Good morning. I do invite you to turn in your Bibles to the book of Genesis again this morning to the 35th chapter this time. And our passage this morning will be just the first 15 verses, and we're going to be looking at a time in the life of Jacob and where The Spirit really uses him to show us some aspects of biblical, godly, gospel repentance, and I think shows us some things about repentance that often we don't think about and consider as being part of what God is after in our turning back to him. But let's pray first, and then I'll read the passage, and we'll move on from there. There was an outline being handed out. Like I mentioned last night, the fill-in-the-blanks will get less and less as we go on. The messages will get shorter as we go on. But that might be helpful in paying attention this morning as well, just being able to fill in some of those blanks to keep up with the message. But let's bow in prayer and ask God's blessing on our time. Our gracious God and Savior, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, We are here before you this morning anticipating that you might again feed us from your Word. We need you and your grace. Indeed, you are our life. And so we pray that this morning you might turn us back to you, the fount of all goodness and grace, And may we find our satisfaction in You. I do pray that You will use Your Word this morning, that You might use it to convict those in sin, further sanctify Your saints, draw us all to a better place and a closer communion with You. We ask these things in Christ's name. Amen. Let's give our careful hearing this morning to the reading of God's holy and infallible word. Genesis chapter 35, verses 1 through 15. God said to Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there. Make an altar there to the God who appeared to you when you fled from your brother Esau. So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, Put away your foreign gods that are among you, and purify yourselves, and change your garments. Then let us arise and go up to Bethel, so that I may make there an altar to the God who answers me in the day of my distress. and has been with me wherever I have gone." So they gave to Jacob all the foreign gods that they had and the rings that were in their ears. Jacob hid them under the terebinth tree that was near Shechem. And as they journeyed a tear from God fell upon the cities that were around them so that they did not pursue the sons of Jacob. And Jacob came to Luz, that is, Bethel. which is in the land of Canaan, he and all the people who were with him. And there he built an altar and called the place El Bethel, because there God had revealed himself to him when he fled from his brother. And Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was buried under an oak below Bethel. So he called its name Alon Bakuth. God appeared to Jacob again when he came from Padan-Aram and blessed him. And God said to him, Your name is Jacob. No longer shall your name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name. So he called his name Israel. And God said to him, I am God Almighty. Be fruitful and multiply. A nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall come from your own body. The land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you.' Then God went up from him in the place where he had spoken to him, and Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he had spoken with him, a pillar of stone. He poured out a drink offering on it and poured oil on it. So Jacob called the name of the place where God had spoken with him, Bethel." In a crowd this size, we are likely at very different places. Some of you You may be here this morning and you're yet to know Christ really as your Savior. You really don't yet have that intimate, true relationship with God. Some of you may be doing very well in your Christian walk. You're thriving. God's grace is being poured out upon you. You're doing rather well. Others of you might be, though, in a state of declension. You may be backslidden. You may be at a place, and I don't know if you noticed as we read, that your household is in shambles. Maybe sin has so caused havoc in your home that you wonder if you'll ever be right again. Maybe your kids are defecting. Maybe you as children, you're wondering, is the faith really for me? Maybe you're at a place where there's even something as awful as false worship going on underneath your own roof. And yet, something keeps bringing you back. I mean, you have been very inconsistent in your life. You have faltered and you've stumbled along, but for some reason, something keeps drawing you back to the church. Something keeps bringing you back to the faith. Something keeps drawing you back to God. And so maybe you've shown up this morning and you live in this tension because you know God's grace in Christ. You've had a taste of that. But you also feel like you have blown it so badly that you wonder if there really is any hope for you. I mean, Can you ever really fully come back? Or, because of your sin, is it just too late? I mean, can God still work with you? Can He still redeem your family? We're going to jump into the life of Jacob at arguably the absolute lowest point of his life. We're not going to take the time to entirely reconstruct and do a full review of his life, but suffice it to say that up until this point in his life, we could really characterize it with maybe just four words. Jacob's life is all about deception, compromise, passivity, and polygamy. In fact, I don't know if you've noticed where we are in Genesis and what the previous chapter was. If we look back at chapter 34 for a minute, you've got to see that our passage here flows right out of one of the most disastrous chapters in his overall awful life. I won't go into graphic details, but something absolutely horrific has happened to one of his daughters, and his sons went on a rampage, a violent rampage, and have committed mass murder. That's where we pick up in the life of