Every great call implies a deformation

I want to invite you to analyze with me a passage of scripture, which is found in the first passage of the Bible, obviously Genesis, we are going to go first to chapter 25, you will remember that I told you the last time two Sundays ago that I was going to be talking about of two characters that the scripture shows us, which are like a graphic illustration of the principles that we have been dealing with in recent weeks, principles of definition, principles of focus, principles of consecration, principles of surrender, principles of concentrating on our identity, as children, servants of God, people who have a very specific identity, a very specific calling, people that God has called to be a separate people, a people set apart from the world around us and those principles of the world that contradict the principles of the Kingdom of God and also separated for the Lord to be useful to the Lord, to be servants who advance the purposes of the Kingdom of God.

We have been discussing all these things in different ways, and we have said that the man of God, the woman of God, is a man who has to live from his identity in light of his calling, in light of the role to which which has been called We are, supposedly, possessed by an identity that God has given us, by a series of principles that define our lives and that force us to live our lives in a different way than the world, the difference is going to be unpleasant, sometimes that The difference is going to be beautiful, and beautiful, a reason for great joy, many times it will be a reason for persecution and suffering, for feeling separate and different from others, but that is destiny, the condition of a son, a daughter of God, we are a special people, we are a separate people.

The Bible says that we are a people of kings and priests, the Bible says that we have been brought out of darkness into the light so that we may announce the virtues of the one who called us from darkness to light. That is to say that all these Sundays we have been talking about it in one way or another, not that, when we talk about holiness, when we talk about consecration, when we talk about sanctification, we are being told that we have been called to have an attitude of complete concentration to a style of life, and as we also said that this style of life is not only to stop doing things, it is not only to avoid committing those grosser and grosser, more obvious sins, but rather it is a matter of total dedication of our mind, our emotions, the principles by which we live, our intellects, the things we have fun with, the way we talk, treat others, manage our money, choose our professions, manage our marriages , our careers, is something that impacts and penetrates all dimensions of the life of the son, of the daughter of God, it is an identity that we have been sealed like a cattle, an animal is sealed with a hot iron entity and is given the seal of its owner.

And that is what God devised in fact with circumcision, circumcision was a way of physically marking, literally, a human being, who was always going to carry that mark, of his total belonging to the God who created him, is what that we also do with the tithe, it is a mark, it is a sign that everything we have and everything we are belongs to the Lord, and if we limit it only to an external act then it lacks meaning because behind that act is a surrender Anyway, by the way I was watching the video that you sent of Daniel Cantalamesa, a preacher, a Catholic priest, and he talks about the Eucharist, the wafer, the Lord's Supper that we call, and he talks, that in fact he is a Catholic man , Pentecostal, and he is a great Catholic preacher, he talks about the meaning of the Eucharist and talks about how when the priest celebrates that symbol, when he says, for example, this is my body, not only is Jesus Christ saying it, but he is saying it the priest and the congregation is also saying it when it says amen, we are also giving our body to be sacrificed, to be given in service to others.

And what becomes clear is that all these symbols of the Christian life speak about the total consecration of our lives. If we limit them to their most superficial and most obvious, most accessible manifestation, we are impoverishing it tremendously. All these symbols, circumcision, baptism, Holy Communion, all these things speak about the consecration and total surrender of a human being to a God who does not behave with less than the total surrender of everything we have and everything we we are, amen? So that is the call of God at this time to our congregation to my life, to yours, is that we have to have consecrated lives.

What's more, I'm going to live this, we have to live deformed lives and I'm going to explain that term that may sound scandalous. We have to lead lives deformed by the call that God has given us, and we are talking about these two people, Samson and Esau, because they are two characters who, despite having been called, despite having a destiny that marked them even before that they were born into the world, into the light, from their mother's womb, and even before they were conceived, they had a call, they had an identity, God had a very special purpose with them. God had determined that their life should go in a certain direction and that they should lead a certain lifestyle, and that their lofty calling and the tremendous privileges that that calling entailed, however, also implied a sacrifice, implied a lifestyle, implied a way of living, implied a deformation, they were not ordinary people.

So the thing with Esau and Samson is that tragedy that is in them, they are both tragic beings, because on the one hand they have a call, God wants to do something in their lives, God has separated them, but they did not live up to the called, they were not willing to pay the price of the call, they were not willing to accept the distortions that accompanied the call. I believe that the tragic thing about Samson and Esau is that they wanted to live a normal life, look how ironic this is, they wanted to be normal, when God had destined them to be abnormal, in the most exalted form of that concept of abnormality, they were atypical beings, and you know that, that you and I in a sublime sense of the Word, have to accept the fact that God calls us to an abnormal life.

