Despising the Birthright

Well, I'm very thankful you all braved the blizzard to be here this morning. That was quite a letdown, wasn't it? We had all our snowsuits ready to go, and there wasn't anything to slide down. Well, we want to complete Genesis 25 together this morning.

Of course, last week we spoke about God's purpose according to election, and we just rehearsed that within God's Word to Rebecca. Rebecca, God reveals there are two nations struggling within her womb, and that He has a purpose, His purpose according to election.

As Paul goes on to say, it's before either of these boys are born, before either of them had done anything, whether good or evil, that God had a purpose according to election. It came in this Word to Rebecca, the older shall serve the younger.

So we read not only this, but when Rebecca also had conceived by one man, even by our father, Isaac, for the children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil, so that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him who calls, it was said to her, the older shall serve the younger.

As it is written, Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated. So this morning we're moving on to verses 29 through 34. We're going to start in verse 24. There's one thing I want to pick up on before we move forward, and that is we see and will see this broken family dynamic.

It emerges here in chapter 25, and as we continue across the next several chapters, we're going to see just how dysfunctional the family of Isaac and Rebecca is, and I think that's very important. In fact, we'll see that same dysfunction, that same broken family dynamic when we move forward to the family of Jacob.

So we read, beginning in verse 24, when her days were fulfilled for her to give birth, indeed there were twins in her womb, and the first came out red. He was like a hairy garment all over, so they called his name Esau.

Afterward, his brother came out, and his hand took hold of Esau's heel, so his name was called Jacob. Isaac was 60 years old when she bore them, so the boys grew. And Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, but Jacob was a mild man, dwelling in tents.

And Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his game, but Rebecca loved Jacob. So there's a little hint, the opening of this broken family dynamic. The first thing we see, of course, is the differences between Esau and Jacob.

We discussed that last week. But therein, we see the disunity between these two brothers. They hold precious little in common, in terms of their temperament and their personality. We also see not only a disunity between Jacob and Esau, we see a disunity between which parent is close to which child.

Rebecca prefers Jacob, she has a favorite, and she shows it toward Jacob. Isaac has a favorite as well, he shows it toward Esau. And therefore, not only is there disunity between the brothers, disunity between parental affection, there's also, therefore, disunity in the marriage.

Isaac and Rebecca are clearly somewhat distant in this narrative. And as we move forward to chapter 27, we'll see Rebecca's even willing to deceive her husband, to help her favorite son, who she feels a lot closer to, to go against the brother that she doesn't care for, and deceive her own husband.

So there's just dysfunction all over this family. Now, one thing to take away from here is the danger of favoritism in the home. It's just a passing point that's worth making, because we have a lot of families with more than one child.

Now, I don't know about all of you, if you're children, I know I happen to be the favorite child in my home, understandably. But favoritism is a very sinful thing. Favoritism in the church is a sinful thing.

According to James 2, 9, if you show partiality, you commit sin. And in James 2, he's connecting that to the command to love your neighbor as yourself. And so, the neighbor is not always the neighbor.

Sometimes the neighbor is the sibling. Sometimes the neighbor is the child. You're to love them all without partiality, for, James 2, 9, to show partiality is to commit sin. So if favoritism is a sin in the church, where we're all brothers and sisters, favoritism is still a sin even in the home.

Parents welcome sinfulness into their family dynamic when they're not careful to avoid partiality, careful to avoid favoritism.

Why?

Because they enable or breed jealousy and aggressive behavior and bitterness, if not against the parent, then against the one that they love. We'll see this with Joseph, when his father trots him around in this beautiful multicolored robe, and he's just thrilled.

He's so delighted. But how do all the brothers feel about that? And even Joseph, I mean, frankly, seems kind of like a snot, doesn't he?

Isn't this wonderful, brothers?

I even had a dream that I'm better than all of you. And so, we see this broken family dynamic even there. We see it between Cain and Abel. We'll see it between Joseph and his brothers. We see it here between Jacob and Esau.

They really have no close relationship whatsoever, and it must have something to do with the way that Isaac regards Esau and Rebekah regards Jacob. One wonders how much Jacob's ego was wrongly puffed up, because his mother always entitled him, always gave him privileges, and always enabled his behavior.

And Isaac, really, it's like father like son, as far as Isaac and Esau are concerned. Isaac is driven by the dinner plate. What do we read in verse 28? Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his gain. So his affection is as fickle as dinner.

