And I Was Not Aware Of It

He believes he has traveled out of range and he could tell you roughly where the edge was.

It was not a single event. It was a direction, held for eighteen years, and every year of it took him further from a place he used to be.

And the picture in his head is geographical. There is a country where this sort of thing happens, and he lived in it once, and he has been walking away from it steadily since he was thirty-one.

He is now, by his own estimate, a very long way outside.

And here is what that produces, which is different from unbelief and much quieter.

He does not consider it. Not as a possibility to reject. As a thing that is not on the map where he is standing. You do not decline what is not available.

So he does not pray, and he does not think of himself as somebody who has stopped praying, because you cannot stop doing something you have traveled beyond the reach of.

He is forty-nine. He has not tested the boundary once. He assumed it.

So let me ask you.

Where did you decide the territory ends?

He woke up in open country and said it

There is a man in Genesis who is running away, in disgrace, from a situation he made himself, and he stops for the night in open country because it got dark.

There is no building. There is no altar. There is a stone, which he uses as a pillow, and there is nothing else out there at all.

And in the morning he says this.

When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.Genesis 28:16

Read both halves.

The LORD is in this place. And: I was not aware of it.

He had been asleep on it. He had walked into it in the dark and lain down on the ground in it and had absolutely no idea, and his ignorance did not make the slightest difference to whether it was true.

Genesis 28 has a man discovering that the ground he ran to was already occupied before he arrived, and the Spirit was in that place while he slept unaware on a stone, so the edge you believe you crossed eighteen years ago has never once been on any actual map.

Now, my friend, in this house we are careful, so let me be exact about what I am claiming.

I am not saying your eighteen years did not happen. They happened and they were a direction and you are right that you are a long way from where you were.

I am not even saying you are wrong to feel out of range. That feeling is honest and I would not talk you out of an honest feeling.

I am saying that Jacob felt exactly the same thing and was factually mistaken, in a way that cost him nothing, because being wrong about it did not exclude him from anything. Genesis 28 leaves the reality entirely untouched by what the man assumed, and the Spirit was in that ground while he slept on it, so you are inside something your assumption never had the power to move.

Genesis 28 has the man's unawareness leaving the reality entirely untouched, and the Spirit was in that ground regardless of what he assumed about it, which means eighteen years of never testing the boundary has been eighteen years of declining something that was never unavailable.

And notice where it happened. Not at a shrine. Not in the town he came from. In open country, on the run, on the worst night of his life so far, with a stone under his head.

Genesis 28 sets the whole encounter in the least promising location in the story, and the Spirit chose that stretch of nowhere rather than anywhere respectable, so the place your life has actually got to has never once been outside where this happens.