When you go through the door of the Gospel, you have to surrender your hopes of living an ordinary life, a normal life. The life to which God calls you is a life of great glory, communication with the heavenly Father, the Creator of the Universe, compenetration with the sublime principles of the Gospel, being able to think and compute in exalted terms than most human beings. It is not given to them to be able to do it, experience great things from God, but at the same time also live with that weight, with that agony that God has called you to leave a number of things behind, I am not going to say that they are allows you to live, because in a sense you are living an illegal life, but it is so, human beings allow themselves a number of pleasures, tastes, enjoyments, freedoms that we, the children of God, cannot allow ourselves, and the world will look at us as abnormal beings .

I imagine that they looked down on Samson, a little boy of twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, and they accused him of being a little woman, perhaps because he had long hair, but it was a sign of a sublime and special identity, and it seems that Samson with time wanted to be with God and with the devil, he wanted to live a life of exceptional privilege with a strength that God had given him for liberation as we have been endowed with certain gifts for the liberation of humanity in which we live, but he also wanted to live in sexual pleasure, marrying women and having probably what we are implied in the life of Samson is that he was a sensual man, he allowed himself certain privileges of a sensual life that were simply not for him, and certain carelessness such as when he ate from that honeycomb that he was inside the body of that lion that he had killed, but that already made him unclean according to the laws of his Nazarite, he was a Nazarite, he was a man reserved exclusively for God, with certain habits and c certain rites that he had to keep so that the anointing of God that was in him could work properly.

When Samson wanted to live a lifestyle, you see because that's one of the things you see in Samson, there was a lifestyle, it's not that Samson made a little mistake once, or that he sinned once and that's it, no, here the Bible says that there was a style of life that Samson led, which finally led to his destruction, and it is what happens many times when we live in an illegitimate way according to the call that God has given us, when that style of life Life sooner or later leads us to destruction, because there are enemy beings, as there were in the life of Samson, these Philistines, these enemy beings of the people of Israel, who are going to want to neutralize the power that is in it, that is why there are We have to live in a certain way, with a certain vigilance, with a certain sense of continual alertness, so that the gift of God can find a suitable vessel through which to function.

So Esau is similar, they are very long passages, the life of Esau, that drama in particular, is recorded above all in Genesis chapter 25, and in Genesis 27, verses from 1 to 40, I am not necessarily going to read it, and if If you want to review it, I invite you to do so, chapter 25:19 to 34 and 27: from 1 to 40, almost all of that chapter, right?, chapter 27, Genesis. But I am going to tell it because many of you already know the story, this is something else, we cannot understand Esau's life well if we do not equally understand Jacob's life, his brother, Jacob and Esau are like a pair of stars that work one with respect to the other, one is a dark star and the other is a luminous and transparent star, although Jacob is also very interesting, right?

Jacob is a supplanter, Jacob is a schemer, Jacob is a tremendously cunning and scheming guy, and Esau is kind of a dark guy, from his hair, from the hair that covers his forearm and his beard, and his heavy hunting build, and from an athlete, and from a weight lifter, to Jacob who is a rather feminine, delicate, thin type, and I think these two characters represent two elements of the human personality, what Carl Young would call two archetypes of human life , this is interesting, if we had time we could go into it much more, Jacob and Esau represent the masculine element, and the feminine element to a certain extent, and there is a spirituality that psychologists and psychiatrists of religion, Carl Young and others have Given that there is an interesting, mysterious connection between the masculine, the feminine and the spiritual, and the material, I am not going to burden you too much with these types of considerations.

But it's interesting, who does Jacob identify with the most? With his mother, his mother identifies with Jacob, with whom does Esau identify? With his father, Esau is a hairy guy, he has a lot of testosterone, bearded, hunter , man of the earth, man, he likes food, when he is hungry, it becomes impossible, because he has a strong appetite, like Samson too, he represents the masculine element, is he the man with hair on his chest, literally in this case, is he? right?, and Jacob is the delicate little boy who was always by mom's side, who lives in tents, is a sheep herder, and is interesting, brothers, that's why Jacob is more conniving, that part is more feminine, excuse me, and here I am not glorifying either one or the other, because man, on the other hand, is clumsy, the masculine element, the masculine psyche is clumsy, the masculine psyche is square, let's go back to where we came from, see things in a straight line.

