What a Testimony!
What a Testimony!
Genesis 48:15-16
And he blessed Joseph and said, “The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day…bless the boys.”
Some men start off strong in their youth, serve in church ministries, devote summers to missions’ work, marry a Christian girl, start a family, and lead a church for a decade or so until some vice goes unchecked and by forty or fifty they’re done with all of it—God, church, the Bible, the lot. Others start off in a godless environment, turn to drugs or psychedelics or cults in search of fulfilment, experience a radical conversion, spend the next years lighting the world around them on fire, until some calamity or cancer or abuse makes them bitter toward God and the fire’s gone for good.
But not Jacob. He started off as a cheater and heel-grabber—a lost cause if there ever was one—but he ends a hero. How? Because in spite of the hard times, in spite of the despair, in spite of losing his beloved wife, of having his favorite son stolen from him, of facing possible death in a famine, he learned to hold fast to God through thick and thin. And he discovered through all the highs and lows that God was holding fast to him.