Jacob. his family in utter pain. And that's why it is absolutely remarkable. It's nothing short of entirely shocking to read the very first word the very first verse, I should say, of our chapter, chapter 35. Notice how the chapter begins. And again, read this, hear this in light of what just happened in chapter 34 with the disaster at Shechem. We read here, God said to Jacob, God said to Jacob, Arise, Go to Bethel and dwell there. Make an altar there to the God who appeared to you when you fled from your brother Esau." You see, Jacob was human just like you and me, and he must have thought at this point in his life that he had sent away all of God's grace, that he had sent himself out of favor with God. He must have thought that he had so messed up his life and his family's life that there was absolutely no way that he could ever again have a right relationship with God. And here, though, what we see in the very first verse of this chapter is as it always actually must be with every one of us. What we see is God. It is God who comes to Jacob. And it is God who rekindles the relationship with Jacob again. A quote from Dr. Ian Duguid, I think, really beautifully states this. He says, the first step, the first step in spiritual renewal, as it is in spiritual rebirth, always comes from God. Left alone to ourselves, our hearts are as cold as ice toward God. We rapidly slide into compromise and embrace the attractions of false goals and idols. And here it is again, but God. But God, our God, will not abandon those whom he has chosen, those with whom he has made a covenant. And so God comes to us just as he came to Jacob, and he calls us back to him to renew our walk with him. You see, as we begin to investigate this passage this morning briefly, this passage makes abundantly clear one very important thing, and that is that once God has entered into a relationship with you, once God has invaded your life And once God has made promises to you in Christ, he never turns his back on you and he will never ever leave you or forsake you. And that is not because of who you are. It is because of who he is. It is not because you are great and he enjoys having you on his team. It is because He is loving and He is gracious and He is kind. In fact, it is precisely as Paul says in Romans 2, 4, God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance. That's why He pours out His grace upon you. Maybe that's why you're sitting here this morning. And that is really what we see next here in verses 2 through 4. And so I'd like you to look there again into the passage. In verses 2 through 4 we read, so Jacob, this is after God, initiates the relationship again with him. So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, put away the foreign gods that are among you and purify yourselves and change your garments. Then let us arise and go to Bethel so that I may make there an altar to the God who answers me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone." So they gave to Jacob all the foreign gods that he had and the rings that were in their ears. Jacob hid them under the terebinth tree that was near Shechem. You see, what we're seeing in the life of Jacob here is, and this is that first blank if you're filling it in, this is the right response, or the right reaction, let's say, of repentance. The right reaction of repentance. Grace should never, grace should never produce further sin in our lives. God does not show us his grace to give us a license to sin. God ultimately shows us his grace to bring us out of our sin. Gospel grace, and here's the next fill-in, gospel grace should always produce repentance in our lives, just as we see here with Jacob and his family. And what we see here is a picture. This is a picture of true gospel repentance And I want us to see what gospel repentance involves. Notice that it includes both a negative aspect and a positive aspect. There's negative actions that go with repentance and there's positive actions that accompany it as well. That is, when God meets us and when God convicts us Here's the thing, if it's real repentance, if it's really an encounter with God and His grace, then we cannot, we simply cannot remain the same as we were before. An encounter with the living God is life-altering. And if that encounter, if we claim to have had an encounter, and that doesn't lead to change in our lives, then we have not responded rightly to His grace. And we see the change that the Word of God affects in Jacob's life in these negative and positive actions that follow here. And I'm just going to name those off for you if you're filling those in. I want us to see negatively, first of all, and we see it there in verse 2. Put away the foreign gods that are among you, purify yourselves, and change your garments. So there's three things there. Put away your idols, purify yourself, and put off your old garments. That is, Jacob and his family had to give something up. They had to give things up. Namely, things that they had come to love and that they had come to worship, either instead of or alongside of God. men and women and young people, make no mistake about it, your repentance is not biblical. It is not true biblical repentance unless it has this part with it. And what we see here in the Old Testament and what we're seeing in the life of Jacob is something that's going to be repeated in very clear in very straightforward words in the New Testament. Remember, it's James who writes in his letters, cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you in fact the the very terminology that we find in Genesis chapter 35 Paul picks up in his writings concerning putting off and putting on the whole aspect of the life of repentance and what goes on as we become more like Christ in in Paul uses this garment terminology. Having been cleansed, put away those filthy garments. Ephesians chapter 4 verse 22. And you kids can pick up and understand that analogy very clearly. Think of the last time you were absolutely filthy. Maybe