Do you remember the game, Chutes and
Ladders? It’s been a while since I’ve
played this board game, but here’s a quick recap of how it works.
You have a game piece, spin the spinner,
and hopefully you end up landing on a space that will take you up a ladder so
that you can get ahead in the game. But
sometimes, you end up landing on a space that forces you down a chute which is
a real bummer. You don’t want to go
backward.
This simple child’s game encourages
players to find where the ladder spaces are on the board and you hope and pray
that you will land on the right space.
It took me a while until I finally bought
a ladder that was tall enough to take care of some basic household chores.
Without a ladder, it’s kind of hard to get anything done around the house.
Ladders don’t just help us with projects
around the house. They can help us in our faith as well. Sometimes, instead of
choosing a ladder that can lift us to heaven we choose a chute instead which
ends up spiraling us downward and away from where God wants us to be.
The story of Jacob from the Old Testament
is more a story of chutes than it is of ladders. Jacob seems to have an uncanny ability to
choose chutes over ladders and here’s a quick summary of his life to help us
understand the context of our Old Testament scripture for today.
Many of us are familiar with the story of
Jacob and his twin brother, Esau. It
would be an understatement to say that Jacob has been a real pain in the
backside toward his own family members.
Jacob is the guy, who when no one is
looking, kicks his golf ball from out behind the tree before hitting his next
shot when you’re not even playing winter rules.
Jacob is the guy who lies about his past accomplishments if it will help
him get a promotion. Jacob is the guy
who sells you a car without telling you that there’s a problem with the
transmission. Jacob is the guy who stabs
you in the back, if it means getting ahead.
Jacob began his cheating ways when he was
in his mother’s womb, if you can believe that.
Trying to beat his brother Esau by a few seconds so as to be the
firstborn, the scriptures tell us that Jacob grabbed Esau’s heel while they
were both in their mother’s womb, but to no avail. And this is where Jacob got his name, which
literally means “heel grabber.”
And from there, he just keeps on choosing
chutes over ladders. One of the most
popular stories in the Bible is the one where Jacob ends up taking advantage of
Esau’s extreme hunger one day by exchanging some stew straight up for his
birthright.
But that’s not all. Heel grabber tricks his own father who is
lying on his death bed by impersonating older brother Esau, and Jacob ends up
receiving the blessing that was meant for his brother.
Now, the problem with heel grabbers is
that even though they may get what they want, they make a lot of enemies along
the way. And when Esau found out what
his brother did, he set out to kill his own twin brother, Jacob.
Jacob’s mother, knowing that things are
going to get ugly really fast, tells Jacob to run away and hide out at Uncle
Laban’s house. While on the run, Jacob
stops for the night, and finding the most comfortable rock he can, he places it
under his head like a pillow. Jacob’s decisions
which involved going down one chute after another, has literally led him to hit
rock bottom.
And the really sad part of it all? I don’t think that Jacob has any clue how far
he has fallen or how bad his decisions have been. You almost get the impression as you read up
to this point, that Jacob probably even thinks that rocks are meant to be
pillows.
One of the striking features of the bible
is that nobody, not even people who you would think should know better, are
immune from making bad decisions or from allowing themselves to drift away from
God. The bible is a frustrating book to
read at times, because just when God’s people seem to be moving in the right
direction, somebody messes it all up.
It kind of reminds me of Gilligan from
Gilligan’s Island. Remember how the
Skipper and his crew would be this close from being rescued, and then just
before the end of the show, Gilligan would do something that caused them to
stay stranded?
But let’s not just blame Jacob. We can find many more names of people who
like Jacob, make decisions that leave us scratching our heads and shouting out,
“what were you thinking?”
And truth be told, if we really think
about it, we’re just like them in many ways.
At times, we too, find ourselves drifting away from God. Sometimes it’s due to our poor choices and
sometimes it’s because…well let’s face it.
Life is hard. And we just say, “What’s the use? I’ll take the easy way.”
The problem is that when we choose to take
one chute, it’s that much easier to take the next one and the next before we
find ourselves in a free fall away from God and our faith.
A while back, a friend of mine who’s a pastor was
talking to me about the importance of taking time out of our schedules to just
be with God and to find renewal in his faith.
And he said, “Every time I take
time to do be with God in an intentional way, God seems to help me to get back
on track again. And I end up feeling
stronger in my walk with Christ. But for
some reason, I allow myself to wander away again from the faith.” And with a puzzled look on his face, his
next words were, “It’s the strangest
thing.”
And I thought to myself, “He’s right. It is so easy to
fall away from God, even when we know what we need to do and to whom we should
go.”
A few years
ago, a survey was conducted which included several churches in our country and
the purpose of this survey was to determine why it is that people end up
drifting away from the church. And the
number one reason it gave was that for many people, they just don’t feel
challenged enough to grow in their faith.
The people who leave the church, tend to be the people who want more in
their faith, but no one seems willing to help them to go to the next
level.
And that makes sense. If you reach one level and plateau, it gets
kind of old to just stay where you are.
In addition to folks who stray away
because they aren’t being challenged enough, there are also folks who are
falling away because life has been tough on them. They’re asking questions like, “Why does God allow bad things to happen?” “Why are you allowing me to go through all of
this suffering?”
