Sermon Recap: Hilltops

Sermon Recap: Hilltops & Valleys
Week 3
Pastor Nate Levering

Destruction comes to the crooked. 

Good Evening, Church! I hope you are all doing well and enjoying the week God has given us. I'm watching the fog roll in over the subtle waves in chilly Mendocino and I AM LOVING EVERY MINUTE. This is my favorite place to find solace from the hot Tuolumne County summer, if even only for a few days.

On Sunday, Pastor Nate Levering led us through Week 3 of the Hilltops and Valleys series, speaking on the topic of INTEGRITY.

1. Integrity is doing the RIGHT thing even when it's the HARD thing. It's the will to do what is right even when we know it'll cost us in the short term. Do we care more about looking good, or being good?

2. The health of our relationships is contingent based on our INTEGRITY, not our INFALLIBILITY. It's not our ability to be perfect (or rather inability to be perfect) that creates healthy relationships. There is integrity that comes from being honest and transparent about our own innate imperfections.  

(Click here for the The Power of Moments book recommendation, Pastor Nate mentioned).

3. Our integrity may be personal but it's not private (for long). When we think about sexual or financial integrity, the pillars we lean on that are not structurally sound fall away.

4. We sacrifice our integrity for imagined outcomes. The only certain outcome when we brake our integrity, is that we brake the integrity. There is now a sin to confess.

5. Our appetites pose a constant threat to our integrity. What are you hungry for? What do you want right now? Can you ever have enough money? Is your desire to know all or be all or do all compromise the integrity of who God made us to be? What is posing a threat in our real lives?

To follow the bulletin points, Pastor Nate read through Genesis 25. Here we see the lineage of Abraham, leading to Isaac. Isaac then bore two sons, Jacob and Esau.

"Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife, because she was childless. The Lord answered his prayer, and his wife Rebekah became pregnant. The babies jostled each other within her, and she said, 'Why is this happening to me?' So she went to inquire of the Lord. The Lord said to her, 'Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.' When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb. The first to come out was red, and his whole body was like a hairy garment; so they named him Esau. After this, his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when Rebekah gave birth to them. The boys grew up, and Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was content to stay at home among the tents. Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob. Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country, famished. He said to Jacob, 'Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I’m famished!' (That is why he was also called Edom. Jacob replied, 'First sell me your birthright.' 'Look, I am about to die,' Esau said. 'What good is the birthright to me?' But Jacob said, 'Swear to me first.' So he swore an oath to him, selling his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank, and then got up and left. So Esau despised his birthright.
(Genesis 25: 21-34)

What we see here is a son, willing to give up his birthright. Why? Because he was hungry. Something so futile as food was enough to give up his long-term blessing. Like Esau, we question, why the waiting matters. The story goes on and we see this in ourselves, the willingness to give up in our own lack of self-awareness. Pastor Nate asked this, 'What is your bowl of stew?' What is convincing you that you need something now and what are you willing to give up for it? Will that then level your integrity?

Often times the issue of integrity comes unplanned. It just comes up. If you're anything like me, you've failed the test. What mattered most at many pivotal moments of my life was, what I thought, me. What I didn't quite understand was that it was lie I told myself, a lie I believed. I thought I cared more about me but my focus was shortsighted. I refused to see the long term affects that choices would have on my life, leaving me desperate for forgiveness and connection. This is the same with Esau. His shortsightedness led him to giving up his birthright, and what he didn't see was the desperation he'd come to for God's redemption. 

Pastor Nate ends with these notes:

1. Read Daniel, chapters 1-6.
2. Guard your integrity at all costs.
3. Go public in areas of compromise.

Be well, church! We love you and appreciate you and can't wait to see you again.