The female psyche is a more calculating psyche, it meanders more, zigzags more to get to the point, her mind thinks more and calculates more, that is why Esau with his masculine mind cannot compute or combine the world of the Spirit with the same complexity. While Jacob, who has a more feminine personality, can come into contact with the world of the Spirit. That is why Esau, who works more in terms of hunting, sports, war, when he is told about the primogeniture, he says: primogeniture, what is that? What I want now is to eat a good stilt with steaming white rice , and that is what I need, he does not understand the sublime meaning of the spiritual. Like many men.

Why is it that it will be so difficult for some men? Many times to enter into the things of God with the same passion as women, that is in all parts of the world, because it is that men think, no, that thing about being consecrated for God is for women and old women, right? , and that is what we sometimes teach little boys, no, men do not cry, men do not feel deep feelings, men do not love, they are not expressive, that is for women, and we castrate them and limit them , then these men when they enter the ways of the Lord are not capable of seeing the things of the Spirit with the same passion, the same complexity, because for that a more feminine mentality is needed. I believe that every man should have a feminine element within him and a woman a masculine element.

And we have to develop both dimensions in our being to be truly complete. And for me one of the most fascinating dimensions of these psychological types of Esau and Jacob is that aspect of the masculine and the feminine, and why it is so important that we men also develop that capacity to feel and think, and compute life. spiritual, in a very deep way as women do. I believe that many times the brokenness of women, excuse me for going into this, but it is fascinating, through motherhood, giving birth, the deformation of her body, the weakness of her body through motherhood, that The suffering of the woman since she was a child makes her more sensitive to certain dimensions of the life of the Spirit, her certain bodily weakness makes her more penetrable to the subtle waves of the Spirit.

Man, with his apparent physical strength, is often not capable of being in tune with these dimensions of the Spirit, and then many times God wants to speak to us and does not find an antenna sufficiently developed to receive the emanations that come from Him, and then a man so rough was Esau, he had a spiritual call that required him to develop his spiritual antennae, his spiritual ability, Esau's call required times of meditation, times with God, times in the darkness of the field looking at the stars like Jacob, where God can speak to him, where he can then have dreams, who has dreams? Jacob, the feminine.

Esau did not nurture his spiritual capacity, even though he had a sublime calling, the spiritual birthright of the world ran through him, by birth and by right he had to be the legal, spiritual, judicial firstborn, that was his calling, that it was his right, that was his privilege, but that privilege implied that Esau had to live a lifestyle that would enable him to administer and manage, and be a good steward of that lofty calling that he had received. However, Esau spends his entire life in the field, hunting animals, developing his body, pursuing merely physical, material things, instead of setting aside time as well, because his calling was a priestly calling, and that calling forced him to seek and cultivate that dimension of his being, and he did not do so.

Jacob ironically did not have the right, he did not have the call, however we see him, and perhaps without him realizing it, because it is what happens is that the call of God endows us, if we follow it the endowment it is there secretly, the more we practice it, the more it develops. But Jacob since he was a child, I don't know if by design or by inertia, I'm going to tell you why, his very DNA, his very subconscious was focused on only one thing and that was to achieve that birthright, I think Jacob instinctively pursues a lifestyle that It enabled him to think in terms of the birthright, and that meant a more meditative, sedentary lifestyle that cultivated more of the feminine aspect of his personality.

For example, if you want to be used, used by God, if you want to enter into great intimacy, may God speak to you, may God give you dreams, may God put impressions on your being, may God direct you in powerful and subtle ways, you You have to take time to commune with the Word of God, you have to take time to read the Bible, you have to take time to pray, you have to take time to learn to be silent, turn off the radio, television, lower the blinds so that the sound of traffic can be heard as little as possible and concentrate on what is inside you, learn to be comfortable with your interior, you have to cultivate moments of separation, you have to look for those environments where the worship of God within you is fed and developed, why? Because you have that call, you are an athlete of faith, and you cannot be creating fat because that fat is going to make the race of faith difficult for you.

You have to be training, you have to be exempting yourself from certain things, you have to be like the Olympic athlete, live for only one thing: the call that God has placed in your life. In other words, the call implies a lifestyle, and that lifestyle has to be twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all your life. I ask you, where are your priorities? And I ask myself where are my priorities, you have a priestly calling, I have a priestly calling, you are living like a priestess, you are living like a priest, are you involved in that abnormality to which God has called you.

