was not right and proper, and he wanted them blessed according to the flesh. And Jacob, blind as could be, but he crossed his hands, and Jacob said, no, no, dad, not that one. This is the younger one you're putting your right hand. He said, I know. God doesn't bless according to age. God doesn't bless according to man's standards. God blesses in grace. And this is the way it is. And then a chapter or two further on, he blessed twelve sons of his own. One, two, twelve. You see the ratio? And before he finished in that chapter, he was not only blessing the twelve sons, but the twelve tribes. And that's multiplication with a vengeance. Now you need a computer to catch up with it. And he not only blessed the twelve sons and the twelve tribes in their lifetimes, but his blessings jumped right over thousands of years in between, right over the church age and right over the tribulation age, and his old blind eyes by faith are fixed away on a very distant horizon, and he pours out blessing after blessing after blessing that will only be fully realized in the millennium. Can you see the development of this man from a money-grabbing, selfish, cheating liar that God had to break? And now here he is, pouring out blessing on the basis of one-to-one, two-to-one, twelve-to-one, and then millions upon millions. And his blessings jump already over more than three thousand years, and we don't know how far it may go. So he blessed, and then he worshipped. He had God in the right place. This was the central thing of his life. Leaning upon the top of his staff, he was a dependent man. That takes us back to Peniel, and we'll be talking about that just in a moment. Now from Genesis chapter twenty-five to forty-seven, as we've said, we have the process. In Genesis twenty-five, twenty-three, we have the purpose of God for Jacob. In chapter twenty-five, Jacob gets the birthright by scheming. In chapter twenty-seven he gets the blessing. You notice it's get, get, get. But God starts that first of all in twenty-five and twenty-three with the purpose, what he had in mind for Jacob. Now in between in twenty-five and twenty-seven Jacob starts running ahead to grab that. And then God steps in. So it's from really from that chapter twenty-seven on God steps in to make him a channel of blessing, a process which culminates in chapter forty-seven, verse ten, and right through there, as you can see. And then finally, in forty-eight and forty-nine. Now, let's look at some of these things, just glancing at them. Some we don't need to look at, but I think there's a word here and there that it's always good to read. And let us read in chapter twenty-eight. Genesis, that is, chapter twenty-eight. And here's the first step in discipline. Verse ten, Jacob went out from Beersheba and went toward Haran, going back to the land of his parents' grandparents. And he lighted upon a certain place and tarried there all night. because the sun was set. And he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillows and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. Behold, the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham, thy father, the God of Isaac, The land whereon thou liest to thee I will give it and to thy seed. Thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Now there is a pivot to the whole thing. Now I know that this refers, of course, to Messiah. But I'm also certain that God intended that each one of these individuals should be himself personally and directly a channel of blessing as well as a channel for the coming Messiah. So there's a pivot of it all. The ultimate aim is to make Jacob a blesser. And behold, here's the verse. And behold, going to bless all the families of the earth in you. And behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whether thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land, because, for I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. And Jacob awakened out of his sleep and said, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not. That's what he had to learn. That's what the first bit of discipline was all about. And I have called it in the notes there, steps leading to this, that is this making of him a blessing, the discipline of meeting God. Jacob thought, you see, that he could cheat his brother and deceive his father and run away and work it out somehow or other. He seems to have been very careless about the fact that heaven was not a million miles away, that God was looking over his shoulder. And that night, He said, God is right here. And that's what I didn't know. Now I'm sure that Jacob had been instructed theologically by his parents and his grandparents, his parents and his grandparents, because we're told this in Hebrews eleven, and we're told it in many and other places well, that Abraham instructed his children and his grandchildren. That he knew this technically. But I didn't realize it. It hadn't burned into my brain. I didn't think that heaven and God and God's watchfulness was so close that a ladder could link the two. That's what he had to learn. That heaven was interested in earth. That God was watching him. That those above were in communication with those below. That he wasn't isolated. That he wasn't on his own. That it wasn't up to him to get through with this thing. God was there all the time. Now, this is an experience that Jacob never forgot. And you can see this, as we shall see it shortly, in the fact that many, many years later, when he was coming back from the land of Haran with wives and children and livestock, a real caravan, and he got into a real tangle when he got back into the land and ended up by being the father of a mob of murderers, until, as he said, my very name stinks in the land, and they're going to surround me