Every Great Calling Entails a “Deformation”

I want to invite you to analyze with me a passage of Scripture found in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, obviously. We are going to go first to chapter 25. You will remember that I told you last time, two Sundays ago, that I was going to speak about two characters whom Scripture presents to us as a graphic illustration of the principles we have been addressing in recent weeks: principles of definition, principles of focus, principles of consecration, principles of surrender, principles of concentrating on our identity as sons and daughters, servants of God, people who have a very specific identity, a very specific calling, people whom God has called to be a separate people, a people set apart from the world around us and from those principles of the world that contradict the principles of the Kingdom of God, and also set apart 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 someone who must live out of his or her identity in light of the calling, in light of the function to which he or she has been called. We are supposed to be possessed by an identity that God has imparted to us, by a series of principles that define our lives and compel us to live differently from the world. That difference will be unpleasant; sometimes that difference will be lovely and beautiful, a source of great joy; many times it will be a cause of persecution and suffering, of feeling separated and different from everyone else. But that is the destiny, the condition, of a son or 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 light so that we may proclaim the virtues of the One who called us out of darkness into light. In other words, every one of these Sundays we have been talking about that in one way or another: that when we speak about holiness, when we speak about consecration, when we speak about sanctification, we are being told that we have been called to have an attitude of complete concentration on a way of life. And, as we were also saying, that way of life is not merely about ceasing to do certain things; it is not merely about avoiding those more serious, more blatant, more obvious sins. Rather, it is a matter of the total surrender of our minds, our emotions, the principles by which we live, our intellects, the things with which we entertain ourselves, our way of speaking, of treating others, of managing our money, of choosing our professions, of handling our marriages and our careers. It is something that affects and penetrates every dimension of the life of a son or daughter of God. It is an identity with which we have been branded, just as a head of livestock, an animal, is branded with a hot iron and receives the mark of its owner.

And that, in fact, is what God intended with circumcision. Circumcision was a way of physically, literally marking a human being who would always bear that mark of his total belonging to the God who created him. It is also what we do with the tithe: it is a mark, a sign that everything we have and everything we are belongs to the Lord. And if we limit it solely to an outward act, then it is devoid of meaning, because behind that act lies total surrender. By the way, I was watching the video you sent of Daniel Cantalamesa, a preacher, a Catholic priest, and he talks about the Eucharist, the host, what we call the Lord’s Supper. And he explains—in fact, he is a Catholic Pentecostal and a great Catholic preacher—the meaning of the Eucharist. He says that when the priest celebrates that symbol, when he says, for example, “This is my body,” it is not only Jesus Christ who is saying it; the priest is saying it, and the congregation is saying it as well when it says amen. We too are offering up our bodies 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, most obvious, most accessible manifestation, we impoverish them tremendously. All these symbols—circumcision, baptism, the Lord’s Supper—all these things speak about the consecration and total surrender of a human being to a God who will accept nothing less than the total surrender of everything we have and everything we are. Amen? So that is God’s call at this time to our congregation, to my life, and to yours: we must live consecrated lives.

What is more, I am going to live this out: we must live deformed lives, and I am going to explain that term, which may sound scandalous. We must lead lives deformed by the calling God has given us. And we spoke 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 they were born into the world, before they came into the light, from their mother’s womb and even before they were conceived, had a calling, had an identity; God had a very special purpose for them. God had determined that their lives should go in a certain direction and that they should lead a certain way of life. Their sublime calling and the tremendous privileges that calling entailed nevertheless also implied sacrifice, implied a way of life, implied a manner of living, implied a deformation. They were not ordinary people.

So that is the issue with Esau and Samson, the tragedy within them. They are both tragic figures because, on the one hand, they have a calling; God wants to do something in their lives; God has set them apart. But they did not live up to the calling, they were unwilling to pay the price of the calling, they were unwilling to accept the deformations that accompanied the calling. I believe the tragedy of Samson and Esau is that they wanted to live normal lives. Look how ironic this is: they wanted to be normal when God had destined them to be abnormal, in the most exalted sense of that concept of abnormality. They were atypical beings. And you know what? You and I, in a sublime sense of the word, must accept the fact that God calls us to an abnormal life.

