Rebuilding The Family House: The Closet
7/4/20101 Genesis 27:1-19 1 John 1:5-12
We are launching a new series of sermons today on Rebuilding The Family House. We are going to look at The Closet in order to get rid of the Junk. We are going to look at the kitchen to discover how to work together. We are going to visit the dining room to learn ways of being kind, and we are going to enter the bedroom to talk about sex. The first room we are going to enter is the closet. The closet is the place we put other things in, in order to keep others from seeing them at the moment.
How many of you have closets in your home where everything is neat and hung up and in its place? How many of you have closets that are semi-neat and in order? How many of you have closets in which everything was thrown in and the door was shut as quickly as possible before it all falls back out on top of you.
As a kid, closets were somewhat a mystery to me. Our closets never had lights in them, and I thought they were much larger than they actually were, and that they had monsters way in the back section. I was always afraid of the end of the closet in my parent’s bedroom and in my grandmother’s room in Ga. We didn’t have a closet in the boys’ bedroom.
The only other closet was in the bathroom and the hallway in our house, and I was always surprised by some of the things that I would be able to find the hall closet that we thought had been lost. I even had dreams of going into the closets and finding a whole section of the house that we never used.
Closets are interesting. Sometimes they can be places where we hide things that we do not want others to find or to see. Sometimes we stash things way back up in a closet that we intend to bring out at a later time when we could blend it back in. I once stole a baseball glove at school, but I had to hide it in the closet until I could bring it into the open without arousing to much suspicion. How many of us have hid things in the closet until we thought we could safely bring it out into the open?
Sometimes we make our homes closets in which we keep things hidden from those on the outside. We place in them family secrets that can be very painful if brought to the light. Jesus made an interesting statement that shows us what we all take into our homes. A group of people were so concerned about eating the right food to be clean, when Jesus was trying to get them to see. It’s not what’s on the outside coming in that’s making a mess, it’s what’s on the inside coming out that’s the real problem.
Jesus said, Mark 7:20-23 (Today's New International Version)
20 He went on: "What comes out of you is what defiles you. 21 For from within, out of your hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile you."
I want you to know that these things are in your home, and they are in my home because we are in our homes. Sometimes we like to think, that some people are really bad or really messed up and that’s why certain things happened in the their families. No that family had the same thing in its closets as we do, but they failed to realize that some things need to be locked up in a closet and left there.
What are some secrets we carry in our families that look good to others? Some of you have terrible tempers at home, that you pull out of the closet. Some of you have terrible spending habits. You keep spending more than you have and you’re getting deeper and deeper in debt and its hurting your family. But you keep shopping and pulling it out of the closet.
Some of you have adopted lying and deceitful ways at home and its destroying others trust in you, and you keep pulling them back out of the closet. Some of you have crossed sexual activity lines in your home that never should have been crossed, but you keep pulling them out of the closet. Some of you are stealing from other family members and deliberaterly putting the suspicion on others thereby causing distrust in your home, and you keep pulling it out of the closet. What you don’t realize is that these will be affecting how you are treated by others for years and years to come.
Each of us needs to be aware of the potential for evil in each of us, and realize even an innocent behavior can turn into a monster. We need to better know ourselves and to know when a closet door needs to be kept closed and a lock put on it. All of us here are facing some temptation to let something out of the closet. We have an appetite growing inside of us to get this thing. It may be more of this, some of that, or to try out this. It may be for a person, it could be to go to a place, or could be to just look at it and see what its like. There’s something hiding in the closet that wants to come out. We need to keep it locked up.
The lie it’s telling us is that “you can handle it, it will only be for this one time. Once you get it out of your system it will be over with.” That’s not true. If you have a problem with spending, buying one more item will not solve the problem. If you have a problem with getting something you can’t afford, if you get it you will still be tempted the next time to get something you can’t afford. If you have a problem with lust, giving in to the lust will not stop you from lusting.
If you really want to kiss a person, you should not kiss, do you really think after the kiss is over, it will end all of your desire for future kisses? Of course not. Your appetite will insist on one more kiss, but this time with the music in the background. The only thing that giving into a temptation does, is to make it easier to give in to the temptation the next time. You and I will never be as strong against a temptation as we are before we give in to it. When you feed an appetite it demands more to be satisfied the next time. Once you break a diet, its easy to break it again, and before you know it that diet is gone.
In our Scripture passage, we saw a family that had been chosen by God to be a blessing to the world. God was going to use that family to send Jesus Christ ultimately into the world. The parents were Isaac and Rebekkah and they had a set of twin boys. Esau was born first, but Jacob came out of his mother womb holding on to Esau’s heel. As the boys grew, Esau was the athletic hunter type of guy. Jacob was the more sensitive, help out at home kind of a guy. Isaac loved to eat wild animals so Esau, the hunter, became his favorite son. Jacob enjoyed pleasing his mother, and he became her favorite son. Now it is natural to like one child more than another because of his or her personality. A loving child is easier to love than a hard headed one. That’s reality.