you played in the mud or you slid down a hill in the mud or you you were in a soccer game or something wherein you were just absolutely sweaty and disgusting and your clothing is as gross it stinks your mom is telling you you stink and you come in and you take those clothes off and you shower and you get clean and Wouldn't it be an absolutely foolish thing? It would be entirely counterproductive to then go and get your clothes that you just took off and put them back on. That's the picture. That's what Paul is saying. Put away these filthy garments. You've been cleansed. Why in the world, after showering, would you put back on those filthy clothes? You're going to stink again. You're going to be defiled again. You see, you can't keep your sin. You can't keep your idols. And hear me clear, you cannot keep your sin. You cannot keep your idols and be right with God. And if you're trying to walk that line and have one foot keeping and coddling your sin, and yet you want to have a relationship with God. That is not going to work. You can't keep your sin and be right with God. The two cannot coexist, and that is why Jacob calls his family here to put off their current way of living. They have to repent. They must turn around in their behavior. They must change their thinking because that's what repentance actually is. They have to, and there's these graphic pictures here, they have to bury those old habits. You have to bury those old habits, those old thoughts, your sin. But notice here, repentance is not complete with merely the negative. It also must include the positive of putting on new practices. You all know this in your life. If you've tried to turn away from certain sins in your life, you will soon go back to those sins if you don't put on something new in that place. Vacuums don't last long in our lives. Something always fills them very quickly. And so repentance must always include thinking new thoughts and it always issues forth in walking in new obedience. And so Jacob, notice here in verse 3, he not only calls his family to put those defiling things away, but in verse 3 we read him say, Then let us arise and go up to Bethel, so that I may make there an altar to the God who answers me in the day of my distress, and has been with me wherever I have gone." And so, if you're filling in those next series of blanks, here's the positive. It's get up, and then I'll be provocative here, but I'll explain it. Get up, go to church, and glorify God. Get up, go to Bethel, and glorify God. That is to say, not only did they have to stop doing certain things, they also had to start doing certain things. And therefore, Jacob calls them into action. He's telling them, okay, we need to put these things off, but we need to go do these certain things. And we see here then something very important about repentance that we often don't think about in the Christian life. And that is repentance does not leave us sulking in the mire of our sins or beating ourselves in our shame. Jacob's call is essentially to get up and begin going back to church. In fact, That's what Beth-El means. You go to the house of God and you glorify God in worship. And this is, I think, an ever-relevant call that we need to hear today because this is teaching us something about repentance and the Christian life that we normally do not gravitate towards, nor do we naturally think in these ways. You see, when the world thinks, and when we tend to think about repentance, but think about how the world thinks about repentance or trying to change its behavior. When the world thinks about changing behavior and tries to engage in it, it actually usually falls into something more akin to what we call penance rather than repentance. And the biblical call upon us is not penance. It is repentance. That is, when the world thinks about changing behavior or even sometimes and very often in the church, we don't think first and foremost about the worship of God as the fruit, the primary fruit of true repentance. Normally people think about their sin in terms of an addiction or a habit that they need to break. And so we focus negatively on stopping that thing that we're doing. But the Word of God teaches us that as soon as He graciously invades our lives and saves us from our sin and calls us to walk with Him, God Himself prioritizes and calls us to begin engaging positively in worshiping Him. Think about, and I have just the the commandments there in your outline. Think about God's priorities when he delivered his people out of slavery in Egypt. Again, as we looked at last night, this was the great Old Testament salvation event. When God brought his people out of bondage and slavery, what were his priorities with his people? Look again, I have there on the second part of your outline, and God spoke all these, this is just a summary working through these 11 verses, and God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. And then listen to what he calls for then, the first things. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. What are all those commands primarily dealing with? They're primarily dealing with worship. God is after right worship. God's number one concern as he saves his people is that they get rid of idolatry and they begin worshiping him rightly. It has always been that way, and that is his call upon you this morning. He's not calling you to flog yourself. He is calling you to forget yourself and to come and worship Him. Which then leads us then to secondly this morning consider worship. This brings us to consider the right response of worship that we see here in Jacob. Notice Jacob buries the idols and the jewelry involved in pagan worship there by Shechem. And he leads his family back to Bethel. And as Jacob begins to walk in obedience, he very tangibly begins to experience the blessing and protection of God upon him. And we find here, as the narrative goes on, just such a great contrast with what we saw in the former episode. In the last words, really, of the