When you pass through the door of the Gospel, you must surrender your hopes of living an ordinary, normal life. The life to which God calls you is a life of great glory, communion with the heavenly Father, the Creator of the Universe, deep involvement with the sublime principles of the Gospel, the ability to think and process things in exalted terms that most human beings are not enabled to use, and the experience of great things from God. But at the same time, it also means living with that burden, with that agony of knowing that God has called you to leave many things behind. I will not say that people are allowed to live that way, because in one sense they are living an illegitimate life, but that is how it is: human beings allow themselves many pleasures, tastes, enjoyments, and freedoms that we, the children of God, cannot allow ourselves, and the world will look upon us as abnormal beings.

I imagine people must have looked down on Samson, a little boy of twelve, thirteen, or fourteen, and perhaps accused him of being a sissy because he wore his hair long. But it was the sign of a sublime and special identity. And it seems that, over time, Samson wanted to be with both God and the devil. He wanted to live a life of exceptional privilege, with strength God had given him for deliverance, just as we have been endowed with certain gifts for the deliverance of the humanity among whom we live. But he also wanted to live in sexual pleasure, marry women, and have what Samson’s life probably suggests to us: he was a sensual man. He allowed himself certain privileges of a sensual life that simply were not for him, as well as certain careless acts, such as when he ate from that honeycomb inside the body of the lion he had killed, even though it made him unclean according to the laws of his Nazirite vow. He was a Nazirite, a man reserved exclusively for God, with certain practices and rites he had to observe so that the anointing of God upon him could function as it should.

When Samson wanted to live a particular way of life—you see, because that is one of the things we see in Samson: there was a way of life—it was not that Samson made one small mistake once, or that he sinned once and that was it. No. Here the Bible says that Samson followed a way of life that ultimately led him to destruction. And that is what often happens when we live illegitimately in relation to the calling God has given us: sooner or later, that way of life leads us to destruction. For there are hostile beings, just as there were in Samson’s life—those Philistines, those enemies of the people of Israel—who will want to neutralize the power within him. That is why one must live in a certain way, with a certain vigilance, with a certain sense of constant alertness, so that God’s gift may find a suitable vessel through which to function.

So Esau is similar. The passages are quite long. Esau’s life, that particular drama, is recorded especially in Genesis chapter 25 and in Genesis 27, verses 1 through 40. I am not necessarily going to read it, and if you want to review it, I invite you to do so: chapter 25:19–34 and 27:1–40, almost that entire chapter, right? Genesis chapter 27. But I am going to recount it because many of you already know the story. Here is something else: we cannot properly understand Esau’s life unless we also understand the life of his brother Jacob. Jacob and Esau are like a pair of heavenly bodies that operate in relation to one another: one is a dark body and the other a luminous and transparent body, although Jacob is also very interesting, isn’t he?

Jacob is a supplanter; Jacob is a schemer; Jacob is a tremendously crafty and scheming fellow. And Esau is a sort of dark fellow, from his hair, from the hair covering his forearms and his beard, to his heavy build as a hunter, athlete, and weightlifter, in contrast to Jacob, who is a rather feminine, delicate, slender fellow. And I believe 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 deeply. Jacob and Esau represent the masculine element and, to a certain degree, the feminine element. And there is a spirituality in which psychologists and psychiatrists of religion—Carl Young and others—have seen an interesting, mysterious connection between the masculine, the feminine, the spiritual, and the material. I am not going to burden you too much with those kinds of considerations.

But it is interesting: with whom does Jacob identify more? With his mother; the mother identifies with Jacob. With whom does Esau identify? With his father. Esau is a hairy fellow with a lot of testosterone, bearded, a hunter, a man of the earth, a man’s man. He likes food; when he is hungry, he becomes impossible, because he has a strong appetite, like Samson as well. He represents the masculine element. He is literally a hairy-chested man in this case, right? And Jacob is the delicate young man who always stayed beside his mother, who dwells in tents and is a shepherd of sheep. And it is interesting, brothers, that this is why Jacob is more calculating; that trait is more feminine, forgive me. And here I am not glorifying either one, because the man, on the other hand, is clumsy. The masculine element, the masculine psyche, is clumsy; the masculine psyche is square: let us get down to business and see things in a straight line.