And as we'll see in our chapter this morning, in our passage this morning, so Esau, his love, his loyalty is as fickle as his appetite. But in the midst of all this dysfunction, God's grace is still at work, and so here we have a note of hope, don't we, that God's able to work in dysfunctional homes.

God is able to redeem broken family dynamics. It's one of the great moments in the account of Jacob's life when he's reconciled with his brother Esau. It's almost something unimaginable here, and when we get to chapter 27, Esau's ready to pull a cane, he's ready to kill his brother, and so that reconciliation is a triumph of God's grace in not only Jacob's life, but really even in Esau's life.

And so God is willing to show grace to us, not because of our family failures, but despite.

Them.

Despite our dysfunction, God is willing to show us grace. So that's just a little application. Parents don't show favoritism, don't be like Isaac and Rebekah. And now with verses 29 and following, we come to the birthright.

Jacob cooked a stew, and Esau came in from the field, and he was weary. And Esau said to Jacob, please, feed me with that same red stew, for I'm weary. And therefore his name was called Edom, another play on the word red.

But Jacob said, sell me your birthright as of this day. Now the birthright, of course, was the honor given to the firstborn son. And so this is a very important factor of ancient Near Eastern culture, still in a lot of cultures today, this issue of primogeniture, that which belongs to the firstborn son.

He becomes the effective replacement head of the household, the leader of the family, leader of the clan, the heir of the father's estate, the one who will take up the father's estate, and he receives a double portion.

He receives a double portion of the inheritance, of whatever is distributed. So the other brothers, they have to fend for themselves. They have their single portion and carve out their own way in the world.

But the first son takes the place of the father, takes the estate and the position within the larger family. Now the birthright is different from the blessing. It's important to point out. Jacob not only takes the birthright from Esau, but he'll later twist in chapter 27 the blessing away from his brother as well.

And we see that in Genesis 27, 36. This is Esau's complaint. He took my birthright and now he's taken my blessing. So the birthright and the blessing are two distinct things. A father would give a blessing irregardless of birthright.

We go on to see a father blessing all of his sons, right? You think of Jacob blessing his sons. But of course, the blessing here would have been extravagant, would have been something highly desirable if you were the firstborn son.

You would probably get a very extravagant blessing as well. And that's why Jacob not only wants the birthright, he also wants the blessing. The blessing is not only a sense of the father's will and desire, sort of a last will and testament for the son, but was also viewed as sort of prophetic.

It was a declaration of what God would do, as though God was speaking through the father as he gave that final blessing to his son. With Esau, beginning in verses 32 through 34, we see the birthright despised.

Look, I'm about to die. What is this birthright to me? You know, you can't help but think of one of those Snickers commercials, you know, you're not yourself when you're hungry. He's just coming from the field and he's like, I'm going to die, I don't care about it, I just need the stew.

Well, he came out from the field, he has full mental faculty, he's able to kind of address the situation. It doesn't seem like he's actually on death's door. What's emphasized here is not so much his appetite as his disdain.

I'm so hungry, I'm sure he was very hungry, I'm so hungry that I'd even give this birthright. And the shock of that is this birthright means that little to me. That's the emphasis here, not the hunger, but the contempt he shows for the birthright.

What use is it to me? Almost sounds like something that he had as a thought over time, year by year. What use is this birthright to me? This is it? A land that's not even our own? This is my birthright?

Whoop-diddy-doo.

And so, no wonder it comes out of his mouth. It was in his heart, for out of the mouth the heart speaks. And so he swore to him. He swore to him, we read, sold his birthright to Jacob, sold it for soup.

Verse 34, Jacob gave Esau bread and a stew of lentils, and he ate, he drank, he arose, he went his way. There's a sort of staccato to the narrative here, very short little moments of action, and that's common in Hebrew narrative.

After the main point is made, you just sort of get a summary with quick verbs. However, here, I think it's really showing just how cold the affection is between Jacob and Esau. It's not like, oh, great, well, let's sit down and have this great meal together, and it's just sort of, you know, he slurps it down and he goes his way, and there's really no brotherly interaction here.

And then we have the summary of this whole account, thus Esau despised his birthright. In this way, Esau despised, hated his birthright. Now there's some interesting things here going on in the text in verses 32 through 34.

Not only do we have him bursting down the tent door, claiming extravagantly, I'm about to die, but we have in our background Esau, the skillful hunter, the man of the field, really what would be characteristically a wild man.