You know that in the Bible the priests did not live a normal life, everyone in Israel could inherit, everyone had a piece of land that they inherited, do you know who were the only ones in all of Israel who did not have the right to a land, to a inheritance?, the priests, the Levites, God told them I am your inheritance. While the others were out there cultivating their land and having their little piece of land they were serving the Lord and had to live on tithes and things from the temple. That is why I see such a great contradiction today, many pastors and evangelists, and people who want the gift and power of the priesthood, the call of God, but also want to live with all the privileges of the CEO of a company, Well, since they earn 100, 250,000 dollars, I can also earn the same.

The inheritance of the priests is very different from the inheritance. If we want to be biblical, we have to be biblical in everything, right? But people are very selective about what is biblical. God spoke to me this morning as I was meditating more on this, about deformation, look, every great call implies as I was saying a deformation, and I am assuming that you are quite familiar with the story of Jacob and Esau that is why I have not gone into it. this, but I am perhaps assuming too much because perhaps not all of you have all the knowledge, I encourage you brothers, familiarize yourself with the great characters of Scripture.

One of the deformations of the children of God is that we have to know the Bible by heart, from the inside out and from the outside in, because as children of God that is one of those called, because when you know the Bible, when you permeate yourself with it continuously, the thought patterns of the Scripture configure your own way of thinking and computing life, it is an interesting process, to the extent that you look at the Scripture, the Scripture configures you inside, in the As you become familiar with Scripture, Scripture computes life and conjugates it, your brain reconfigures itself and you configure life or conjugate it in the same way that Scripture does.

So every great call and every dedication to a call implies a deformation, and we avoid the word deformation, because nobody wants to be deformed, but look at the following. The great tennis players, for example, a person who has played tennis all his life, knows one thing that develops artificially is the forearm with which he handles the racket, because by dint of doing this continuously it is more developed, larger than the other parts of your body. Basketball players are deformed in a sense, they measure 6 feet, great runners, long-distance runners for example, are very skinny because their bodies need to be small in order to consume less energy, if they are very large they cannot run long distances.

Short-distance runners who require greater speed have well-developed thighs because they need the explosive power of running quickly, and so their legs, especially the thighs, are artificially developed, and so on. All artists have their distortions, weightlifters, scholars have their distortions, there is a term in fact, professional distortion, in scholarship which means that when one gets used to thinking theologically or literaryly let's say it that way, his mind kind of it gets deformed and one kind of sees life according to the approach one has. The great scholars from great universities, Hardvare and that guy you see, that distortion they have, is the ability to concentrate on one thing.

On the plane from Spain I saw the film by the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerman, and you see the distortion, the ability of these people to see things technologically, geeks are famous for their concentration on programming and all this, everything in life my brothers, it implies, if you want to achieve something great in the ways of the Lord, you have to be willing to accept a degree of deformation in your life, what I mean by this is that look: all appetite for normality in life Christianity is an aberration, it is a violation of the principles of the Kingdom. The man, the woman of God who wants to be normal is putting himself in an inherent contradiction, his machine is starting to start and in reverse and it is going to destroy itself.

As a Christian you have to accept the fact that you have been called to live focused, concentrated on one thing, and if you do not live like this, you are preparing yourself for disaster, sooner or later, the inconsistency of your experience is going to take you to some kind of failure or failure, because you are not like the Guatemalans as they say, neither chicha nor lemonade, you are neither one thing nor the other, you have the devil against you and the Lord completely, God hates lukewarmness. That is why Laodicea tells the Church, if you were cold or hot I could deal with you but since you are neither cold nor hot and you are lukewarm I will vomit you out of my mouth. Esau was a lukewarm man, Samson was a lukewarm man, the Gospel is full of lukewarm people, religious people, people who believe that the Gospel is coming to church for a couple of grudgingly given hours, and then living life in a way Normal until next Sunday, if that.

What it does is that it prepares us for disaster, the Christian by definition is an abnormal being, focused on a single thing as Esau should have lived, but Esau did not live a lifestyle that would prepare him for the moment of trial, that's something else. Many people say they know that, don't talk to me about a lot of consecration, a lot of holiness, because for that we pay the Pastor, what I want is simply to punch out my card and go to heaven when I die, the rest is all that stuff and so much apparatus that I leave to the professionals of religion. But you know what happens, you can live like this, and they will go to heaven, because salvation is above all through faith in Christ, and if faith is placed in Jesus they will go to heaven, but they will suffer loss in the long run , they will suffer it in the end because there will be certain rewards that they will not have.