The feminine psyche is a more calculating psyche; it takes a more meandering route, zigzagging more to reach the point. Its mind thinks and calculates more. That is why Esau, with his masculine mind, cannot process or engage the world of the Spirit with equal complexity, whereas Jacob, who has a more feminine personality, can make contact with the world of the Spirit. That is why Esau, who operates more in terms of hunting, sports, and war, says when someone speaks to him about the birthright, “The birthright? What is that? What I want right now is to eat a good stew 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 so difficult for some men? Many times, it is difficult for them to enter into the things of God with the same passion as women. That is true everywhere in the world, because men think, “No, being consecrated to God is for women and old ladies, right?” And that is what we sometimes teach little boys: “No, men do not cry; men do not feel deep emotions; men do not love; they are not expressive. That is for women.” And we castrate and limit them. Then, when these men enter the ways of the Lord, they are incapable of seeing the things of the Spirit with the same passion and the same complexity, because that requires a more feminine mentality. I believe every man should have a feminine element within him, and every woman a masculine element.

And we have to develop both dimensions in our being in order to be truly complete. And for me, one of the most fascinating dimensions of these psychological types represented by Esau and Jacob is this aspect of the masculine and the feminine, and why it is so important for us men also to develop that ability to feel and think, and process spiritual life, in the very profound way women do. I believe that, many times, a woman’s brokenness—forgive me for getting into this, but it is fascinating—through motherhood, giving birth, the deformation of her body, the weakening of her body through motherhood, that suffering a woman experiences from childhood makes her more sensitive to certain dimensions of the life of the Spirit; a certain bodily weakness makes her more receptive to the subtle waves of the Spirit.

Man, with his apparent physical strength, is often unable to be attuned to those dimensions of the Spirit, and so God often wants to speak to us but cannot find an antenna sufficiently developed to receive the emanations that come from Him. Esau was such a rough man; he had a spiritual calling that required him to develop his spiritual antennae, his spiritual ability. Esau’s calling required times of meditation, times with God, times in the darkness of the countryside gazing at the stars, as Jacob did, where God could speak to him, where he could then have dreams. Who has the dreams? Jacob, the feminine one.

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 was supposed to be the legal, spiritual, judicial firstborn; that was his calling, that was his right, that was his privilege. But that privilege meant that Esau had to live a lifestyle that would enable him to administer and manage, and to be a good steward of, that sublime calling he had received. Esau, however, spends his entire life in the countryside, hunting animals, developing his body, pursuing things that are merely physical and material, instead of also setting time aside, because his calling was a priestly calling, and that calling obligated him to seek and cultivate that dimension of his being, but he did not do so.

Ironically, Jacob, who did not have the right and did not have the calling, is nevertheless the one we see doing this, perhaps without even realizing it himself, because what happens is that God’s calling endows us; if we follow it, the endowment is secretly there, and the more we practice it, the more it develops. But from childhood, whether by design or inertia—I will tell you why—Jacob’s very DNA, his very subconscious, was focused on only one thing: obtaining that birthright. I believe Jacob instinctively pursued a lifestyle that would enable him to think in terms of the birthright, and that meant a more meditative, more sedentary lifestyle, one that cultivated the feminine aspect of his personality more fully.

For example, if you want to be used by God, whether you are a man or a woman, if you want to enter into deep intimacy, for God to speak to you, for God to give you dreams, for God to place impressions within your being, for God to guide you in powerful and subtle ways, you have to make time to commune with the Word of God. You have to make time to read the Bible; you have to make time to pray; you have to make time to learn to be silent, to turn off the radio and television, to lower the blinds so that as little traffic noise as possible can be heard, and to concentrate on what is inside you, learning to be comfortable with your inner self. You have to cultivate times of withdrawal; you have to seek out those environments where the worship of God within you is nourished and developed. Why? Because you have that calling; you are an athlete of faith, and you cannot be putting on fat, because that fat will make the race of faith difficult for you.

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

You know that in the Bible the priests did not live normal lives. Everyone in Israel could inherit; everyone had a piece of land that they inherited. Do you know who the only people in all Israel were who had no right to land, to an inheritance? The priests, the Levites. God told them, “I am your inheritance.” While the others were out there cultivating their land and possessing their little plots, they were serving the Lord and had to live on the tithes and the things of the temple. That is why I see such a great contradiction today: so many pastors and evangelists, and people who want the gift and power of the priesthood, God’s calling, but also want to live with all the privileges of a company CEO. Well, since they earn 100 or 250,000 dollars, I can earn the same amount too.