The goal is to love our children fairly and to treat them fairly, not necessarily equally. One child deserves a reward for getting a B, but another needs to be held accountable to an A. One is more gifted intellectually than the other. What is wrong is to treat a child unfairly and to seek to give another a clear advantage in favoritism.
Rebekkah and Jacob treated their sons unfairly and it started a lot of envy, rivalry and strife in their home. It got to the point where Rebekkah wanted the best for Jacob even if it meant robbing from Esau, and Isaac wanted the best for Esau even if it meant leaving out Jacob. All this stuff that was in the closet was coming out in different ways.
When Isaac got older he became blind. One day he wanted a real good home cooked meal from wild game. He calls Esau his favorite and lets him know, if you go and kill me some game and prepare it the way I like it, I’m going to give you a full blessing. Now part of his wanting to give the blessing to Esau was because Esau was the first born son and his favorite. The other part may have been his desire to get him a meal his way
The only problem is that Isaac knew that before the boys were born God had prophesied their futures. Rebekkah was having such a hard time with her pregnancy with a lot of pain, and she asked God, why is this happening to me. God told her two nations were in her womb that would separate from each other. God further declared in Genesis 25:23 that the younger son would be stronger than the older one and that the older son was to serve the younger son. Isaac preferred his plan for Esau’s life, over his God’s plan. Because Esau was his favorite, Isaac looked over the poor choices Esau was making in his life and attempted to overrule God’s choice? How many of our families are hurting because we let our favorite child get away with all kinds of things? We challenge anyone who dares to say something contrary to our our favorite child. We won’t even listen to what God has to say about their behavior without starting to defend them. We may insist we do not even have a favorite, but the kids know how the favorite is.
Esau was only to happy to hear his father’s compromise of what God had said about him and his brother. Only problem is that Rebekkah hear’s the two of them scheming, and she does some scheming of her own. She intends to kills a goat and cook the meal just like her husband likes it and send in Jacob to get the blessing. Jacob is afraid of the plan, because he is afraid of what his father will do if he knows he’s lying to him.
Jacob had smooth skin, his brother was hairy. No problem his mother ties some hairy goat skin to Jacob’s neck and his hands. Esau rarely takes a bath and you can smell it in his clothes. Jacob likes smelling decent. No problem, Rebekkah puts Esau’s clothes on Jacob and now he’s smelling up the room. He goes to his father to offer him the meal and when Isaac asks him who is he, he lies and says, “I’m Esau and I have done just like to told me. Please sit up and eat so you may give me your blessing.
But Isaac knows something is up, because the meal is prepared so quickly.
He asked, “how’d you pull this thing off so quickly.” Jacob lies and says “ the Lord your God helped me out and gave me success.” Isaac says, “you sound like Jacob, so come close to me and let me touch you.” He says, “the voice is that of Jacob, but the hairy hands are the hands of Esau. Are you really my son Esau?.” Jacob lies again, “I promise its me.” Isaac said bring me the food so that I can eat it and come over so I can kiss you. When he got close enough for the kiss, Isaac smelled his clothes and one whiff of those clothes convinced him that this was definitely Esau.
Isaac, thinking it was Esau, then gave Jacob his blessing for his future in which again contrary to what he knew God had said. Isaac proclaimed, “Be lord of over your brothers and may sons of your mother bow down to you.” Jacob got the blessing from his father and ran out the tent. Just a few minutes later in comes Esau, ready to be blessed by his father. When He said, “father here I am with the food you like sit up and bless me.”
Isaac was like “who are you.” When he said he was Esau, Isaac started shaking violently like he was having a seizure. He realized that Jacob had tricked him out of the blessing he wanted to give to Esau. Esau begged for a blessing from his father, but Isaac did not have another one to give. Finally he said okay “One day you will get tired of your brother and you will throw his yoke from off your neck.”
Esau was so angry with his brother Jacob. He thought in the back of his mind, it will not be long before my father dies, and when he does I am going to kill my brother Jacob. Esau didn’t mind letting others know how he felt.
What do you think this did to Esau’s relationship to his mother? What did this episode do to Rebekkah’s relationship to Isaac? What did it do to Isaac’s relationship to Jacob? This is not what Rebekkah or Isaac was planning when they put their schemes into action but family turmoil and anguish is what they got. Those two schemes should have never of come out of the closet.
Rebekkah is so afraid that Esau will kill his brother the day his father dies that she wants to send him away so that Esau will have a chance to let his anger subside. Now Esau had married women that were from the surrounding culture and they got on Rebekkah and Isaac’s nerves. Rebekkah pleaded with Isaac to send Jacob back to her family which was also his family roots to get a wife for Jacob.
