Steven Furtick Sermon God Can’t Heal What You Hide: What are you hiding from? This is the central question of pastor furtick’s discourse today; it’s a penetrating question if you will really answer it in your heart. What are you hiding from?
Because no matter where Jacob turned or where Jacob went, what Jacob did, what he accomplished, there was always Esau. It’s the battle he was fighting when he was 9 months old. It was the battle he was fighting when he was 97. What is your Esau? What is the thing that no matter how many herds and cattle and goats and relationships you acquire, there is always an Esau? It’s your hidden issue. It is not the thing you mention to the people in your group. It is not the thing you talk about to people you just met. It is the thing beneath the thing beneath the thing. It is not your behaviour. It is not your symptom. It is your issue.
The Church is ineffective when preachers only address behaviours, because until you get to the issue that creates the behaviour, the behaviour will manifest because the issue wasn’t healed.
What are you hiding from? Your heart may be in hiding because of your fear of rejection. Your heart may be in hiding because of your fear of failure. It is understandable why Jacob had issues. It’s pretty plain in the text. Well, the Bible says there was a lot of favouritism going on in Isaac’s household.
Genesis 25:28 It says, “Isaac [his father], who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob.” There it is! No wonder the guy spent his whole life in hiding, because from a very early age, he discovered he didn’t have what his father wanted. He didn’t have the skills to be acceptable in the sight of the ones whose affirmation meant the most.
When that happens to you, you develop all kinds of devices to hide behind. Psychologically they call this “abandonment issues.” They say when you have abandonment issues. It can happen through a divorce. It can happen through abuse. It can happen through love withheld. It can happen through a circumstance that is so imbedded that you can’t even remember what it is. But when you have these abandonment issues, they tell us you tend toward two extremes.
One is attachment, and the other is avoidance. You attach (this is Jacob grabbing the heel of Esau), or you avoid (this is Jacob running from that same brother to whom he was trying to attach himself).
One thing to love about God’s Word is that it doesn’t just address our spirituality, it addresses our psychology.
In Jacob, pastor Steven Furtick sees an illustrated sermon about the psyche of someone who is running toward and chasing something they can never get, meanwhile running from something they don’t want to face.
Every person can relate to Jacob, hiding from an Esau in your life, hiding and hoping no one sees you for who you really are. You invent methods by which to be impressive, that’s what Jacob did. He makes a plan; he makes a plan to hide his issues.
When Jacob sent his gift ahead, he remained alone in the camp. To every lonely person today, you must know that the places of your greatest isolation will often become the places of your greatest revelation. Jacob had seen God in the form of an angel when he was with people, but he only saw God’s face when he was all alone, separated from his stuff.
He sent his gift ahead, but he himself spent the night in the camp. God dealt with him, and God pushed him around a little bit. God brought him to his breaking point, so much so that the Bible says when he got done and he left that camp, he was limping. He was limping, but he was blessed.
We must say to ourselves, “I am a child of God”, I will not fear, though the darkness beset me, though the Enemy tries to hold me down in fear, I shall come out of my fears.
God is so good, because if you will devote yourself to the issues within you, he’ll handle the issues around you. He’ll do it.