The inheritance of priests is very different from the inheritance of others. 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 meditated further on this matter of deformation. Look, every great calling entails a deformation, as I was saying, and I am assuming that you are quite familiar with the story of Jacob and Esau, which is why I have not gone into it. But perhaps I am assuming too much, because not all of you may possess all that knowledge. Brothers and sisters, I encourage you: familiarize yourselves with the great figures of Scripture.

One of the deformations of the children of God is that we have to know the Bible inside and out, backward and forward, because as children of God that is one of our callings. When you know the Bible, when you continually immerse yourself in it, the thought patterns of Scripture shape your own way of thinking and processing life. It is an interesting process: as you look at Scripture, Scripture shapes you inwardly; as you become familiar with Scripture, Scripture processes and interprets life, your brain is gradually rewired, and you shape or interpret life in the same way Scripture does.

So every great calling and every dedication to a calling entails a deformation, and we run from the word deformation because no one wants to be deformed, but consider the following. Great tennis players, for example—a person who has played tennis all his life—know that one thing that develops artificially is the forearm with which the racket is handled, because from continually doing this, it becomes more developed, larger than the other parts of the body. Basketball players are deformed in a sense; they are six feet tall. Great runners—long-distance runners, for example—are very thin 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 very well-developed thighs because they need the explosive power to run quickly, and that is why their legs, especially their thighs, are artificially developed, and so on. All artists have their deformations; weightlifters and scholars have their deformations. In fact, there is a term, professional deformation, used in scholarship, which means that when a person becomes accustomed to thinking theologically or literarily, let us say, the mind becomes deformed, as it were, and one begins to see life according to one’s particular focus. You see this deformation in the great scholars at major universities, Harvard and places like that: it is the ability to concentrate on a single thing.

On the plane from Spain, I watched the movie about the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and you see the deformation, these people’s ability to see things technologically. Geeks are famous for their concentration on programming and all of that. Everything in life, my brothers and sisters, entails this: if you want to achieve something great in the ways of the Lord, you must be willing to accept a degree of deformation in your life. What I mean by this is, look: every desire for normality in the Christian life is an aberration; it is a violation of the principles of the Kingdom. The man or woman of God who wants to be normal is placing himself or herself in an inherent contradiction; the machine is trying to start while 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 that way, you are preparing yourself for disaster. Sooner or later, the inconsistency of how you live will lead you to some kind of failure or breakdown, because, as the Guatemalans say, you are neither chicha nor lemonade; you are neither one thing nor the other. You have the devil against you and the Lord completely against you; God abhors lukewarmness. That is why He says to the church in Laodicea, “If you were cold or hot, I could deal with you, but because you are neither cold nor hot and 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 the Gospel consists of coming to church for a couple of hours, reluctantly given, and then living life in a normal way until the following Sunday, if they even come then.

All that does is prepare us for disaster. By definition, a Christian is an abnormal being, focused on one thing, just as Esau should have lived; but Esau did not live a lifestyle that prepared him for the moment of testing. That is another thing. Many people say, “You know what? Do not talk to me about so much consecration and so much holiness, because that is what we pay the pastor for. All I want is simply to punch my time card and go to heaven when I die; as for all the rest, all that fuss and commotion, I leave that to the religious professionals.” But do you know what happens? You can live that way, and you will go to heaven, because salvation is above all through faith in Christ, and if that faith is placed in Jesus, you will go to heaven. But you will ultimately suffer loss; you will suffer it in the end because there will be certain rewards you will not receive.

And I tell you, my brother and sister, there is so much ambiguity in Scripture concerning a lukewarmly lived life that I would not take the risk, because even I myself am not completely sure about a life lived with such neglect toward God. We have created a gospel called Cheap Grace, and it is one of the terrible afflictions of the Church in our time. We have encouraged people to believe that because we live by grace, they can allow themselves every kind of luxury and every kind of freedom 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 whether, in the end, what happened to the unfaithful servant will happen to them, because there is a great deal of ambiguity in the Bible about that.

