“And Jacob awoke from his sleep and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it. He was afraid and said, How to be feared and reverenced is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gateway to heaven!” (Gen 28:16-17)
Well if we believers are now the house of God, what does that mean for us? The church is not a building put together by human hands but it is collectively the people of God (Acts 7:48). That means through our fellowship with God, we should be the way to experience heaven on earth. As the writer of Acts put it, “Heaven [is] My throne and earth the footstool for My feet…” (Acts 7:49). Blessings descending from the Father onto His children. Do we live like we have an open gateway to heaven?
The story from Gen 28 amazes me everytime I read it. Also in this chapter Jacob was blessed by his father, with the same blessing that Abraham received. He was obedient to his father’s wishes to relocate from one city and journey to another to find a wife. He stopped in a certain place for the night to rest. Reclined his head on a stone to sleep and had an annointed dream of a ladder resting on the earth pointed up to heaven, with angels ascending and descending upon it. God Himself prophesied in this dream the blessings he would incur, were the same ones spoken to Abraham. Amazingly, despite the kind of deceitfulness Jacob displayed, in order to receive this initial blessing from his father, God still planned to bless him abundantly. When Jacob awoke from his sleep he had a revelation that God’s presence was so near to him. Therefore, he gained a referential fear of God. He was in awe of God’s presence and how real it was. He set up something to remind himself of his experience. And marched forward knowing that if God was for him all of his needs would be met. And in the next chapter Jacob journeyed forward vigorously and joyfully 400 miles until he came to his destination (Gen 28;12-22, Gen 29:1).
His experience with God motivated him to actively to reach for and obtain his calling. We as children of Abraham get to benefit from that same promise because we were grafted into the family of God, by accepting the payment Jesus made with His blood shed for us on the cross; for our sins and our whole well-being (Eph 3:6, Ps 103:3). Do we live like that’s true? If so, do we have lives that reflect that?
God wants us to have life and life abundantly (John 10:10). Are we experiencing and displaying that life to a lost and dying world? How important is this in leading people to Christ? (1 Cor 2-3).
I just want to challenge us all to really consider where we stand in our relationship with God. Are we only surface deep and externally devout, while missing the internal experience of our God?
My experience lately has been God is at a distance. The Bible does say the proud person God only knows from a distance (Ps 138:6). I sincerely hope that this is not my problem. I sense that I’m just in a season that will end as I go deeper with Him. I feel like the Lord wants to take me to new places with Him. This will mean I can’t use the same means I have in my past with which to reach Him.
Just as Jacob wrestled with the Angel of the Lord for a blessing, we should be wrestling with the Spirit to obtain this blessing of deeper fellowship with God and letting our lives display this (Gen 32:22-32). While we’re quarentined in our homes we have lots of time to spend with our God. Let’s make the most of our time people of God.
“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Heb 4:16).
Check out my book A Life Redone. In it is an encouraging word for you!
https://www.authorhouse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/464097-a-life-redone
A Life Redone 