We have in our translation in verse 27 this contrast between Esau, the skillful hunter, a man of the field, Jacob, a mild man. Mild here is interesting. It comes from a root that certainly means mild or quiet, that's fine, but the root has the idea of someone who's self-controlled.

It goes on to mean something like civilized, you know, not wild like those other tribes, those other barbarians, but civilized, self-controlled, dignified. That would be the sense here of Jacob. And the language is something that would be used of shepherds.

We don't think of shepherds as those who are dignified, but to the ancient Israelite mind, a man of the field, a man who's running around chasing after animals is somewhat wild compared to the pastoral life, which is dignified.

It's quiet, it's organized. You have to have a whole system for the cattle that you're caring for. And so a shepherd would have been seen as somewhat more civilized than a hunter. That would have been a little more wild and certainly uncommon to the Israelites.

And so we have this contrast between the hunter, the wild man, and the dignified, civilized Jacob. And yet the tables are going to turn. First of all, we should point out also the only other hunter we've seen so far in Genesis was Nimrod, the godless city builder.

And so, you know, 0 for 2 if you're a hunter as far as biblical encouragement, I suppose, in the book of Genesis. So far, the hunters haven't been very promising. But Jacob is actually going to become the hunter in these verses.

So there's wordplay here. The first thing we read is that Jacob is cooking. The verb is tzid in Hebrew, and it echoes the noun hunter, which would be tzayid. That would have been something that would have been echoed or recognized.

It's ironic within the literature. And it's deliberate. We have a hunter coming in from the field, and what is Jacob doing? He's hunting too. He's cooking. He's laying out a snare for the hunter. And so it's very deliberate.

I know some of you are reading. We could put it this way. Esau is now the most dangerous game. Jacob is hunting Esau. The soundplay from these two words merged to mean he's setting a trap. He's laying out a snare by cooking.

And this is reinforced by another very rare term that when we read, it's translated Jacob gave Esau the stew. It's a very rare verb that in later Hebrew, it only ever means to feed pasture, to feed cattle.

And so again, Esau is typified as sort of an animal, a wild animal that's now been brought into this trap, and he's being fed like an animal. And so again, you have this contrast between the very mild Jacob, who's actually very scheming and very wily.

And he's laid out this snare for his brother who comes in like a ravenous beast, controlled by his appetite, controlled and driven by his hunger. And he sells it. He gets caught up in Jacob's snare. He sells not only the material benefits, the family privilege that attended this birthright, but all of the covenantal dynamics that belong to it because of who his father was, Isaac.

And so that which belongs to Isaac because of the God of Abraham and Isaac, he's willing to forgo. So he despised his birthright. He ate, drank, arose, and went his way. If we ever needed an illustration, as we opened up last week, of the sovereignty of God, but also the responsibility of man, we have it here.

Remember we emphasized last week that the utter sovereignty of God, which in no way responds or reacts to the way and will and works of man, it's by His sovereign decree, Him working out what pleases Him in His great desire to glorify Himself and magnify His.

Name.

That great sovereignty never robs human responsibility, never gives man an excuse. And we see that even here. It's not that Esau has a heart of gold, if we put this narrative in the Hallmark movie frame, and, oh, it's just that unfortunately God's out to get him, and even though he wants to do the right thing, he just can't.

God's made him this way. We don't see that at all, do we? We have divine sovereignty, the electing grace of God, God telling Rebekah the older is going to serve the younger before they've even been born so that His purpose according to election might stand, but at the same time, look how selfish, look how foolish, look how hardened Esau is when he makes this choice.

He's making this choice. And why does he make this choice? It's a free choice. Why does he make it? Because his will, his will, his free choice is in bondage to a sinful nature because his God is his belly, and that's why he makes this foolish, cynical, treacherous choice.

God's sovereignty is never an excuse for man's responsibility. We see not only God's sovereignty, but we see Esau's God-despising, promise-rejecting choice. We don't have a lot of commentary here for Jacob.

All of the emphasis in the narrative is on Esau, but we should highlight what we will highlight as we move forward. Jacob's not a prize either. Jacob doesn't come out unscathed. We see that he's somewhat of a wretch as well.

He's clearly not on the right. He's manipulative. He has a cruel nature. He really doesn't care about his brother. Certainly doesn't show him brotherly kindness. He realizes a meal is a means to get what he wants out of his family rather than caring for his family as he ought.

He also shows us, and this is the foil of the narrative, just how flimsy Esau's desire for the inheritance is. This is a real ripoff. When we think about the possession of Abraham, that he's going to be a blessing for the world, that name will never perish.