When we waste our gifts, when we do not live up to the calling—hey, we also need to be careful. But let us suppose that yes, a person can simply be saved with a mediocre attitude. Do you know what happens? When you enter the Gospel, as soon as you take your stand with Jesus Christ, you bring upon yourself the wrath of the enemy and of the dark powers of this world. You are already marked; it is as though you have broken your covenant with the world of darkness and adopted an enemy army, the Gospel and the Kingdom of God, and now the devil’s wrath is upon your life, whether you like it or not. Not only that, but this world is an extremely sinister world. The longer I live, my brother and sister, the more I realize that I am such a fragile creature and that I need to cling to the skirts of my God tooth and nail, and that every day before I leave my house I have to entrust myself to God’s mercy because I do not 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 themselves—knowledge of the Word and defenses against life—and when terminal illness comes, when the doctor pronounces that they have six months left to live, when their marriage falls apart, when their children scatter, or when tragedy, loss, or failure comes, they have nothing to hold on to. There is no system of knowledge that enables that person to deal with the crisis. And then, at that moment, that person’s spiritual poverty becomes completely evident, and that is why one has to store up, as Joseph did, for the times of the lean cows.

In normal times, one has to store up knowledge; one has to pray and be filled with the power of God, because sooner or later every human being faces some degree of tragedy, suffering, and affliction, and when the spiritual drought comes, you need to be spiritually strong, and you need to have a bank account with God. And that is why, brother, I believe that ultimately no one should allow himself 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 cash some of those checks you have deposited; you need to have a bank account.

Because salvation may be free—and it is—but a life of power, success, and effectiveness is reserved only for those who have invested in the life of God. So Esau is a man who does not live up to his calling; he is not storing up treasure, he is not preparing for the moment of testing. When the moment of testing comes, he is not prepared. Do you know the story? The moment comes when he suffers great hunger, and I wonder whether that great hunger was also something spiritual, because the hunger, the appetite he felt, was so great; he was desperate. And sometimes there are things that seem normal but are spiritual as well. I believe Peter felt his great terror when that woman accused him: Ah, you are one of Jesus’ disciples. I believe that was a supernatural, diabolical moment, in which what he felt was a spiritual trial, because Jesus Christ had already said, “Satan has asked to sift you like wheat.” He said it to Peter: “And I have prayed that your faith may not fail, and once you have come through that trial, go and strengthen your brothers.”

So there will be moments in your life that will appear merely ordinary, but behind them there will be spiritual realities, and God will be testing you in some way. There are so many cases in Scripture that we could mention concerning this. There will be moments when you will not know whether, at that very moment, the devil and God and all the angels are in a great auditorium, watching to see what you are going to do at that moment, and perhaps the rest of your life will be determined by what you do then. And if you are spiritually prepared, you will discern the solemnity and sublimity of that instant, 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 Jacob is waiting for him there, crouching like a wild beast in order to take away his birthright, was a moment of testing. And if Esau had prepared his life, he would have been prepared to know what he had to do; but because his entire life had been one of mediocrity and spiritual laxity, when the moment of spiritual testing comes, he acts like a carnal man, a man of the earth and of the stomach. And the feminine, calculating Jacob says to him, “Hey, I have just made a shrimp asopao that is so good you cannot imagine it. Would you like to trade your birthright, your spiritual right, for my asopao?” And what does Esau say? “Ah, what is this business about a birthright? I’m going to trade it. Fine, take the birthright!” He did not know that at that moment he was making a terrible spiritual covenant.

The problem is that spiritually superficial people are incapable of thinking in spiritual, symbolic terms. That is why I always tell people, my people, that when I speak of a supernatural mindset, that capacity—even within Christianity—is a more inward, concentric circle, where the children of God who have become deeply attuned to the archetypal patterns of Scripture know that there is a very intimate way of comprehending and thinking about the universe, and that way is sometimes symbolic, metaphorical, and very prophetic. And I believe that, in order to have true success in the spiritual realm, one must learn to think in that way. Very few Christian men and women in the twenty-first century know how to think in that way.

That is why, when they see the great moral, spiritual, and political problems and conflicts of the twenty-first century, they resort to the brain and reason and are not processing things in deeper, spiritual terms, as the Church has done throughout the centuries. That is why the time we are living in is more dangerous than any other in the twenty-one centuries of Christian life, because Christianity is moving farther and farther away from that symbolic, supernatural way of comprehending spiritual life.

