Our sermon text for this morning is Genesis chapter 29, verses one through 30. Genesis 29, one through 30, that's on page 23 of your pew Bible. And as you turn there, I invite you to stand out of respect for the reading of God's word. Then Jacob went on his journey and came to the land of the people of the east. And as he looked, he saw a well in the field and behold, three flocks of sheep lying beside it. For out of that well, the flocks were watered. The stone on the well's mouth was large. And when all the flocks were gathered there, the shepherds would roll the stone from the mouth of the well and water the sheep and put the stone back in its place over the mouth of the well. Jacob said to them, my brothers, where do you come from? And they said, We are from Haran. He said to them, do you know Laban, the son of Nahor? They said, we know him. He said to them, is it well with them? They said, it is well, and see, Rachel, his daughter, is coming with the sheep. He said, behold, it is still high day. It is not time for the livestock to be gathered together. Water the sheep and go, pasture them. But they said, we cannot until all the flocks are gathered together and the stone is rolled from the mouth of the well. Then we water the sheep. While he was still speaking with them, Rachel came with her father's sheep, for she was a shepherdess. Now, as soon as Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of Laban, his mother's brother, and the sheep of Laban, his mother's brother, Jacob came near and rolled the stone from the well's mouth and watered the flock of Laban, his mother's brother. Then Jacob kissed Rachel and wept aloud. And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's kinsman and that he was Rebekah's son. And she ran and told her father. As soon as Laban heard the news about Jacob, his sister's son, he ran to meet him and embraced him and kissed him and brought him to his house. Jacob told Laban all these things, and Laban said to him, Surely you are my bone and my flesh. And he stayed with him a month. Then Laban said to Jacob, Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be? Now Laban had two daughters. The name of the older was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah's eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance. Jacob loved Rachel, and he said, I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel. Laban said, it is better that I give her to you than I should give her to any other man. Stay with me. So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her. Then Jacob said to Laban, give me my wife that I may go to her, for my time is completed. So Laban gathered together all the people of the place and made a feast. But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob, and he went into her. Laban gave his female servant Zilpah to his daughter Leah to be her servant. And in the morning, behold, it was Leah. And Jacob said to Laban, what is this that you have done to me? Did I not serve with you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me? Laban said, it is not so done in our country to give the younger before the firstborn. Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years. Jacob did so and completed her work. Then Laban gave him his daughter, Rachel, to be his wife. Laban gave his female servant, Bilhah, to his daughter, Rachel, to be her servant. So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah, and served Laban for another seven years. The grass withers, the flower fades. The word of our God abides forever. Amen, you may be seated. A young groom wakes up the morning after his wedding from a terrible nightmare. He dreamt that he accidentally married the wrong woman. He's relieved to wake up to the real world until he flicks on the light and he sees it wasn't a dream at all. The nightmare was real. Behold, Leah is there in the bed beside him and not. Rachel. Poor Jacob. Am I allowed to say poor Jacob? Even knowing all the awful things that he did back in his parents' house, I can't help but feel sorry for him. For what comes to him, comes true to him in this text is the thing that many young men before or after their wedding night have dreamt, oh no, what if I wake up to the wrong bride? And it happens to him, horror of horrors. Here he is, and I cannot help but feel a little sorry for him. The question for us is this, where is God in this? In the previous text, in Genesis chapter 28, he had this magnificent dream of God and this ladder and how God promised to be with him and how the angels of blessing were ascending and descending, the very commerce of heaven coming down upon his head, even while he slept. But here, while he sleeps, a nightmare happens. And the wedding night of his dreams is stolen from him. And the marriage of his dreams slips right between his fingers. And you have to wonder, where is God here? Where is he? Did he abandon Jacob? God's not mentioned at all in Genesis 29. He's all over Genesis 28. Where is God now? No, God did not disappear. God is here with Jacob to bless him even in these difficult circumstances, even when this nightmare of his imaginations becomes reality. The lesson for Jacob to learn is that God often uses hard relationships, hard circumstances in our lives to bring about his blessings for us. Jacob learned this lesson through both love and loss. We will too. First, we need to look at this love, this beautiful love story that unfolds in Genesis 29, when Jacob sets his sight on the girl of his dreams. Here he is. on the search for a wife, and not just any wife, but a wife from his family