previous chapter were Jacob crying out, all despondent and self-absorbed, saying in verse 30 of chapter 34, me and my household will be destroyed. This was sort of the outcome of all his compromise and his sin, just a fear of, me and my household will be destroyed. But now we see him walking and virtually saying, me and my household will serve the Lord. He actively leads his family back to church, we might say. God watches over them. He brings terror upon the cities that are around them until they arrive at Bethel. And immediately upon getting back, Jacob builds an altar for worship because this is where God had revealed himself to him. Jacob had told his family that This is what they were going to do because as he says there in verse 3, notice, this is the God who answers me. This is the one who has loved me and who has always been with me. This is why we're going to go back. This is why we're going to begin to worship him again. In other words, God's grace should lead us This was God invading his life, rekindling the relationship with him. God's grace should lead us to repentance that then bears the glorious fruit of giving right worship to God. We also see this in verses 9 through 15, if you just kind of glance there, where we read that God appears to Jacob again. He comes and appears to him again. He blesses him. And then he reminds him of who he really is. Do you see that there? You are Israel. You are not Jacob. And God reaffirms what we see as the passage continues, as God reaffirms the full gamut of the promises of the covenant of grace to him. And again, Jacob responds again by rightly worshiping. He sets up a pillar and he pours out a drink offering and oil. So let me ask you as we see this going on in front of us. You see God invade Jacob's life again with grace. We see Jacob repent. We see his repentance bear the fruit of coming back to worship. And in worship, he is reminded again of who he really is. That he is Israel. He is not Jacob. Let me ask you then, Do you actually worship? And I'm not asking you if you go to church. I'm not asking if you attend somewhere on Sundays. I'm asking you if what we see here in the life of Jacob, is that actually a pattern in your life. Is this ancient patriarch who lived with such little light, is this what we would see in your life? Worship is always to be our response to His grace, or, this is another fill-in, repentance should always result in worship. I'm being redundant here because I'm wanting the point to be very clear and us not to miss this. Is that why you go to church? Worship should always be the result of repentance. where repentance should always lead us to worship. And is that why you go to church? Is it a response? Is your coming to worship a response to His grace? There are so many wrong reasons to go to church. But what we are seeing here in Jacob's life is the right reason. Each time the Lord engages him, each time the Lord shows him his kindness, each time the Lord rescues him from his sin, Each time the Lord reiterates his promises to him, each time the Lord pours out his grace upon him, what we see in the life of Jacob, even though he was a massive failure, very often, and recorded for us are desperate times of backsliding. What we see every time God invades this man's life is he responds by returning to worship God. And that is the pattern that you are called to as well. Now, hear me right, I said there's many wrong reasons to go to church, but you should be coming to church. And frankly, we'll take it no matter what your reason is. You should be there. But you should not be coming to church primarily. to have a friend network. And I'm gonna challenge you young people in this regard. It is so wonderful to have friends in the church and that is one of the blessings that comes with being part of the covenant community. That God sometimes blesses you with your best friends right there in the church. And it is a joy to see them week in and week out. But the primary reason for coming to church and the primary reason for worshiping God, coming to worship, is not to have a friend network, or because your parents make you come, or because you like to sing and there's good singing at your church, or because It's a good activity, you fathers or you parents. It's a good activity to have your families involved with. They should have a little bit of religion in their life. But hear me and hear the emphasis. Rather, you, and I'm talking to you, whoever you are hearing my voice, you are to come because you know the grace of God in your life. And you are compelled then to offer to Him a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for what He has done for you. And you come, and you come week after week, and it is because you long to hear again of the glories of His grace to you in Christ. You long to be reminded again of who you really are in His grace. Which brings us to finally see here our third point, final point, the reminder of gospel grace. I want to go back to and kind of focus on verses 9 and 10 again for a moment because we see there that God again reminds Jacob of his new name. You are Israel. No longer will you be called Jacob. You are Israel. And folks, this is nothing other than God meeting Jacob where he is at And in this statement, he is reiterating his grace to Jacob. As we've noted, Jacob must have been paralyzed and debilitated by the havoc that his compromises had wreaked in his own life and that of his family. I mean, Jacob is a man and I, The sin sometimes and the passivity, the compromises from a father or from a parent in a home. They can cause so much pain and sorrow in the life of a family. If you have the Spirit of God within you, you feel that pain desperately. It is often paralyzing. You don't want to do anything. You often just want to die. Because you think, this is it. This is it. I can never, I can never again be right with God. And if you've ever sinned terribly, then you know the pain and the regret of having caused that irreparable damage