and murder me. That was the end of it all. God said, get back to Bethel. To the place where I met thee at the first. Jacob turned to his whole family, and he said, off with the idols, off with all the pagan ornamentation, and sweep the whole thing, and they buried it below an oak, where he was, because He was going to Bethel. Now, God didn't tell him to do that. God simply said, get back to Bethel. Where I met you at the first. But Jacob knew what Bethel meant. It meant the presence of God, the house of God. And he knew that this pagan business they had got themselves into would never stand the test of Bethel. And though God said nothing about the pagan jewelry and the pagan dresses and the idols and all the rubbish they had got around them, God never mentioned it as far as the record goes. But he knew perfectly well that it didn't suit. And so he did off with a lot. What are we going to do with it? Sell it. Nothing of the kind. Dig a hole and bury it. That's all. Put it in a grave. Put it in the place of death. Well, why? Well, we're going back to Bethel. Well, what's so special about Bethel? Bethel means the house of God. And Bethel is where I first met God. And he spoke to me face to face. And I was really shaken. And that's where we're going now. So he went round a kind of circuit. And his lessons were not completed until he came back to Bethel. God very often does that with us. And so this is step number one. The discipline of meeting God. Now this is really a very, very severe kind of thing. You remember Peter? And Peter was... Not a man really like Jacob, but he was a very strong man and a very brash man, a courageous. But he was a very strong man and a very brash man, a courageous, impulsive kind of personality. But when he found himself in a boat with the Lord Jesus and he saw the power of deity in operation in the hands of the man of Galilee, he dropped down in the bottom of the boat and said, depart from the old Lord. Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord. It's a very, very disturbing thing and a very shaping thing to be in the presence of God. It's very disturbing and very disappointing. For there's much that has to go. There's much that will not stand out there. And in his presence we realize that heaven is right here. But the one with whom we have to do is right by us. and that there is no way that we can hide something. Now in chapter twenty-nine, verse one, and Jacob went on his journey and came into the land of the people of the east. He looked and behold a well in the field and lo there were these lots of sheep and so on. And there at those wells Jacob met Rachel, whom he wanted for his wife, and whom he finally got. But he had to go and live with his uncle Laban. Verse thirteen, and it came to pass, when Laban, that's his uncle, his mother's brother, heard the tidings of Jacob, his sister's son, that he ran to meet him and embraced him and kissed him and brought him to his house. He told Laban all these things, and Laban said to him, Surely thou art my bone and my flesh, and he abode within the space of a month. And Laban said unto Jacob, Because thou art my brother, should thou therefore serve me for not, brother, me and Kinsmen, of course, Tell me what shall my wages be. And herein starts another story that was going to mean a great deal of discipline for this man. I have put this down, I've had an arm, the discipline of his own tactics used on him by others. And that also is quite an experience, isn't it? But you know it happens. It happens. With what measure you meet, it shall be measured to you again. And this is what God does. And this smarty find people just as smart as he was. And a little bit smarter at home. And the very things that he had practiced on others, he had practiced on himself. And he was dumped and bruised and drowned in it. And the very first place he was to see was in the matter of Rachel. Now true, he got Rachel. But it was at the end of fourteen years. And not so. And not only that. But during that time, I believe that Laban played every trick on him that he'd ever played on anybody, and then about a hundred percent more. You remember Jacob later on is going to say, you changed my wages ten times. He tricked him, he fooled him. He cheated him right up to here. And Jacob was the one who had started off cheating on him. Now that is a discipline from God. You see, God very often works on the basis of... a poetic retribution, as it's called, he makes the punishment fit the sin, or sometimes the very sin itself, or whatever it is, brings about its own punishment. A drunkard plunges into drink, and by and by the punishment is that he becomes an alcohol. And the very thing that we go into, Israel, for example, pampered and played around with with idolatry. And God said, all right, you want idolatry? Right, I'll give it to you. And he tore them out of the land, destroyed their temple, and put them in the middle of an idolatrous nation for seventy years. And down there they saw so much of idolatry, and they suffered so much under it, that that was one thing Israel never did again. She did many another thing, including crucifying the Messiah. But she never reverted to idolatry, as the other nations round about did. And so there is always this rhyming justice. What God does, answers to, and rhymes to in a poetic way, what we have done, what His children have done. And we see this, of course, in a multitude of ways in the Scripture. The discipline of His own tactics used by him by others. This happened to you, Mead. Maybe it doesn't like you will. Now in chapter twenty-nine and thirty, we have, again, in Paddan Aram, the discipline of family friction, wives, children, servants. Now, I'm not trying to be facetious in putting this in, but I suppose