Pastor Wayne Cordeiro
February 9, 2014 - W1406

We are going to continue to talk about the Giants or Heroes of the Bible.  Jacob was one of them and he had a very hard life with lots of hardships.  He was forced to leave home under threat of death, he had to serve a dishonest master for twenty years, tricked into marrying the wrong sister and so many other terrible things happened to him.

To the man that had cheated him for twenty years, Jacob said, “These twenty years I have been with you ... by day the heat consumed me and the frost by night, and my sleep fled from my eyes …I served you fourteen years for your two daughters and six years for your flock, and you changed my wages ten times. If the God of my father, the God of Abraham ... had not been for me, surely now you would have sent me away empty-handed.” (Genesis 31:38-42)

Many of the heroes of the Bible have things in common. The Bible says of Apostle Paul: “They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city supposing him to be dead. But when the disciples gathered about him, he rose up and entered the city.” (Acts 14:19-20)

Paul himself said, “Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea … “(2 Cor.: 24-25)

But I thought what is it of these men that all have that same common quality that we need to capture for ourselves?  It is not that they didn't fall.  Here it is.  It is when they did fall, they can't stay down.  They got back up.  They knew in order to succeed, they had to get up one more time, then they were knocked down again but still got up again and again. 

FAITH IS _SPIRITUAL RESILIENCE___.

One of the greatest running backs of all time was Walter Payton.  He rushed an amazing 5 miles in his pro career. But it was said that statistically on average he was knocked down every 3.5 yards but kept getting up for all of those 5 miles!

Jacob serves for seven years and he gets the wrong wife, and then he has to serve another seven years, you stupid because you got up with the wrong woman, and then six more years for the flocks.  And then Esau, your brother, by the way, is coming to kill you.  Are you afraid?  And then he goes out and he wrestles with an angel and he gets his hip busted.  And then he has 12 sons, and the son you love, they said he died.  And then you're going to face a famine because all the other kids you have are bozos.  And you're going to go to Goshen, and you're going to be there for 400 years.  But then the children of Israel are going to come out of Egypt, and they'll be forged into a nation out of which the messiah will be born.

Why did all these hardships keep happening? God works on one flaw at a time because, you see, when he first nailed Jacob, it may have been because he was sneaky, and then he nailed him again, bang, because of your lust, because of your jealousy, because of your grief.  And each time he's resilient, he comes up a better person.  But, you see, he's not ready yet for the plan of God to be fulfilled through him, that the promise was given to his grandfather Abraham, and it would be fulfilled through this man.  But you're not ready yet.  And so he gets hit again and again and again. 

And so God begins to allow us to go through storms and one flaw at a time; a need to control, kaboom, greed, bang, and then he comes back up, and the Lord says now we're going to teach you patience, resilience, leadership.

As the Bible says, “For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again.” (Proverbs 24:16)

The danger is that the Devil knows your “quitting points” – the exact point or setback at which you will give up on God. So if you are the type to give up, the Devil will simply put enough “quitting points” in your life so that he can control you into giving up.

As the Bible says, “The one who endures to the end, he will be saved.” (Mark 13:13)

You don't even practice for a race.  You practice for that moment in the race when you're ready to give up.  When you say I'm calling it quits,  God says, that's when you're building faith.  Now you're building faith. 

You see, a lot of you have gone to a lot of marriage classes, but you didn't practice for marriage.  You're practicing for the moment right now when you want to stay down and give up.  That's what everything comes to.

I mean, how many of us have sat in a hundred sermons, maybe 200 sermons, maybe 500.  What is it for?  For the Christian life?  No.  For the moment in your Christian life when you're ready to give up and God is saying don't do it because you're about to go to Egypt and I'm going to build a nation through you. 

The promise has to come alive.  So when you're nailed and you're hit, you have to get back up.  And it's that last time when you're ready to finish it off and call it quits, that's what those 500 sermons were for.  That's what all those marriage classes were for.  That's what the hours of prayer were all about, not the Christian faith like right now when we're sitting there going, “Oh, yeah, this is cool”.  No.  It's the moment when you leave here and you run into something and you say I'm tired of this.  God says that's what all those sermons were about, right that moment.  Because if you'll get back up, that may be the 3 1/2 yards that will take you over the goal line.

Faith is spiritual resilience, and my prayer for this church and my prayer for you is that when it rains, we grow and we get back up. 

Study Suggestions

1.   What is faith?

2.   Why do we have so many hardships?

3.   What did some of the heroes of the Bible have in common?

4.   Why is it important to have spiritual resilience?

5.   Why are we training and practicing?