So Esau did not think in spiritual terms. What is this business about the birthright? The birthright meant that when a male child was born first—the firstborn—he had the right within the family; he was the spiritual leader and also the one who inherited the property, an all-or-nothing inheritance. He inherited the power, he inherited the authority, he inherited the property, and he inherited the 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 and who held that right. That was Esau, but once again, that is how things are with callings and gifts; that is the mystery of this matter.

So when the moment came to understand the sublimity of what he was surrendering, he could not do it. He was coarse; he was clumsy. A man who calculates things only like an accountant, only in terms of numbers, cannot think in the sublime terms the gospel requires. So he said that and saw nothing wrong with it. What does it matter? Perhaps afterward I can take it back. In the best-case scenario, he said, “What does it matter if I tell him I am giving it to him, right?” He was making a covenant; he was giving his word at that moment, and there was a man there who did know what he was doing, who had spent his entire life pursuing it.

So at that moment Esau does not perceive the profound spiritual transaction he is making, and he surrenders his right to spiritual leadership. Abraham’s calling was supposed to run through Esau: to be a light to the nations, to be a blessing, to have the grace and protection of God upon his life, and to have the calling to be the spiritual father of all spiritual people and people of faith. All of that was meant for him, and in one of the most tragic, dramatic, and disproportionate exchanges in the entire history of humanity, this man trades the great eternal inheritance of his life for a moment of pleasure and physical satisfaction. How many of us have made exchanges like that, my brothers?

How many people do that for a moment of pleasure, for satisfaction, for a false love, for a profession, for a bank account, for a late-model BMW? They sell their soul to the devil and sacrifice God’s sublime calling for the temporary satisfaction of a lifetime. They trade it; we trade it. We trade spiritual vitality, we trade the power of God, we trade God’s powerful and specific endowment for my life, for your life; we trade the privilege of being spiritual fathers for a pleasure, whatever it may be called—social reputation, influence, people’s admiration, money, physical pleasure. There are thousands of possibilities, because it is not only the ugliest and crudest things; sometimes they are very subtle and very beautiful things: 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 like that.

This man sold it because I believe that what the Bible wanted was to portray very graphically the transactions we sometimes make: a plate of food for something infinitely valuable. Between those two extremes there are a great many possibilities we can choose, and you and I must be careful lest Esau’s drama be repeated in our lives. We have a calling, and the devil will continually say to us, just as he said to Jesus, “Hey, I can give you everything; I will give it to you. It is mine, if you will only do this.” The Lord said no; he knew how to discern: “I will serve my God alone.” And you and I, brothers—that is the issue. Choosing between the plate of food and the birthright is something we will 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 plate of asopao, or the calling of God and the power that flows through a perfectly suitable vessel. Every day—sometimes many times a day—sometimes they will be very big, appetizing, and compelling things; sometimes they will be subtler things, and they will come and say to you, “Hey, trade me this for that.” Many times you have to do that at work; you have to do it at home; 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 birthright for the plate of food,” and at that moment you have to be prepared to discern the sublime, tremendously serious, and weighty nature of what is taking place in your life at that moment. 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 discussing here. But the wonderful thing about Jacob is this: I believe one has to understand both of them in this interplay. Jacob is the man who lives his life obsessed with one thing. Look at the extent to which Jacob’s identity is summed up in this. You know the story: when Rebekah is pregnant with these two boys, she does not know they are twins, but her womb is in conflict and turmoil because these two characters are fighting inside her. I am not going to talk about what this implies concerning abortion and the claim that a fetus has no personality. I believe that one of Christianity’s great defeats lies there—not that it does not matter. The person who believes that life is given by God believes that even within the womb there is already a configuration of personality and an endowment of personality; there are callings and there are things that must be protected. They cannot simply be reduced to the state of a mechanical, physical, and biological fetus.

But there inside her womb are the two principles of life—I believe, the material principle and the spiritual principle—which one will be lived for; and I believe that these two beings within her embody that. Jacob is struggling with Esau just as the flesh is continually struggling against the spirit within us. And when the two come out—well, the fact is that she experiences such anguish that she says, “I do not want to go on living. If they had told me this was motherhood, I would not have asked for children; I would rather have been barren all my life,” another sign that there was something important there. So she goes and prays to the Lord and seeks revelation, and the Lord gives it to her.