that those of us who have homes, those of us who are married and have brought up families, we realize that we have learned more in the doing of that than the families we were bringing up. And that maybe we have suffered a good deal more in the way of discipline than they have. This is a real discipline. And if you don't believe it and haven't had any experience, just wait. You still have ahead of you, you know. Now this man got himself into a deep tangle where he ended up with two wives and two contraband or two common law wives. We have nothing which answers to this in the day of ours. At that time a slave person could be taken as a wife. It was perfectly legal and legitimate. Whatever God may have thought of it. That's not the point I'm talking about. But this is what he ended up with. And of course a great deal of his sorrows and tribulations for the next little while came from that very fact. First there was jealousy between Rachel and Leah. Then there was jealousy between Rachel and Leah and these bondwomen. Then there was fighting and quarreling between the boys, the family themselves. Then there was a desperate matter of the daughter, Dinah. And all of this is discipline and friction from within his own home. Now I'm not going to go into that anymore, except to apply it a little in our day. And I'm not talking now about fighting and quarreling and the kind of jealousies that there were in that home. because I hope under God that we have been preserved and kept by being Christian from this kind of thing. But nonetheless, home life involves adjustments, home life involves patience, home life involves swallowing many tears and many hurt feelings, home life involves sitting up at night praying for the family, and not always having those prayers answered immediately. Home life, and I'm talking about the life of a couple in a home or even being a part of that home as a child. If you are an intelligent child entering into, as you should be, the concerns of your parents, then you will know something with what I'm talking about. It sometimes involves very grievous sickness. I think from the time my parents, my father anyway, got saved, there was hardly a time until I went to Africa when we did not have very deep and serious sickness in our home. My father, for thirteen months, was a complete cripple. He lost his sight through about six weeks of that time. He lost his business because of this. We lost everything we had. I know what these sorrows are like. I know what it's like that the boy of fifteen just saved a month or so to sit up all night with my father who was in such agony with his eyes through this affliction that struck him, beating his hand up against the wall where he was lying in bed until his whole hand and arm was swollen up like a football. He just couldn't stand it. Those were not the days when hospitals were around the corner when you phoned emergency. And they gave you, them are all no less of it. We were in the country. There was nothing to do, but just get on with us. I'm sure that everybody here could duplicate this in some measure or other. Perhaps not the exact circumstances, but you in your corner and I in mine. And in all this discipline of the home, the sorrow. Perhaps poverty. I've been through it with that too. Perhaps disappointment. perhaps upset plans, failure, all kinds of things. I take it out of the immediate context of Jacob, and I suggest to you that one of the areas in which Christians are most disciplined is right in the family service. And if we can take that disciplining from God, not punishment, not punishment, I'm not talking about that, that's a different thing. A sadistic God just simply torturing his people because he gets some kind of pleasure out of it. But a loving God putting us through these pressures to bring out exactly what he wants in us. For it's pressure and heat that makes a diamond a diamond. And you know that very well. And it's grinding and polishing that makes the lens what it should be and the surgical instrument what it should be. And it's the heat of the furnace that makes the beautiful piece of porcelain what it is. And there are many, many other illustrations we could use. The hammering on the anvil, the pounding of the hammer and chisel on the wonderful work of sculptor, wherever you turn, discipline is the road to perfection. And this is what Jacob was going through. The discipline of family friction. The discipline of criticism and accusation. And the meeting with Laban. Just turn over very briefly to chapter thirty-one to see what I mean. Jacob ran away, it says in verse twenty of chapter thirty-one. So he fled. Jacob's verse twenty of chapter thirty-one. Jacob stole away unawares to Laban the Syrian, in that he told him not that he fled. So he fled with all that he had, rose up, passed over the river, set his face toward the mount of Gilead. And it was told Laban on the third day, so he took off after him. And then, verse twenty-five, then Laban overtook Jacob. Jacob had pitched his tent in the mount, and Laban was his brethren, pitched in the mount of Gilead. And Laban said to Jacob, Why hast thou done? What hast thou done, that thou hast stolen away unawares, and carried away my daughters? They weren't his wives, of course. Jacob's wives. They were his daughters, captives taken with the sword. Wherefore didst thou flee away secretly, and steal away from me? And it's not tell me that I might have sent thee away with mirth, and with songs, and with tabrith, and with heart, a likely thing. And hath not suffered me to kiss my sons and my daughters, Thou hast not done foolishly in so doing it. It is my power to hurt you and so on. Now, this is only the culmination of a long period of spying and pressuring and persecuting. He was