ancestry. He goes back to his family home, and he's looking amongst, at this time, his cousins and his second cousins, and he finds Rachel. And I think it's fair to say it was love at first sight. Rachel strolls up to the scene at the well, and Jacob is hooked from the start. He's never seen such a beautiful woman. He says to the other men hanging around the well, he was there talking with the shepherds and he says, Hey guys, don't you have work to be doing right now? And if you, in case you don't realize it, that's a man code for time for you to split. So I can talk to this girl. Right away, Jacob turns into a flirtatious show-off. 40 years old, here he is, and he's doing things, what do you do? He lifts, single-handedly, this rock that's on top of this well that it would take several men to, they're standing around talking about when they're gonna move this well together, and Jacob sees her, and he just lifts the whole thing right in front of her. Sets it aside. And then he rushes to serve her, saying, can I feed your sheep? This is one of the beginning, the beginning of one of the most wonderful love stories of the Bible. You see it summarized well here. Jacob loved Rachel. And there's something exemplary in Jacob's lifelong devotion to Rachel. Later on in Genesis, even when Rachel has died many years before, You'll see as we come towards the end of Genesis that Jacob in his old age is speaking to his sons and he can't help but mention Rachel, his beloved. He mentions her even though she's been in the grave for many, many, many years. He speaks of his devotion to her, speaks of his love, remembers her. Something here of the romance of Song of Solomon. which we ought to celebrate and pursue in our own marriages. Yes, men, with the wife of our youth. There's something here to say, go after this. He who desires a wife desires a good thing. The goodness of marriage, the goodness of romance, the goodness of Song of Solomon, it's all over this text. And it's summed up here in this beautiful phrase, verse 20, so Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed but a few days because of the love he had for her. Isn't that something? Isn't that something in a way to emulate and pursue? And if we were to look past the human relationship just hovering on the surface of this text, we'd look beneath it and see that there is something here of a picture of Christ and his church. Something here of the picture of all romances have, of a picture of Jesus who took for himself a bride, the church of God. He became a servant to his bride to give her water from the wellspring of eternal life. That is here hovering about this text as well. Any beautiful romance in the Bible really pulls us in and brings us to Christ and his love. Yes, church, for you. He became a servant for you. He labored for your love, for your affection. That is here too, to be celebrated, to be enjoyed. Love. but also loss. This is indeed one of the most beautiful romance stories of the Bible. Nothing quite like Jacob's devotion to Rachel. And yet, this one also turns out to be one of the saddest. Because you see on the night of the long awaited wedding, the bride's father played his trick. At the last moment, Laban switched his oldest daughter, Leah, into Rachel's wedding dress, and the whole scene is set. He uses everything at his disposal, the veil, the darkness, the wedding wine. They blend together to deceive Jacob's senses. The young groom thinks he's marrying Rachel, but the morning after the marriage, the plot is exposed. Behold, Leah! Not beautiful, bright-eyed Rachel, but ordinary, Old Leah. Jacob rushes to his father-in-law to demand the meaning of this. Why did you deceive me? Why did you give me Leah? Didn't I work seven long years for Rachel? And what does Laban say? It's our custom in this country to give the firstborn in marriage first. What a con man. What a trick. But let's be honest, and we need to be honest here. Could this cruelty choose a better victim? It was Jacob, the heel grabber, the deceiver, who stole the birthright from his firstborn brother, Esau. It was Jacob who disguised himself in his brother's clothes, who tricked his father into giving him the blessing. Remember all this, several chapters before? And now the master deceiver is himself deceived. This is dripping with irony. He gets a taste of his own medicine. Now he knows what his brother feels. Now he knows the pain of deceit. Now he, he gets a taste as it were of his own medicine. Do you know the, the family member who's always pulling pranks, but they're not really pranks, they're kind of cruel, and everyone's annoyed at him, and then the pranker gets pranked, and everyone kind of claps for a moment. There is something of that here where we say, finally, poetic justice, Jacob knows what it's like. Jacob stole the rights of the firstborn from Esau, but now he must respect the rights of the firstborn in marriage to Leah. You see that? He tried, what did he do? He was the younger who stole a blessing from the older, but now his father-in-law comes and says, no, no, no, not so fast. Firstborn, first. Jacob deceived his father to steal the blessing, but now his father-in-law uses the same playbook to steal the blessing from Jacob's marriage. What's this all about? I think Galatians 6, 7 sums it up well. A man reaps what he sows. Your sin will catch up to you after a while. Just let it run its course. The consequences of your sin will come back to bite you. A man sows what he, he reaps what he sows. And what did Jacob sow? He sowed deception. What does he reap? Deception. The con man