How? Through prophets, through illumination—we do not know. But the fact is that she receives clarity that there are two nations within her; there are two spiritual principles struggling within her. The prophecy says that the older will serve the younger, which is a contradiction because the older is supposed to be served by the younger, right? And they will be two nations that will be in continual conflict, although later, at some future time, the older will break free, as happened in the history of the Edomites and the Israelites. That is another long matter there. But the fact is that when these two come out, do you remember the story—that Jacob’s hand is grasping Esau’s heel, trying to pull him back so that he himself can come out first? That is why they call him Jacob, which means supplanter.

He wanted to supplant his brother; he wanted to replace the other. It was a race, and he was pushing to arrive first. In other words, that is why his hand was clasped around his brother’s heel. That is a powerful image. This creature instinctively already possessed a passion for that spiritual dimension; he valued it, almost idolized it. His whole being was summed up in one thing: being the spiritual firstborn. And since he could not attain it biologically, he attained it by another means. But that is why I say that this man’s identity was already summed up in his DNA. And another of the great mysteries is what God determines and how much freedom man has, because whether it was God who had determined it or man who was already seeing it from the beginning—whether what God says is something active or something passive, whether God is determining it or seeing it, declaring it.

I believe no one can say; those are the mysteries of free will, freedom, and determinism. Here there is an interplay between those two things. And that is why I believe that when Jacob and Rebekah scheme together—at least you know that I am familiar with the story—once again there is that matter of personality in the family. These are other things we do not have time to discuss, but how sad it is when the children leave—terrible as well. But the fact is that when Rebekah schemes with her son, the question is: Is Rebekah merely responding to a calling from God? Are we being told there that spiritual principles stand above humanity’s legal principles, because the fact that Esau had the biological right did not necessarily mean that he had the spiritual right? And is this woman, then, aligning herself with the Perfect Will of God, although using illegitimate methods, because of her appetite and her love for the things of God?

Do you see here the complexity of Scripture? I invite you, in your free time, to devote yourself to reflecting on these things, these mysteries of human and Christian life, because, as I often tell you, my brothers and sisters, the more one understands the Word of God, the harder it becomes to be simplistic in the judgments one makes about human life, because life is a mystery. There are things that are attained through illegitimate methods but that accord with the ultimate Will of God, and the people who act unlawfully will receive their punishment, yet paradoxically they will be doing the Will of the Lord. Many times there are things we do in our lives, and we do them illegitimately, yet we do them within the Will of God. That is why we must be terribly careful, and every day we must ask Him: 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 attained, because I believe that one of the things I see here between Jacob and Esau is this: look, the first will be last and the last will be first. These two men illustrate some very powerful spiritual principles, as all Scripture does; they are symbolic. In time, the Hebrews and the Gentiles would repeat the drama of Jacob and Esau, because who held the birthright in the spiritual history of the world? The Jews. They are the legitimate people of God, in one sense. But what happened to the Jewish people? They despised their calling; they despised the principles for which they had been called; they despised their calling to be an abnormal people; they wanted to be like the other peoples, with kings and gods.

They squandered their birthright. And who now enjoys the fullest knowledge of the People of God? The Jacobs—we Gentiles—because in the Christian life, in God’s universe, it is not simply a matter of being a biological heir; it is by faith, by appetite, by passion, by discerning God’s purpose. Now, I believe that God also has a purpose for the Hebrews. That is ultimately why I love and value the Jewish people and believe in the mystery of all this, because I believe there is a time of the dispensation of the Gentiles, or whatever it may be. The Bible says that when the fullness of the Gentiles has been reached, then there will be another move of God among the Hebrew people. The Hebrew people are now, as it were, in question, in parentheses, and this Jacob, who is the Gentile people, has discerned God’s calling and has entered into covenant with God through Christ Jesus.