That's what Esau's willing to trade away. Not just trade away, throw away, really. It's a ripoff. If we think of some of the great ripoffs of history, some of you children, you're at a place in your homeschooling where you're doing sort of U .S. history, and you get to the 19th century, and the U .S. had some real ripoffs, the Louisiana Purchase.

All right, we basically took the whole middle of our country for about just under three cents an acre.

That's a ripoff.

Or when we purchased the Alaskan territory, it was actually about two cents an acre. We got all of Alaska from Russia. And then about 30 years later, the Klondike Gold Rush was like, hey, all right, this place.

Is full of gold. That was a ripoff.

My favorite ripoff, I think, of all time, 1975, a business executive named Gary Dahl. I wonder if any of you have one of these at home. He had the brilliant idea of taking rocks from a beach in Mexico and putting them in a cardboard box and selling them as pet rocks.

Four dollars a pop, and he sold millions. The guy sold rocks and made millions.

That's a ripoff. That's a ripoff.

You can go pick up a rock for free, but somehow people were spending four dollars to get a pet rock. But this is a much greater ripoff than that. The blessing of God upon Abraham for stew.

It's shocking.

It's scandalous. And you realize the nature of sin here. Sin makes stew more real than some promise that doesn't seem real. Sin makes stew more desirable than the ways of God, which seems so difficult.

Sin reduces you to delivering something of immense value, inestimable value, so that you can pander for crumbs. That's what sin does. Sin is the greatest ripoff there's ever been. Maybe the second greatest ripoff there's ever been, if we go back to Adam, and we ought to be thinking of Adam when we're reading these verses.

Because just like Adam, Esau is throwing away the entirety of a future paradise with God's presence in a land that will belong to him for some food. Just like Adam. We're meant to see this echo of Adam's sin for something so foolish, something so pitiful and paltry and passing, you're going to eat fruit and expel it, and was it worth trading paradise for?

Was it worth severing communion with God over? And that's what Esau is willing to do. It shows the sinfulness of his mindset before he ever took a bite. He had contempt, not so much for the birthright, but for the God of the birthright.

God's covenant with Abraham to bless the nations of the world is the only beam of light in this fallen world at the time. There is no other area of God's grace at work, when we talk about God's redemptive grace, at work in this dark and fallen world.

From Genesis 3 and following, the only beam of light is the promise of Genesis 3 .15, which begins to flower with the call of Abraham in Genesis 12. So in the midst of pitch black darkness, there's a solid beam of light, and that beam of light is God's covenant with Abraham, and Esau would rather dwell in the darkness.

Esau wants nothing to do with what is the most unimaginably greatest privilege possible, to be the firstborn recipient of this unique relationship to God's promise and blessing, and he throws it away like Adam, the firstborn who throws away this unique relationship with.

God.

He throws it away for a meal. As much as we can say about Jacob's scheming, his deceit, he's a twister, he's a sinful man, and God's going to sanctify and straighten him out. But as much as we can say about him in the negative, we can at least say this, he desired.

The birthright.

Esau despised it, Jacob desired it. It was sinful how he sought to obtain it, but somehow beneath his twisted mindset and his sinful activity, there's this little sprout of faith. I want that because I do believe that's a blessing.

I do want to have this unique relationship with God. I don't want to be shut out of that. I don't want my brother to get it, and I'm cast out. I believe what my grandfather has told me about the land.

I believe what he has done, and I want that for myself. He desires the inheritance. In other words, as much as he's a sinner, Jacob believes the promise of God. But Esau is a worldly man. His fixation is on his stomach, on the things of the earth, more than the covenantal lineage of his family.

And we see this play out in the rest of his life. He goes on to marry two Hittite women. He's not like Abraham at all, who takes great pains to make sure that Isaac marries someone who will be equally yoked with.

He goes to live in Edom. He doesn't stay in the promised land, which he could have. It meant too little to him. He had no desire whatsoever for Isaac's inheritance, and therefore, he had no desire whatsoever for the God of Isaac.

He had contempt for it all. And that brings us to our last section, our main focus this morning, which is taking this passage as we're meant to, according to the New Testament. This passage is meant to be a warning to the profane, a warning to the profane.

We pick that up in Hebrews 12, where this passage is quoted. Remember the context of Hebrews 12? The writer of Hebrews has been talking about the suffering of the church, the hostility, apparently persecution that was causing some to want to depart from the faith, to apostatize, most likely back to Judaism, seems to be the context.