conned. None of this was by accident. It's not just this law of karma either. This was God. God's providence that brought beautiful Rachel into Jacob's life. And it was also God's providence that brought who? Deceitful Laban into Jacob's life. God was responsible for both. He's sovereign over all of this. You see, Laban was a personality perfectly crafted by God to chisel away at the flaws in Jacob's character. Everyone else seemed to be conned by Jacob, but this man at this time has been put there by God because he's the one man who can himself expose Jacob's sin. weather away at his stubbornness and teach him a thing or two about himself. Laban was the Lord's chosen instrument to painfully but productively expose Jacob's besetting sins. Over 14 years of labor to Laban, God formed Jacob into the kind of man he would have him to be. And the Jacob before this and the Jacob after are very different Jacobs. Think back to deceitful Jacob of his youth. And then think about the big change that happens with the ladder from heaven. And Jacob says, I'm a new man, I'm gonna worship God. But then as this new Christian, as this new convert, God just doesn't leave him, say, great, it'll all work out. God starts to chisel away using another person. And after a year, after a year, after a year, Jacob starts to see something of himself and he starts to change. the deceiver exposed and conform more to the image of Christ. Here's a hard truth for us this morning. God is more interested in our holiness than our happiness. I think I need to reword that slightly. God is interested in our happiness through our holiness, not apart from it. You see, God knows that for us to be truly happy means that we're truly holy. And so he doesn't give us whatever we want. He doesn't give us the easiest life. He doesn't give us the happiest life that we would choose. He doesn't give us the people that just pander to us and tell us everything we want. He doesn't put people in our life who just think we're the bee's knees. What does he do? He puts hard people in our life. He puts hard circumstances in our path. The Lord disciplines those whom he loves. Proverbs chapter three, and Hebrews picks up on that theme, doesn't it? And says, it's because he's treating you as sons that you suffer under his hand of discipline. Why is life hard? Why are hard people in my life? Because God loves me too much to leave me how I am. Do you know that Christian? Have you learned that lesson? Perhaps there's a Laban in your life. Who is he? Who is she? Someone who makes life tremendously hard for you and you don't understand why God has tethered you to such a problematic person. Who is that person? Coworker? Family member? In-law? Know this, Christian. God doesn't place difficult people in your lives to torture you, but rather to conform you to the image of his son. Love, loss, and a lesson in all of this. We've already started to bring out some of the lesson, but we need to go learn one more, one more in this text. There's a final lesson which God was teaching Jacob here, a lesson which he intends to teach us, and it's this, that our deep longing for love can only be satisfied by God. For seven long years, Jacob was controlled by a single passion to marry his dream girl, Rachel. She's all he ever wanted. When he set eyes on her, he knew she was the one. But when that dream finally became a reality, or so he thought, it wasn't bright-eyed Rachel, but ordinary Leah. And the marriage that he had for the rest of his life was by no means the marriage he had hoped for, divided between two interests, divided unnaturally between two women. The marriage of his dreams slipped right out of his hands. The dream. I guess you could say in the words of a musical, life has killed the dream he dreamed. And isn't life this way for us too? We set our hopes on the dream girl, or the dream job, or the dream house, But reality always falls short of what we were hoping for. It's always Leah in the morning. No matter how close we get to heaven on earth, reality is always so much more ordinary than we hoped it would be. And the reason why ordinary life can never fully satisfy our deepest desires is that it was never meant to do that. God alone can satisfy us with his unending love, his faithfulness, his rich mercy. In fact, the Bible as a whole is the greatest love story ever told. It's about a bridegroom who pursues his bride, yes, his precious bride, but also, let's be honest, his ordinary, his even ugly and sinful bride at the cost of his own life. The gospel is the good news that God in Christ does not let you chase after your dreams. He doesn't give you your dreams. He gives you something better. He gives you something that you don't deserve. He gives you himself. He conforms you to Christ. And somehow in the midst of all this, it makes ordinary life livable. and even wonderful, we can receive the ordinariness of life for all it is and yet say, in God, I have more. In God, I am fulfilled. Let's go to him in prayer. Heavenly Father, you are better to us, far better than we deserve. You give us better than we would dream for ourselves, and yet what a hardship that is in the midst of it all. And yet by your plan, and even through the sinful actions of man, you are weaving your providence throughout it all to give us what? To give us, Lord, what heaven dreams for us, which is far better than what we would dream for ourselves. We pray we would, by faith, live in light of these things. We would not be a complaining and stubborn people, but that we would be bendable to your will. We pray all this in Christ's name.