And I tell you my brother, there is so much ambiguity in the Scriptures about a life lived lukewarmly that I would not risk it because I myself am not completely sure that a life lived like this with neglect to God, we have made a Gospel called Gracias Baratas, and it is one of the terrible afflictions of the Church in our time, we have encouraged people to believe that since they live by grace, then they can allow themselves all kinds of luxuries, all kinds of liberties because God is a merciful God and He understands , and I fear that we are setting people up for failure and loss, and who knows if it will end up like the unfaithful servant, because there is a lot of ambiguity in the Bible about that.

When we waste our gifts, when we don't live up to the call, hey, you have to be careful too, but let's say yes, you can just be saved with a mediocre attitude, but you know what happens, when you enter the Gospel immediately when one takes sides with Jesus Christ one carries the wrath of the enemy and the dark powers of this world, you are already marked, as if you have broken the pact with the world of darkness, and have adopted an enemy army, the Gospel and the Kingdom of God, and the wrath of the devil is already upon your life, whether you want it or not, not only that but this world is an extremely sinister world, the longer I live brother, the more I realize that I am a creature so fragile and that I need to cling to the skirts of my God with nails and teeth, and that every day before I leave my house I have to entrust myself to the mercy of God because I don't know what awaits me out there.

It is a terrible world, it is a sinister world, and many people live the Christian life superficially without storing up reserves within it, knowledge of the Word, defenses against life and when terminal illness arrives, the doctor's dictum that you have six left. months of life, when their marriage breaks down, when their children are scattered, or when there is a tragedy, a loss, a failure, they have nowhere to hold on, there is no knowledge system that allows that person to deal with the crisis. And then at that moment his spiritual poverty becomes totally evident, and that is why one has to hoard like Joseph for the lean times.

In normal times one has to treasure knowledge, one has to pray and be filled with the power of God, because sooner or later every human being experiences a certain degree of tragedy, suffering, suffering, and when spiritual drought comes you need to be strong spiritually, and you need to have a bank reserve with God. And that is why, brother, I believe that in the end no one should have the luxury of living a mediocre life, because sooner or later you are going to need to be able to go before your Heavenly Father and change a little of those checks that you have deposited, you need to have an account banking.

Because salvation may be free and it is, but a life of power, success and efficacy is only reserved for people who have invested in the life of God. So Esau is a man who does not live up to his calling, he is not treasuring, he is not preparing for the moment of the test, when the moment of the test comes he was not prepared, do you know the story?, the moment arrives in which he suffers a great hunger, and I wonder if that great hunger was not also something spiritual, because the hunger, the appetite that he felt was so great, he was desperate, and sometimes there are things that seem normal but are also spiritual. I believe that Peter felt great terror when this woman accused him, ah, you are one of Jesus' disciples, I believe that this was a supernatural diabolical moment, in which what he felt was a spiritual test, because Jesus Christ had already said Satan He has asked you to sift you like wheat, he told Peter, and I have prayed so that your faith does not fail, and once you have come out of that trial, go and strengthen your brothers.

So there are moments in your life that are going to seem merely everyday but behind them are going to be spiritual, that God is going to be testing you in a way, there are so many cases in the Scripture that we could mention about that, there are moments in which you You're not going to know if at that moment the devil and God and all the angels at that moment are in a big auditorium watching to see what you're going to do at that moment, and maybe the rest of your life is going to be determined by what you do. you do at that moment, and if you are spiritually prepared you will discern the solemnity, and the sublime of that moment and you will pass the test but if not, you will lose God's mysterious purpose for your life.

That moment when Esau feels that great hunger and that Jacob is waiting for him crouching like a beast there to take away his birthright, it was a moment of trial, and if Esau had prepared his life he would have been prepared to know what he had to do, but As his whole life had been a life of mediocrity and spiritual laxity, when the moment of the spiritual test arrives, he acts like a carnal man, from the earth, and from the stomach, and feminine, calculating Jacob tells him hey, I just did a shrimp asopao that's what you can't imagine, would you like to exchange your birthright, your spiritual right, for my asopao? And what does Esau say? Ah, what is that birthright, I'm going to change it, okay, take the birthright! I didn't know that at that moment I was making a terrible spiritual pact.

What happens is that spiritually superficial people are not capable of thinking in symbolic spiritual terms. That is why I tell people, my people, always, when I speak of a supernatural mentality, that capacity, even within Christianity, is a concentric, more interior circle, where the children of God who have penetrated with the archetypal patterns of Scripture, they know that there is a very intimate way of conjugating and thinking about the universe, and that way is sometimes symbolic, metaphorical, very prophetic, and I believe that to be truly successful in the spiritual realm, you have to learn to think in that way. way, very few Christian men and women in the 21st century know how to think that way.

