Saturday: What Is Your Name?
WEEK 49
SATURDAY
WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
Genesis 32:22-30
We spend one more day on the mastery of beginning with others. In the case of Jacob there is a vivid account of what happens to others when we begin with ourselves. Esau was coming to meet Jacob with four hundred men, to avenge himself upon his brother for stealing his birthright. The night before the meeting, Jacob wrestled with an angel all night. The angel asked him the key question, “What’s your name?” and Jacob confessed that it was Jacob—the supplanter—the supplanter of his brother. When he got out the old name, he found a new one—Israel—for he was a new man (Gen 32:27-28). When this new Jacob met the oncoming Esau, a strange thing happened: “But Esau ran to meet him, threw his arms around his neck, kissed him, and they wept” (Gen. 33:4). How did that happen? A man with blood on his horns, ready for vengeance, was now weeping on his brother’s shoulder. How did that happen? Very simple: Jacob began with himself, and a changed Jacob changed Esau.
A big businessman was changed by the surrender of himself to God and passed from a secondhand faith to a firsthand faith. He writes:
I have often remarked to my Sunday-school class that I felt I wasn’t contributing much because all I said was out of a book. But last Sunday what I said was not out of a book; I think God told me what to say. When I finished, a girl came up and said, “Where did you get the material for that lesson? Did that come out of a hook?” I told her it didn’t. She replied, “I knew it! You can always tell, and it sure made a difference.”
It surely made a difference in the Acts, for here was the difference between the stagnant pools of discussion about laws and the bubbling springs of a shared life. Nothing reaches the heart that does not come from the heart. To preach and to witness out of the overflow are the only effective preaching and witnessing. Anything less than this reaches the head but not the heart.
O Jesus, we lift to you our empty cups. Fill them with yourself and your power, and then we will be able to lift those filled cups to the thirsty lips of others. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I go filled to the empty, joyous to the joyless, victorious to the defeated, loving to the loveless.