I Am With You In the Fight | I AM... The God Who Gets Close | Menlo Church Live Stream

This is the beauty of the gospel, the good news of Jesus, that when you finally stop running, when your ram crashes, when your system is on overload, when you finally confess who you really are, God doesn't remove you from his plan. He renames you. He gives you a new identity right in the middle of it. Jacob wrestled with God in the dark and walked away with a limp. And I'd love to tell you that after this interaction, Jacob's a changed man, and he's, just night and day better the rest of his life, but he still fails. He still falls short. He's still being shaped by God day by day. Jacob was like us, imperfectly pursuing God and needing him just as much today as yesterday. [00:47:48] (43 seconds)

To get the true blessing this time, Jacob has to tell the truth. He has to confess his true nature. When god asks, what is your name? Jacob finally stops pretending. He tells the truth. He says, I'm Jacob. I'm the deceiver. I'm the grasper. I'm the runner. I'm the one that's been doing this year after year after year of my life. And look at how God responds. He doesn't shame him. He doesn't say, I know you're a mess, dude. He says, your name shall no longer be called Jacob but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed. [00:46:50] (36 seconds)

See, when the load gets too heavy, our cultural instinct in that moment is to pray a prayer like this. Even if you're not a person of faith, I bet you've prayed a prayer like this. God, please give me the strength to keep up the unsustainable and unchecked level of commitment in my life. I mean, we don't say it with those words. We say different words. They're nicer, but that's what we're praying. But the questions that we're gonna be forced to consider today is what if God isn't adding capacity in your life on purpose? [00:28:30] (27 seconds)

But looking back, you know, football wasn't really the problem of what was going on. Football, it didn't pull me away from God. What I was letting it turn me into did. See, I had sensed a call from God when I was younger about a pull toward orienting my life around him in a specific direction for my life. But football, it gave me a different script to follow. Identity through dominance, value through performance, approval through applause. Now none of that is inherently evil. The sport wasn't sinful, but I could feel myself becoming someone God hadn't called me to be. More ego, more image, more edge, less Jesus. [00:42:02] (39 seconds)

So as we get started, I wanna kind of think about a little bit of the unique facets of our region. We are kinda, like, hardwired into the way we think about life through the way we think about technology. It's kind of everywhere. When somebody tells you in Silicon Valley that they work in health care, in my mind, I'm like, yeah. But, like, technology health care. Right? Like, technology is the first part of every answer, a little bit in people's mind. And in computing, there's this thing called RAM, which provides for your active workspace. [00:26:25] (30 seconds)

And then in the midst of that, we try to upgrade our personal RAM, our internal capacity. We try to think about how we hack or optimize. For some of you, you have optimized sleep to an unbelievable level. Others of you, I heard, are eating or, like, drinking mushrooms in your coffee, which is wild. Right? We become completely obsessed with sheer willpower to keep our background processes running while not always paying attention to how many are still running. But that approach is breaking us because we're not machines. [00:27:56] (33 seconds)