So that is why when they see the great moral, spiritual and political problems and conflicts of the 21st century, they go for the brain and the reason and are not computing in deeper and more spiritual terms, as the Church has done through the centuries, that is why it is a very dangerous time like never before in the 21 centuries of Christian life that we are living now, because more and more Christianity moves away from that symbolic, supernatural way of conjugating that spiritual life.

So Esau was not thinking in spiritual terms, what is that about the birthright? The birthright is when a male was born first, the first, the firstborn had the right in the family, he was the spiritual leader and he was also the one who inherited the property, an all or nothing inheritance, he inherited the power, he inherited the authority, he inherited the owned, and inherited spiritual leadership, the family's spiritual lineage ran through the person who held the birthright. There could be forty sons but only one was the spiritual leader and the one through whom the lineage of his ancestors ran had the right, that was Esau, but again as things are about calls and gifts, that is the mystery of this matter.

So when the time comes to understand the sublime of what he was delivering, he could not, he was rough, he was clumsy, a man who only calculates things like an accountant, only numbers, he cannot think in the sublime terms that the gospel, then he said that and he didn't see anything wrong, what does it matter, maybe later I'll take it back, in the best of cases, he said what does it matter if I tell him I'll give it to him, right?, he was doing a pact, he was giving his word at that moment, and he had a man there who did know what he was doing, had lived his whole life chasing it.

So at that moment Esau does not perceive the deep spiritual transaction that he is making and gives up his right of spiritual leadership, the call of Abraham was supposed to run through Esau, to be a light to the nations, to be a blessing, to have grace and God's protection over his life, and having the call to be the spiritual Father of all spiritual and faith people, all this was for him, and in one of the most tragic exchanges in the entire history of humanity, and most dramatic, and more disproportionate, this man gives up a moment of pleasure and physical satisfaction for the great eternal inheritance of his life. How many of us have made trades like this my brothers.

How many do that for a moment of pleasure, for satisfaction, for a false love, for a profession, for a bank account, for a latest model BMW? They sell their souls to the devil and sacrifice the sublime call of God for a temporary satisfaction of a life, they change it, we change it, we change the spiritual vitality, we change the power of God, we change the powerful and specific endowment of God for my life, for your life, we change the privilege of being spiritual parents for a pleasure, call it whatever, call it social reputation, call it influence, call it admiration from people, call it money, call it physical pleasure, there are thousands of possibilities, because it is not only the ugliest and the grossest, sometimes they are very subtle and well beautiful, a literary career, a political career, the approval of the world, a place in history, there are men and women who have sold their souls for something similar.

He sold this one because I believe that what the Bible wanted was to make this very graphic, the transactions that we sometimes make, a plate of food for something infinitely valuable, between those two terms there are a great number of possibilities that we can choose, and you and I have to be careful that the drama of Esau repeats itself in our life, we have a call and the devil is going to tell us continuously as he told Jesus, hey, I can give you everything, I give it to you , it is mine, if you only do this, the Lord said no, he knew how to discern, I will only serve my God, and you and I brothers, that is the thing, choosing between the plate of food and the birthright is something that we are going to to have to do thousands of times in our lives.

I believe that every day many of us have to choose what is more valuable to me, the soup dish or the call of God and the power that runs through a perfectly adequate vehicle, every day, many times a day sometimes, sometimes they will be very big and appetizing and compulsive things, sometimes they will be more subtle things and they will come to you and say hey, change this for this, many times, you have to do that in your work, you have to do in your house, you have to do it in your marriage, you have to do it in your friendships, you have to do it in your daily walk, many times they will ask you, give me the plate of food for the birthright, and you have to be prepared in that moment to discern the sublime and tremendously serious and heavy character of what is taking place at that moment in your life, what are you going to choose, one thing or the other?

It is a question that I believe is the very essence of what we are talking about here. But the wonderful thing about Jacob is this, I think one has to understand both in this game, Jacob is the man who lives his life obsessed with only one thing, look at how much Jacob's identity is summed up in this. The story knows that when Rebeca is pregnant with these two boys, she does not know that they are twins, but her womb is in conflict and in conflict, because these two characters are fighting inside of them, I am not going to talk about what this implies about of abortion and that a fetus has no personality, I believe that there is one of the great defeats of the Christian, not that it does not matter, the one who believes that life is given by God even within the womb there is already a configuration of personality and there is an endowment of personality, there are calls and there are things that have to be protected, they cannot simply be reduced to the state of a mechanical and physical, and biological fetus.