Judaism was a religio licita, a legal religion within Rome. Christianity was not, not until Constantine. And so, for Jewish Christians, Jewish followers of Jesus, the heat was getting hot in the kitchen.

Can't we just go back to Judaism? We'll serve God in this way, we'll have a good conscience, we're serving God in our own way, we'll show devotion to Jesus, but we're going to stop identifying ourselves as Christians because we don't like the persecution that's coming against us.

And in the context, the writer of Hebrews is saying there is no going back. You cannot go back, you cannot depart from the faith, you cannot go back to Mount Sinai and think that this is the way you'll find salvation with God.

And so there's both warning but also encouragement. There's tremendous warning, Hebrews 6, and yet the writer can hope better things concerning the church. In Hebrews 12, we have the same context, now some instruction.

Realize that the suffering you're experiencing is the chastising hand of God, and the chastening is never pleasant in the moment, but it bears fruit. And so there's an encouragement. Don't lose heart because God is training you by His chastening unto righteousness.

And so we pick up in verse 12, therefore strengthen the hands which hang down and the feeble knees. Make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated, but rather healed. And pursue peace with all people, and holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

Looking carefully, lest anyone fall short of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springs up causing trouble, and by this many become defiled. Lest there be a fornicator, or a profane person like Esau, who for one morsel of food sold his birthright, Esau is called a fornicator.

We could translate that as an immoral man. Fornicator would make sense in a given context, but when it's used as a general term, the idea is immoral, just generally immoral, not the specific act of fornication.

And he's called a profane man. It's an interesting word, profane. We take that as someone who's needlessly vulgar, rough. It comes from the Latin, phenom, which is a way of talking about a holy space, a holy place, an altar, and the preposition pro, which means before.

So profanum, profane, before the sacred space, outside of the sacred space. So, in other words, you're not acting with reverence like you would in the sacred space, you're acting like you're outside of it, anything goes, so he's profane.

He's not living accountably, he's not living quorum deo, before the face of God. He's profane. He was aware of the glorious promise made to Abraham, but that promise was pale to him. That promise was tense in a land that didn't belong to them, and it was not worth waiting his whole life not to see, like his now departed grandfather.

Yeah, what good did that do for you, grandpa? You died in a tent. What good was that? And yeah, my father, he's getting up there, he's going to do the same. Well, you know what? Not me. Why would I make these kinds of hard choices for my life?

Why would I throw away what I could get out of this world and really make something of myself and have a good life and provide? The promise was pale compared to his immediate desire, as God was his belly.

He let his appetite entice him and draw him away from life in God's presence. This isn't a moral man. This is the definition of a profane man. As Calvin says, the profane are those in whom the love of the world so holds sway that they forget heaven as men carried away by ambition, addicted to money and riches, given over to gluttony, entangled with all kinds of pleasure.

And they give the kingdom of Christ either no place or the very last place in their thought. That is his definition of the profane. And so we're called here in light of Esau's example to look carefully lest any one of us fall short of the grace of God.

Verse 16, lest there be any fornicator or profane person like Esau, who for one morsel.

Of food sold his birthright.

The writer of Hebrews is saying to the church, to apparent believers, don't give away your birthright for some passing of sin. This is a warning to the profane within the church. And of course, we confess that those who have genuine faith, true faith, ultimately cannot lose their salvation.

But we must never think that we can ignore a warning given to the church, which is meant to clarify whether we are in the faith. Who is this warning for if it's not for the church? It's who it's written to.

This is a warning for the church. This is a warning for us. When we actually heed the warning, we prove that we have genuine faith. This is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10, let him who thinks he stands, take heed.

Let him who thinks he's under the impression, he's sure, he has confidence that he's standing, let that man take heed lest he fall. So how do we take heed in light of Esau's example? I want to give five ways I think we can take heed.

So the first, beware of the muckrake. Beware of the muckrake. This is one of my favorite images from Pilgrim's Progress. Some of you have used a muckrake without knowing what a muckrake is. A muckrake is a rake you use to spread manure.

You'd use it to scatter it around the fields in order to cultivate the soil. And so the muckrake would be at the end of that cart full of dung, and you would rake it off and rake it around, and the whole time you're trying to get that rake to spread this foul heap of stuff.

And John Bunyan, of course, in Pilgrim's Progress, the second part, he speaks of this muckrake. And it's from John Bunyan, interestingly, that the term muckrake enters really into English vocabulary as a metaphor.