to others and to yourself. And therefore, you know just how important this new name reiteration is. You see, Jacob had simply sinned too much to be able to go on walking in faith without regularly being reminded of who he really was in God's grace. And thus, his worship led to his hearing. His worship led to his hearing God's reminder again of his new identity. And the principle here is this. It is in worship that we are brought back to the gospel. It is in worship that we are brought back to the gospel. This is why Jesus gave us the Lord's Supper, and he said that as often as we do this, that we are to do this in remembrance of him. In other words, you are not to look primarily at yourself and your sin But you are called to look to Christ and His perfection, and worship is a gift, ultimately, that God gives us to get us to look outside of ourselves and to look upon Him and His glory and His grace. in the face of Jesus Christ. You see, you need, I don't care who you are, I don't care what your position is, I don't care how long you have walked with the Lord, you need to hear the gospel preached to you and you need to be reminded that you are not, you are not what the world says you are. You are not what your flesh says you are. And you are not what the devil continues to whisper in your ear and tell you that you are. But rather, you need to hear again that you are a child of God. You are a blood-bought saint. You are a citizen of heaven. Your life is hidden in Christ now, and you need to hear that over and over and over again. And when we hear these glorious truths, like we see here with Jacob hearing again his new name, God comes to him and God says to him, you are no longer Jacob. You are Israel. You are a prince with me. It's to lead us then to crave and desire. I want to keep on worshiping. I want to live in that reality. That's why we say it's a little slice of heaven. When we come to worship, it's to creating us again. Can this be true? I mean, I know myself. I know my heart. And yet I come to worship and I hear things about me that I can't see. I have to take it by faith that this is true of me. And oh, if I could live there forever, in a reality that seems so different than what I've lived in and where I feel myself to be and what the world tells me I am and what the devil tells me I am. Folks, that's heaven. Living there forever under that new identity, looking out of myself to my Savior and worshiping Him forever. That's this blessed pattern that is to grip our lives. I have there in your outline, I'm calling it here, the glorious cycle of the life of faith. The gospel, that's the first thing to fill in. Or you could put grace there. Grace is to produce repentance. God's kindness leads us to repentance. But repentance is to always lead to worship. It's supposed to bear the fruit of right worship. And worship is to always bring us back to God's grace or the gospel. which then leads us to repentance, which then leads us to worship, which then leads us back to Christ and His grace, which leads us to repent. And you get the pattern. You get the glorious cycle of the life of faith. But it's important to say a final thing here as we're concluding this morning. This account of Jacob and his family is not before us here merely to teach us a very neat story of one of our heroes of the faith. Nor is it before us this morning so that we might just get our theology right. God has put this before You this morning, and you are hearing these words this morning because His desire is to rekindle that relationship with you and move you, move you actually to action. Don't just be a hearer of the Word, but be a doer. You must get into, you, And I speak to every one of you. Again, I have no concern of who you are, of what position you hold in the church, of how young you are, how backslidden you might be. You must get into this glorious cycle of the life of faith. That is to say, if you're here and you're hearing this this morning, God is calling you to repentance. This isn't a message for somebody else. It is for you. He's calling you to repentance this morning. He's engaging you even now. It's time for you to put away your idols to purify yourself and to put off the garments that have defiled you, those compromises with the world. God is graciously calling you to find your satisfaction and your joy in Him because only He can satisfy you. And therefore, the call is ultimately to get up. Get out. Stand up from that mire that you're in. Get up. Go back to Bethel and worship Him rightly. You see, God has recorded the life of Jacob for you so that you can see that ultimately where sin abounds, grace much more abounds. He's showing you this so that you will know that you are not too far gone. In fact, you're here today. He's drawn you here. He has ordained for you to be here. He's engaging you even now. He's calling you back to himself. And therefore, do not harden your heart against him. Don't put him off for a later time. Don't put him off for after camp. Today is the day of salvation. Repent. Worship. So that you can remember again your new name in Christ. Let's bow in prayer together. Father, we thank you again that you are who you are. A God who abounds in mercy and in love and in grace. You are the comfort that every soul needs. And you have grace sufficient for every sinner. And so draw us back to you again this morning. May we live in that name that has been placed upon us in our baptisms. That we gave up our name to take on your name, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. O Lord, may that become the all-encompassing reality and identity of our lives. That we are Israel. We are no longer Jacob. Because you have loved us, you have entered into relationship with us, and you will never leave us or forsake us. We do marvel at these things, they humble us. But Lord, draw us near and make us truly do heart engagement with you today. We pray as we give thanks for the great name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.