But there within his womb are the two principles of life, I believe that the material principle and the spiritual principle, for which one is going to live, and I believe that these two beings there within them embody that, Jacob is struggling with Esau, as the flesh is fighting against the spirit within us continuously, and when the two of them come out, well, the fact is that she has so much anguish that she says I don't want to continue living, if they had told me that this was motherhood I would not have asked for children , she would rather have been barren all her life, again a sign that something important was there, so she goes and prays to the Lord and seeks revelation, and the Lord gives it to her.

How, through prophets, through enlightenment, we don't know, but the case was that she receives clarity that there are two nations within her, there are two spiritual principles that are fighting within her, the prophecy says that the greater will serve to the lesser, which is a contradiction because the older one is supposed to be served by the younger, right? And they will be two nations that will be in continuous struggle, although later in a future time the older one will be freed as it happened in the history of the Edomites and the Israelites, that is another long subject there, but the fact is that when these two come out, do you remember the story that Jacob has the hand grabbed by Esau's heel wanting to pull him to get out first?, that's why they call him Jacob which means supplanter.

He wanted to replace his brother, he wanted to replace the other, it was a race and he was pushing to get there first, that is to say, that is why his hand was locked on his brother's heel, that is a powerful image, this creature instinctively he already had a passion for that spiritual aspect, he valued it, almost idolized it, it was summed up in one thing and that was to be the spiritual firstborn, and since he could not reach it biologically, he reached it in another way. But that is why I say that the identity of this man was already summarized in his DNA, and another of the great mysteries is what God determines, and what freedom there is in man, because if it was God who had determined it or it was the man who I was already seeing from the beginning, what God says is something active or something passive, it is that God is determining it or is seeing it, is declaring it.

I think that nobody can say, those are the mysteries of free will, freedom, determinism, here there is a game between those two things. And that's why I think that when Jacob and Rebeca scheme with Jacob, at least they know that I'm familiar with the story, again that of the personality in the family, these are other things that we don't have time to discuss, but that Sad is when the children leave, terrible too, but the fact is that when Rebeca schemes with her son, the question is, is Rebeca merely responding to a call from God? Are we being told there that the spiritual principles are above the legal principles of humanity, because Esau had the biological right did not necessarily mean that he had the spiritual right, and is this woman then connecting with the Perfect Will of God, although using illegitimate principles, because of his appetite and his love for the things of God?.

Do you see here the complexity of Scripture? I invite you to spend your free time reflecting on these things, these mysteries of human and Christian life, because many times I tell you my brothers, the more one understands the Word of God, the more difficult it becomes to be simplistic in the judgments that one makes in human life, because life is a mystery, there are things that are achieved through illegitimate methods but that are in accordance with the ultimate Will of God, and people who are illegal will receive their punishment , but paradoxically they will be doing the Will of the Lord. Many times there are things that we do in our life and we do them illegally, but we do them within the Will of God, that is why we have to be terribly careful, and we have to ask Him every day Lord, give me wisdom, give me understanding to discern your will.

Perhaps there would have been other, more appropriate ways to arrive at what Jacob arrived at, because I think that one of the things that I see here between Jacob and Esau is that he looks, the first will be last and the last will be first, these two men They illustrate some very powerful spiritual principles, such as all of Scripture, symbolic. Over time, the Hebrews and the Gentiles were going to repeat the drama of Jacob and Esau, because who had the birthright in the spiritual history of the world? Jews, that is the legitimate people of God, in a sense, but what happened to the Jewish people? They despised their call, they despised the principles to which they had been called, they despised their call to be an abnormal people, they wanted to be like the other peoples with kings and gods.

They wasted their birthright, and who now enjoys the fullest knowledge of the People of God? The Jacobs, we are the Gentiles, because in the Christian life, in the universe of God, it is not simply because you are a biological heir, it is by faith, it is by appetite, it is by passion, it is by discerning the purpose of God. Now, I believe that God also has a purpose for the Hebrews, in the end that is why I love the Jewish people and I value it, and I believe in the mystery of all this, because I believe that there is a time of dispensation of the Gentiles, or what Whatever it is, the Bible says that when the fullness of the Gentiles reaches then there will be another move of God with the Hebrew people, the Hebrew people are now in question, in parentheses, and this Jacob who is the Gentile people has discerned the call of God, has entered into a covenant with God through Christ Jesus.