And still,
there are others, who like Jacob, simply make bad decisions, sending them down
one chute after another until they reach a point where they have fallen almost
completely out of a relationship with God.
But here’s the good news for those of us
who have gone down our fair share of chutes.
God never gives up on us. Just
like in our Old Testament reading for today.
Here Jacob is on a cold and damp ground with a rock under his head. He’s drifting off to sleep and he begins to
see something that will mark a turn around in his life.
He sees a ladder set up on earth. Not a short ladder. But a tall ladder that reaches up to
heaven. And not only that, but he also
sees angels ascending and descending on that ladder. And as Jacob is given this unexpected glimpse
of God’s presence, God speaks to him and reminds him of a promise that was made
to his father Isaac, and to his grandfather, Abraham. And the promise is that through their family,
God will bless the world.
Sometimes, when we end up going down
chutes for whatever reason, we forget the bigger picture of God’s promise that
one day the sin and brokenness in our world will be overturned and everything
will be made new. And the way that God
is going to reclaim his creation and make everything new is through you and
me.
So God reminds Jacob of this promise which
he had forgotten. God promises to be
with Jacob and also assures him that the covenant will be fulfilled through
him.
Jacob then wakes up from his sleep and
says, “Surely, the Lord is in this
place.”
In one of the churches I served, a guy in
his 20s whose name was Dave, began attending worship services out of the
blue. All I knew about Dave was that he
lived a couple of blocks from the church and that was about it. So, I got to know him a little better and one
day I asked him just out of curiosity, “What
was it that led you to begin attending church here?”
And he told me how he had grown up in the church but
then when he got out of school, he just kind of drifted away from God and the
church. He told me how he had moved to
the neighborhood because of a job transfer.
He wasn’t married and enjoyed his new home and especially liked relaxing
on Sunday mornings in his closed-in porch.
He said that since moving into his new
home, he liked drinking his coffee and reading the paper on Sunday mornings. And he said, “But every Sunday morning, I couldn’t help but listen to your church
bells. At first, I didn’t think a whole
lot about it, but one Sunday morning, it was the strangest thing. I decided to put my paper down. I got dressed for church, and I’ve been here
ever since. I feel like I’m back home
with God again,” he said with a smile.
One of my favorite hymns is the hymn,
“Come Thou Fount of Every Blessings.” Robert Robinson who lived in England
during the 1700’s wrote the lyrics for this hymn. One of the verses says,
“Prone to wander, Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. Here’s my
heart, O take and seal it. Seal it for thy courts above.” Robinson was known to
backslide in his faith which is why he included those words in this great hymn
of faith.
During one of those times when he had
backslidden in his faith, Robinson was sitting next to a woman on a stage
coach. This woman was quietly humming this tune. Not knowing that she was
sitting next to the writer of this hymn, she asked him what he thought of this
hymn.
Robert Robinson said to her, "Madam,
I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give
a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then."
This woman responded by quoting a phrase
from the first verse of that hymn. She said, “Sir, the streams of mercy are still flowing.” The woman on that
stage coach ended up helping Robinson to climb back up the ladder in his faith
with God.
Let’s face it. We are all prone to wander from our faith. All
of us land on chutes at one time or another.
We fall away from God and sometimes it even feels like we’re headed the
opposite direction. But then comes along
a ladder and it seems to come out of nowhere.
You hear those same old church bells. You sit next to someone humming a tune. You lay your head on that cold rock. And guess what? We discover that we were the ones who
moved. Not God.
Jacob, the one who grabbed his brother’s
heel, all of the sudden realizes that God has a grab of HIS heel. And God isn’t letting go.
This God is determined to have his way
with us. Whether we’re on the run or we
have drifted away without even noticing, at the bottom of every chute is a
ladder and this incredible promise:
“I will not leave you until I have done what
I have promised to do through you.
Through you, I am going to change the world!”
Never expecting that God would ever catch up with you
again, the only words that come to your mind are these words of praise…
“Surely,
the presence of the Lord is in this place.”
Chutes & Ladders
Small Group Questions
Genesis 28:10-19a
July 30, 2017
Remember the "Chutes & Ladders" children's board game? To win, you need to land on the ladder spaces instead of the chutes spaces.
Share a time in your life when you felt that you landed on a "ladder" space where you were able to move forward in a good way. Share a time when you landed on a "chutes" space where you ended up going backward in a not so good way.
The story of Jacob from our Genesis scripture reading is a story of how he ended up on one chute after another which was leading him farther and farther from God. Some of the reasons we drift away from God include 1) We simply gradually drift away from God and the church almost without noticing! 2) We don't feel challenged enough spiritually and so we plateau or slide back in our faith. 3) Sometimes, life has been tough on us and we kind of give up on God. 4) Other times, we just make really bad decisions that take us away from God and the church.
Share how you have experienced some of these reasons for drifting away from God and the church.
The good news of this story about Jacob is that God sent him a ladder to help him climb up from all of the chutes in his life. This story reminds us that God is always reaching out to us with a ladder (grace) to draw us closer to God, the church, and one another.
What ladder has got set up for your recently? Share with the group.
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