Isaac sent Jacob away with a blessing to get a wife from Rebekkah’s side of the family. Little did Rebekkah know, that she was sending Jacob away from the family for about 30 years. It also appears that even though Isaac was older than she was, she died before Jacob returned home. She never saw her son that she loved again. Think she would have acted differently if she had known this would be the result?
We don’t know what the consequences will be when we let things out of the closets that should have been locked up forever. Rebekkah never intended to destroy her family or to break up her home. She simply gave in to the temptation to try to help her son get what she thought he rightfully deserved. God does not need our schemes and deception to bring about his plans.
I’m not sure what all is in our closets today, but I do know there are some monsters that want to come out and devour us. We need to ask the question, “what is going to happen when everyone finds out what I did?” Satan has you thinking you can’t get caught. God may already be exposing you in a way you could not imagine.
We need to ask the question, “what will happen if—things do not go the way I planned.” We can control whether or not to choose to sin. Nobody gets to control the consequences. We all have some regret of opening a closet door and letting something out, that we wished had never seen the light of day. It started out as something small and it became an appetite that would not be satisfied. We need to ask the question, “who am I asking to pay the price for my choice to sin.” Sin never stops the consequences on just the person sinning. We ask a lot of people to pay a price for our opportunity to have a good time. Why not ask them in advance if they’re willing to pay the price just in case your plan does not work out?
God wants to be in control of our closets. The first time we met Rebekkah in the bible she was a model for us all to follow. She did not turn away all at once. It was a compromise here and another one there. But we should not define her by this final act of deceit, because God forgave her when she repented just as God forgives us. It is so unfortunate that we try to define a person by how they acted at a given point in time, be it 2, 4, 10 or 20 years ago. We all have had some very unflattering moments, that we do not wish to be defined by. It’s amazing how much worse the sins of others seem, even when we have thought of doing the sin ourselves but by the grace of God we did not. God has the ability to change people. We need to accept that changes have occurred.
Jacob reaped what he sowed in deceiving his father. His own father in law tricked him out of marrying the women he loved and gave him her sister instead. Later his wife’s father deceived him ten different times with his wages. Sometimes we go through rough times, because we are reaping what we sowed years earlier.
In this family, the one who turns out to be the most forgiving of all was Esau, and he was the one who lost the most. If God could change the way Esau felt about Jacob, surely in Christ God can help us to change the way we feel about others in our families for the wrong they have done.
God is calling us all to a place of confessing what we have let out of the closets at home and repenting of it. God wants us to invite Jesus into our closets so that we can get rid of the junk that’s destroying our homes. 1 John 1:7-10 (Today's New International Version)
7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all [a] sin. 8 If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.
God never gave up on this family and all the kings of Judah and Israel, including the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, Jesus himself, trace their lineage through Isaac and Rebekkah. God has not given up on you or your family. As we seek forgiveness for our wrong, let us extend forgiveness to those who have hurt us. It’s time to get the junk out of our closets.
Sermon Outline:
Rebuilding The Home-The Closet
Pastor Rick 7/4/2010
Genesis 27:1-19 1 John 1:5-12
A. The Launching Of The Series On The Family
1. Closet, Dining Room, Kitchen, Bedroom
2. Traits In A Home Needed
3. Getting Things In Order
B. The Closet
1. Childhood-Dark Mysterious, Deep
2. The Hiding Place
3. The Forbidden Call
4. Every Home Needs Closet Doors
5. What Locks To Put On The Doors
6. Appetites Grow When Fed
7. It’s Easier The Second Time
8. Just This One Time Is A Lie
C. Good Homes Go Bad With Sin
1. Home With God’s Promises
2. Rebekkah/Isaac Great Start-But Then
3. The Closet –Favoritism
4. Just A Little—It Gets Out Of Hand
5. What’s In The Closet Will Get You
D. Rebekkah’s Plan To Get Ahead
1. Isaac Plan Is Overcome
2. Jacob Learns To Lie & Deceive
3. A Father Is Tricked
4. A Family Is Betrayed
5. Hatred Fills A Home
E. There Are Consequences From Things In The Closet
1. Brother Loses A Brother
2. Marriage On The Rocks
3. Son Is Gone For 21 Years
F. What Are The Consequences Coming Out Of Closets
1. What Will Happen When
2. What Will Happen If
3. Who Will Pay The Price With You
G. God Wants Us To Confront Our Closets
1. We Don’t Have To Be Defined By
One Point In Time
2. The Sins Of Others Seem For Worse
Than Our Own
3. Jacob Reaped What He Sowed
4. Esau Made The Biggest Change
5. God Calls Us To Confession &
Repentance
F. Allowing Jesus Into The Closet
1. Live Where You Want Those You
Love To Live
2. God Has Not Given Up On You.