We enjoy the covenant of the birthright, but Paul says that we cannot become proud and simply believe that we can kick the Jews aside and say, “Not anymore.” No, God has a purpose for them, and at a certain moment God will restore that purpose, because that is what Scripture says. Meanwhile, who enjoys the privileges of access to the Father? We, the Jacobs, because we have discerned, we have paid the price, we have affiliated ourselves with Jesus. So I believe that here, too, there is an important principle involving these two powers. God is always telling us: Look, it is not always by right; outsiders often arrive first; the little ones arrive before the great; those who are physically weak, like Jacob, can be more powerful than the strong if they align themselves with My principles. And I show no partiality: I honor the one who loves Me, the one who values Me, the one who puts Me first, the one who gives himself for Me, the one who sacrifices for Me, the one who values what I offer—not the one who gives it away to satisfy a momentary appetite, but the one who is willing to endure a life of sacrifices and deprivation because he loves what I give him.

Those are the people with whom I affiliate Myself and to whom I give Myself, and who enjoy My privileges—not simply those who were born with a spiritual pedigree or whatever, because their grandfather was a pastor or an evangelist. No. To whom does God give His anointing? To whom does God give His gifts? To the little ones of the earth, to those who have an appetite, passion, and obsession for the birthright. If you want the power of God to be manifested in your life, do not look at the smallness of your body; do not look at how unlearned your mind is; do not look at how undistinguished your family background is. Look at your heart, because the eyes of God range throughout the whole earth to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose hearts are perfect toward Him.

That is what God wants to show, and that is why God calls us. Set your mind on this: God calls us to live up to our endowment, to live up to our identity, to live up to our calling. God says to you, “Awake, you who sleep; strengthen your knees; draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” If you are double-minded—there are so many passages in Scripture that I wanted to read, but we have not had time—which emphasize this to us and hammer into our hearts and our spirits that central principle of our lives: define yourself, concentrate, purify yourself, surrender yourself, immerse yourself, be baptized in the waters of consecration, surrender to My principles, a life lived at white heat for Me.

The times of lukewarmness and indecision have passed; what is more, they never existed. If you want God to flow through you, define yourself, cleanse your vessel, purify yourself, because this is the time for taking a stand. This is the time, and every day it draws nearer and nearer, when those who are weak and double-minded will not survive, because of the devil’s wrath, and because God will grant the enemy a freedom in the last days such that only those who are very clearly committed will survive. Moreover, God wants to use you; God wants to do great things through us, but that requires a clear commitment, an abnormal life. God calls you now to say to yourself: Yes, I am abnormal—so what? I am going to live an abnormal life; I am going to live a deformed life, but deformed in the most beautiful sense of the Word: a life filled with the Holy Spirit.

So let us stand firm. Please stand this morning. I have to do it myself. The days of playing evangelical have been put away, ladies and gentlemen; that never had any legitimacy. The time for playing church, for playing at being evangelical, being this or being that—forget about it. If you want to enter in with God, God says to you: Are you willing to pay the price? Are you willing to live a life of total surrender 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, all-consuming obsession? That is what God is calling you to this morning, People of God. We do not want a religious Church; we want a lean Church, a Church whose sinews can be seen through its skin because it is filled with the strength of God, because it has sacrificed everything in the spiritual exercises that make us dangerous to hell and 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 still have far to go to live up to these things, but that is what He calls us to. It is an independent word; it is an autonomous word. It comes from the mouth of God, passes through this man who needs it, and reaches your life; it takes up residence within you. God says to you: This is My calling, what 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 into your heart and seal it there within you, and tell yourself, “From today onward I will live this way. I will live at white heat; I will live on the edge of the sword; I will pay the price; I will become deformed, but I will reach the destiny God has for me, and I will be useful to God and used mightily.”

Lord, help us become the people You need. Perhaps someone has felt a need to take a greater step and come forward. If you have not received Jesus, do so at this moment; I invite you. If you have lived a Gospel that needs adjustment, if God has confronted you and you feel that you must take that step toward greater militancy before the Lord, come forward. Make a different gesture, something that seals that acknowledgment in your life. I leave this moment open for whatever God may want to do in your life; otherwise, receive it as you feel in your heart.

Meditate in your spirit and make a firm commitment to the Lord. We are going to say to the Lord, “Here I am; I give You my whole life.” I myself say to the Lord, “Here I am; I offer You all that I am. Take my being; I surrender my life to You.” When you leave here, may that prayer have become a reality in your heart and in your spirit.