And so investigative journalists are called muckrakers, right, because they have to dig out the dirty details of a situation or of a certain person. Now the reason I say the first point is to beware of the muckrake is this.

Esau's decision was impulsive, right? He burst down the door, and he's like, give me the stew.

I don't care about my birthright.

Give me the stew. It's a completely impulsive decision. But one of the things you realize in the Christian life is impulsive decisions are never truly that impulsive. They always have roots that have developed over a long time, and by the time you get to make things that impulsively, you've laid down thousands of small negotiations that have brought you to that point.

A man doesn't wake up one morning and say, after 13 years of fidelity to my wife, today I'm going to commit adultery against her. He has to make thousands of little adjustments and compromises until he gets to the point where what seems impulsive externally is actually the natural progression of the way he's been.

Living.

And that could be true of any sin that may seem impulsive to us. And so there's years of training, and there's a continual practice of disregarding the means of grace or the things of the Lord. And that means that for Esau, what seems so impulsive actually was not all that impulsive.

At all.

It had begun a long time earlier when Esau, unlike Jacob, was disregarding the things he was hearing, was showing little interest or concern for that which belonged to his family by way of God's promise.

In other words, his mind was fixed upon the things of the earth. He was muckraking, and he wouldn't look up. And that impulsive decision came after a long way of living with his eyes to the ground and his rake in the muck.

This is what Christiana says. This is in the House of Interpreter. She's taken into a room, we read, where there was a man that could look no way but down with a muckrake in his hand. And there also stood one over his head with a celestial crown in his hand and offered him that crown for the muckrake.

But the man never looked up, and he didn't give any regard. He raked to himself straws and the small sticks of dust on the floor. And Christiana said, I persuade myself that I know something of the meaning of this, for this is a figure of a man of the world.

Genesis 25, a man of the field. Interpreter, you've said right. This muckrake shows his carnal mind. And you would see him. He'd rather rake up the dust of the floor than to what calls to him from above with a celestial crown in his hand.

He'd rather lap up a bowl of stew than look up to God's crowning covenant and a future.

Of glory.

This is to show that heaven is but a fable to some. The promise to Abraham is but a fable to Esau. And that things here are counted as only things substantial, real, like stew. Now it was also shown to you that the man could look no way but down.

It's to let you know that earthly things, when they have power upon men's minds, carry their hearts away from God. And then Christiana said, oh, deliver me from the muckrake. That ought to be the Christian's prayer, lest we be profane and immoral like Esau and despise our birthright as the secondborn of God.

Deliver us from the muckrake, which means examining ourselves. What is causing me to look downward? What's causing my affections and my interest to drift away from the things of the Lord? The call to Christians is, Colossians, to set your heart on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, not on earthly things, a believer with a stomach for the world, a believer with his head to the muck will sell his birthright for stew.

So first point, beware of the muckrake. Second point, check your appetite.

Check your appetite.

We're creatures of flesh. We're living in a fallen world. God's work of sanctification is still underway within our lives. We're being gloriously conformed to the image of our Savior, but only by degree of glory to the next degree of glory and through seasons and trials and many hardships that we endure.

And that's just to say we all have fleshly appetites, and we need to check those appetites. James 1 talks about this appetite, this desire, and he frames it as a birth cycle. This is beginning in verse 14 of James 1.

See how it's a birth cycle. Each one is tempted when he's drawn away, by the way, in the Greek, that's the word for snare, just like we're seeing in our passage, dragged away by the nets, as it were. Each one is drawn away by his own desires and enticed.

And then when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin. And sin, when it is full grown, it brings forth death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. So do you see the birth cycle of sin? It's spoken of an act of consummation leading to conception, leading to birth, leading to death, right?

The enticement, the conception, the birth, and then it becomes full grown, and then it brings forth death. That's the birth cycle of sin. Where does it begin? Each one is tempted when he's drawn away by his own desire.

It begins with desire. There's a danger when we're not checking our desire, our appetite. There's a show, I don't know if it's still on, I don't know how old it is, but you can see interesting clips of it here and there.

It's called My 600-Pound Life. And it's usually sort of little video accounts of people who are undergoing bariatric surgery. They're morbidly obese, they'll die within a few years if they don't take drastic measures, and so they go fly out to some center and they undergo, you know, pre-op, and the idea is we're going to do bariatric surgery, reduce the size of your stomach, and then you have to gain control of your appetite and you'll be able to lose all sorts of weight.