criticized. He was blamed and accused, sometimes in some cases falsely, in some cases truly. But this is a discipline. How do you shape up through accusation? How do you respond when you're in a position that men can close in on you and pin things on you in business or wherever else and make you take the blame? Do you know that as a Christian you shouldn't kick back and take it to law or upset the whole thing? How do you respond to it? That's a discipline, as I assure you. I know of no deeper discipline than accepting false accusations and just leaving it in the hand of God. Now Jacob had to do that. As I say, some of the accusations were quite proper and correct. He had done the wrong thing, but some of them weren't. And here he is, under this discipline, of criticism and accusation and meeting with Laban. He had done the wrong thing, far be it from me to put myself in the place of God, and yet it seems to me that as God's man, if he had gone to Laban and said look we've had enough let's settle this thing now I'm going but somehow or other he didn't do it and the flesh was still strong in him so he took off at night but he had to finish it in any case and that was a discipline and then these two men there in the mountain they made each other swear look at verse forty eight Laban said this heap is a witness between me and thee this day therefore was the name of it called Galid And mispa, for he said, the Lord watched between me and me when we are absent one from another, and so on. Now this beautiful word, mispa, the Lord watched between me and me, watching, has been put in silver, silver, green, and gold, and all that sort of it on another pair of brooches, and given by a sweetheart, you know, mispa, the Lord watched between me and me. And we forget that that's not the way it was intended in the first place, and that's a lovely application out of it, of course. But these two rascals knew perfectly well that neither the one nor the other could trust the opposite number unless God was watching over them. And so this pagan Syrian, this Laban, he put up this monument and he said, the name of this thing you is Mizpah. I can't watch you. I've failed for nearly twenty years to watch you. You're living right in my own house. So how could I do it a hundred miles away or more? So I'm asking God to watch between you. And if you do anything wrong to my daughter, God will punish you for it. And if you do this, God will look after you. That's how the name Misfits started. And I wonder what pro-Jacob was thinking about. There went testimony of twenty years, a man called to be a blessing to others. And instead of that, this man is really tearing him apart. It was a sad, sad thing. And it was all part of the discipline of this man, recognizing his failure. And then in chapter thirty-two, we can't turn to it. You can look it up at your leisure, and I hope you've been reading these things through the week. Mahaneim, the discipline of meeting Esau. He had to come back. He had to face Laban. He had to face Esau. He had to face his own family. He had to come back to Bethel and face God. There was no way that he could dodge out and around this thing. God was standing right across the path. And this is part of the discipline of life. You can't run away from it. You take it with you. And you always come back to it again. And so in Mahanaim, which means truth, the discipline of meeting Je Esau. It's a very, very instructive passage. He tried to wiggle and wangle. There wasn't any way he could wiggle and wangle. He sent presents and he divided them up and sent them ahead by installment. A rather sharp idea. But it didn't work. It didn't work. God said you've got to go and wiggle. Face to face. And in the end, all the streaming is unnecessary. And then there's the Brooke Jabot. We simply must look at least at the end of that story because it's one of the most beautiful in the whole of the Bible. Chapter thirty-two. And verse thirty, you remember the story, the man wrestling with him, trying to break him down, trying to bless him, and he's asking for blessing, and yet he's fighting the one who is going to bless him. Notice that the angel, verse twenty-four, we've got to go back to twenty-four. Jacob was left alone. All the rest had passed over. Now he's alone with God in the darkness of the night at the brook. Penio at the fords of Jabba. And there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. God took the initiative. God was now going to break him. And Jacob wrestled back. He wasn't prepared to be molded by God. And when he saw, the angel saw, that he prevailed not against him. He touched the hollow of his thigh, and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with him. One of the most ferocious agonies of human bodies in support. The whole hip joint knocked right out. in one flash of a second enough to paralyze a man and it did. And he said, let me go for the daybreaker. And he, Jacob said, I will not let me go except thy blessing. He's after the blessing again. He said unto him, what is thy name? And he said, Jacob, it's the moment of confrontation, it's the moment of truth. Who are you anyway? I'm the supplicant. Jacob is my name. Cheat. He'll grab it. shortcutter, elbower, crook. That's who I am. He faced himself, and he put a name on himself. And he, the angel, said, thy name shall be called no more, Jacob, but Israel, a prince of God, a prince of God. Now I jump down for the sake of time, verse thirty, and Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, For I have seen God face to face. It means the face of God. My life is to serve. And as he passed over, Penuel, it's the same name differently spelled. The sun rose upon him. It's the beginning of a new day. He has a new name. He has a new walk. For he's limping. He's got a crutch now. And he's hobbling instead of swaggering. So he has a new name. He has a new walk. and it's a new day for him. The sun is symbolically rising over him and he halted on his side. Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinews which shrank and so on. From there on he's a different man. A different relationship with God, a different attitude, a different mind, a different way of thinking, a different walk, a different personality. He's now the man who will say we've got to slow the herds down to the pace of the flow. We've got to think about even The sheep, the ewes that are going to have land, and we can't overdrive them, that's a different man, isn't it? I'm going to bless Pharaoh, not grab a blessing from him. I'm going to bless the sons of Joseph in the opposite direction that man would bless them. I'm going to pour out blessings that will reach down through thousands of years. From this moment on, to the best of my knowledge, we do not find this man grabbing for anything. The table should turn. The flow is in the opposite direction. That was the result of the discipline. Now, Saka was a very sad interlude when he settled down on the borders of the land, and there was a tremendous family disgrace. He built, settled down, and built among the people of the land, and his daughter was violated, raped, if you will, the word that we know all too much about in the papers these days. His daughter was violated. And then his sons laid a trap for those who did it and massacred the whole time in cold blood. They did it in a deceptive way. They didn't go out and fight. They trapped them. And they trapped them with a religious angle to it. So bring them into their clan that offered these men a choice of covenant relationship that they would submit to circumcision, which they did. And then they murdered them. And poor old Jacob was just shaken to the very foundations of his being. What have you done? What have you done? Don't you realize that I'm a pilgrim traveling through? They might have answered, all right, what have you settled here for? Build houses and barns and corrals for your cattle. But anyway, there it is. The discipline of meeting Esau, the discipline of wrestling with God, the discipline of settling down in a place and facing family disgrace. And that is a tremendous discipline. In the land, the loss of Joseph, sorry, in Bethel again in chapter thirty-five, returned to God, putting away everything that was in the way, and the death of Rachel. There, Rachel died. He buried her by the wayside, and now a broken man, for he really loved Rachel, a broken man who plows his way ahead lonely. That was all a discipline. The touch of death, after returning to Bethel, he might have said, well, now that I'm back and got rid of all those things, everything will just be done. Do you know there are deeper waters to cross? There are heavier disciplines to bear. There's never an end to it. Right to the glory. And this old man is now becoming more and more polished, more and more spiritual, more and more like God. We see him at the death of Rachel really shining. And as he journeys on, the loss of Joseph, the discipline of losing a darling son. In chapter forty-two, the discipline of famine. And then in chapter forty-six, the discipline of having his roots torn up and being taken off. to a new country at a very, very advanced age, starting all over again. How would you like that? That's quite a discipline too, you know. Having your roots torn up and having to start all over again. Now, we have taken up all the time, I'm afraid, in the disciplines of Jacob. I suggest that you read the notes for yourself on the other side. I think you'll find them very interesting. And if you're going to get the benefit really from the classes, you will have to do a little digging for yourself. Just to explain, I have put them in two groupings. Self-discipline, first, in Matthew five, six, and seven, the whole sermon in the month. It's a matter basically of self-discipline. Restraint and anger, control in prayer, no rash oath, no resistance to violence, no impatience with the brother's faults and so on. I think you could interpret almost the whole of the sermon in the month within the framework of self-discipline. I think that's what it's aiming at. James one and twelve, the Christian is seen under various types of testing and is rewarded with a crown for coming through the testing stamp approved. In Ephesians six ten, the Christian is seen as a disciplined soldier, armored, girded, standing, withstanding. First Corinthians nine, he is an athlete in training and therefore under strict discipline of spirit, soul and body. Second Peter one, five, two, eleven, add to your faith self-control, that discipline, self-discipline. And then in that way you'll never fail, never fall. First Timothy four, six to ten, exercise, that's discipline. If you don't believe that it's discipline, even in bodily exercise, start a whole new set of exercises tomorrow and see how long it continues. That requires quite a bit of self-discipline, and I think you all know it. Give time, give thought, give yourself, give heed, give perseverance, give consideration, all terms of discipline, and they're all in that portion of Timothy. And then, of course, there is God's discipline on those who will not use self-discipline. And, of course, the basic text was Hebrews twelve, one to twelve, if ye be without. It's not chastisement in the sense of quipping, but it is child. The word really is child training. And if you do not have this training, you're not God's at all. You might as well start all over again. Now we leave it there, hoping that you yourselves will look these things up and we'll hand over now to the Lord.