We enjoy the birthright covenant, but Paul says we can't take pride and simply believe that we can kick the Jews and say no, no, God has a purpose for them, and in a moment God is going to restore that purpose. purpose, because that is what the Scripture says, meanwhile who enjoys the privileges of access to the Father, we, the Jacobos, because we have discerned, we have paid the price, we have affiliated with Jesus. So I believe that there is also an important principle of these two powers, God is always telling us, look, it is not always by right, the outsiders often arrive first, the little ones arrive before the great ones, the physically weak like Jacob can be more powerful than the strong, if they align with my principles, and I do not respect anyone, I respect those who love me, those who value me, those who put me first, those who give themselves for me, those who sacrifice for me, the one who values what I offer, not the one who gives it up for an appetite in a moment, the one who is willing to spend a life of sacrifices and privations because he loves what I give him.

Those are the people with whom I affiliate myself and to whom I give myself, and the one who enjoys my privileges, not simply the one who was born with a spiritual pedigree or whatever because his grandfather was a pastor or an evangelist, no, who? God gives his anointing, to whom does God give his gifts? It is to the little ones of the earth, to those who have appetite and passion and obsession with the birthright, if you want the power of God to manifest in your life, do not look at the smallness of your body, do not look at the illiterate of your mind, no look at the undistinguished of your family background, look at your heart, because the eyes of God run through the whole earth to show themselves in favor of those who have a perfect heart towards Him.

That is what God wants to show, and that is why God calls us, put your mind to this: God calls us to live up to our endowment, up to our identity, up to our calling. God tells you, wake up you who are sleeping, affirm your knees, come closer to God and He will come closer to you if you are double-minded, there are so many passages that I wanted to read, we have not had time, in the Scriptures that emphasize that, they hammer on our heart, our spirit that central principle of our life, define yourself, concentrate, purify yourself, surrender, immerse yourself, be baptized in the waters of consecration, surrender to my principles, a life lived red hot by me.

In times of lukewarmness, indefiniteness, they have passed, in fact they never existed. If you want God to run through you, define yourself, clean your vessel, purify yourself, because this is the time of definition. This is the time and every day it gets closer and closer that those who are weak and double minded will not survive, because the wrath of the devil and God will give a freedom to the enemy in the last times that only those who are very clearly The defined ones are going to survive, and besides, God wants to use you, God wants to do great things through us, but it requires a clear definition, an abnormal life, God calls you now to tell yourself: yes, I am abnormal, so what? I am going to live an abnormal life, I am going to live a deformed life but in the most beautiful way in the Word, a life filled with the Holy Spirit.

So we are going to affirm, stand up this morning, I have to do it myself, the times to play evangelical that we have ordered to keep, gentlemen, ladies, that never had legitimacy, time to play Church, to be evangelical, be this be that, forget about that, if you want to enter with God God tells you, are you willing to pay the price, are you willing to live a life of total dedication to me, are you willing to die, are you willing to be baptized with the same baptism with which my Son was baptized, total crucifixion, total surrender, total consecration, consuming obsession, that is what God calls you this morning People of God, we do not want a religious Church, we want a thin Church, a Church that her nerves can be seen through her skin because she is full of the strength of God because she has sacrificed everything in the spiritual exercises that make us dangerous to hell and make us useful to God.

May the Lord visit us now with a spirit of consecration, I ask the Lord to have mercy on me because I have a long way to go to live up to them, but that is what he calls us to, it is an independent word, it is an autonomous word, it comes out of the mouth of God, passes through this man who needs it and comes into your life, settles inside you, God tells you this is my call that I demand and what I want, if you want to be used by me, pay the price and die, so say in your heart if that Word is for you, if you dare, receive it in your heart and seal it in there, and tell yourself from today on I am going to live like this, I am going to live red hot, I am going to live on the edge of the sword, I am going to pay the price, I am going to be deformed but I am going to reach the destination that God has for me, and I am going to be useful to God and I am going to be used greatly.

Lord, help us to become the people that You need. Perhaps someone has felt the need to take a greater step and come forward, if you have not received Jesus, do it right now, I invite you, if you have lived a Gospel that needs adjustment, God has confronted you and you feel that you must take that step of greater militancy before the Lord, come forward, make a different gesture, something that seals that recognition in your life, I leave this moment open for whatever God wants to do in your life, if not, receive it as you feel in your heart.

Meditate on your spirit and make a firm commitment to the Lord. We are going to tell the Lord, here I am, I give you my whole life. I tell myself to the Lord, here I am, I offer you all that I am, take my being, I give my life to you. When you leave here, I hope that this prayer has become a reality in your heart and in your spirit.