Preached on July 26, 2026, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Genesis 29:15-28.
Today, we’re continuing the story of Jacob that I was also in last week. To refresh your memory: Isaac and Rebekah had twin sons, Esau the elder and Jacob the younger. Isaac loved Esau but Rebekah loved Jacob. Jacob was a trickster, a striver, a deceiver. He took advantage of Esau’s hunger after a long hunt and convinced him to trade his birthright for a bowl of lentil stew. Then Jacob tricked his father into giving him the blessing that would rightfully belong to the elder son. After this trickery, Esau was intent on killing Jacob, who ran for the hills.
His first stop was a town then called Luz. After his mystical encounter, Jacob renamed it Bethel, the House of God. Encouraged by God’s presence, Jacob continued on to Haran.
In the parts that the lectionary skips, Jacob makes it to Haran, the land of his mother’s family. He meets Rachel at the well and learns that she is the daughter of Rebekah’s brother Laban. She brings Jacob home, where Laban welcomes him.
Now, remember what started this all: Jacob is running for his life. Laban knows this. Eventually, Jacob establishes himself as a semi-permanent fixture in Laban’s household, but throughout the story, Laban clearly knows that Jacob has limited options. Jacob cannot simply return to Canaan, for fear of his brother. So Laban has him cornered.
This is true of so many refugees. When war breaks out, innocent people are displaced. They can’t stay where they are, for fear of being caught up in the violence between factions. So they run for the hills, or to be more precise, they escape the war zone and seek a place on the other side of the border. For example, in Sudan, a civil war broke out in April 2023. By the end of 2025, nearly 12 million people had been displaced, including more than 4 million who crossed the border into Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, and other neighboring countries. This is the largest active refugee situation in the world today, though there are many others.
Now, what do you do if you are one of those millions of people seeking safety? You take what you can get. Egypt doesn’t have formal refugee camps, which means freedom of movement, but also means that nobody is actively taking care of the refugees. Instead, they have to find what work they can. They endure whatever living and working conditions they must, because the alternative is a return to their violent homeland.
In other nations, refugees are housed in camps with limited facilities and supplies. It’s just too many people for those nations to support. In Uganda, some refugees have to live on 500 calories a day. Keep in mind that the average American consumes 3600 calories a day, though we would probably be healthier with about 2000. But again, refugees have to take what they can get.
And those are refugees who have done nothing wrong. Jacob was no saint. He wasn’t fleeing a famine or a war. He was fleeing the consequences of his actions. I’m reminded of Lee, one of the Magnificent Seven in the original movie with Yul Brynner. Lee was a dapper gunfighter and vicious killer. He had killed his enemies, but that meant he was a wanted man and had to pay much more for much worse accommodations. He said, “I have the most stylish corner of the filthy storeroom out back. That, and one plate of beans. Ten dollars a day.” When you act without integrity, in violation of God’s plan for universal human flourishing, you place yourself at the mercy of those who would exploit your vulnerability like Laban did to Jacob.
The solution is to always act with integrity. Simple, right? I’m working through a book titled The Way of Integrity. In fact, I’m planning on a deep dive with it when I go on my annual silent retreat next weekend. “Integrity” has a certain judgmental connotation, but the book uses the more faithful definition of it: intact, one thing, united and whole, functioning correctly. I hope the plane I take to Dallas tomorrow has integrity—everything working together the way it should, the way its designers intended.
The Way of Integrity is about achieving complete alignment of body, heart, mind, and soul. This isn’t a moral judgment so much as an honest accounting of who you really are and what you are really supposed to do.
The problem we all face is culture. None of us were raised by wolves in the wilderness, right? We all grew up surrounded by people who had certain beliefs. Our family of origin is the strongest influence, but certainly not the only one. We continue to absorb messages from the media, from our friends, from our extended family, from the groups to which we belong. These messages shape our beliefs about ourselves and what we should do.
A great example from the book: The author describes a man who worked as an advertising executive. He was raised with the belief that a man is obligated to make the most money possible to provide for his family. But he was miserable, absolutely miserable. He was stuck between the beliefs drilled into him as a child and the truth of who he really was. That internal conflict affected his health and his relationships. Eventually, he quit the advertising job and opened a martial arts studio for disadvantaged kids—much less lucrative, but far more rewarding.
That’s integrity. Listening to your personal truth about who you are and what you are called to do, rather than cultural norms, family expectations, and so forth. And it applies to organizations as much as to individuals. A whole organization can buy into a certain set of expectations and ruin itself, rather than staying aligned with its own truth and calling. My dad worked for Westinghouse during an era where they abandoned their core engineering principles and instead followed investors’ desires that they develop a real estate financial division. That eventually led to near bankruptcy and the downfall of an industrial giant. They abandoned their own truth and paid the price.
But what is truth? What is your truth? Ah, that’s the hard part. How can you tell when that voice in your head is God, or your parents, or the guy on TV? Obviously, you should listen to God more than the others, but how can you tell?
Without giving away the whole book, which I couldn’t do in a short sermon anyway, I’ll just point to a few things that help you to know when you are not following your truth. The first is feeling purposeless. Everything seems meaningless. Take the ad executive. The purpose of his job was to make money, but he just didn’t care about the work itself.
The second is emotional misery. You might feel sad, or angry, or fearful, or anxious. You might even have a panic attack. You might spiral into depression.
The third symptom is physical deterioration. That’s a symptom of depression, too. Even without depression, though, just suppressing your inner truth can lead to chronic illness. Interestingly, secret-keeping is linked to higher heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, and glucose levels.
The fourth symptom is consistent relationship failures. You end up in relationships of all sorts that don’t really fit because you are not living your truth. So the relationships don’t last. You end up disconnected and lonely, even in a crowd.
The fifth symptom is consistent career failures. You can “fake it ‘til you make it” up to a certain point, but eventually, if your heart isn’t in your work, you will not succeed. Simple tasks will become major challenges. You might know what you should do, but you just can’t force yourself to do it.
And finally, the sixth symptom is bad habits you can’t break. Maybe it’s drugs or alcohol, maybe it’s Candy Crush or Facebook, maybe it’s games or gambling. I heard a fantastic podcast about addiction where a psychologist confessed to an addiction to romance novels. These bad habits give you temporary release from the internal struggle that comes from not living your truth, and eventually take on a life of their own that consumes you.
The worst lies are the lies you tell yourself. And so, you need to be honest about who you are. Inevitably, that means being honest in all things. As Mark Twain said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” You don’t have to remember which lie you told to get ahead if you live from a place of integrity. Simple, not easy.
Our society, and all human societies, are lubricated by little white lies. When someone says, “How are you?” how do you respond? Do you say, “I’m fine”? Are you really fine? Maybe, maybe not, but that’s the social convention. If you disagree with your boss, or your spouse, or your friend, do you say so bluntly, or do you claim that you mostly agree and put off the conflict to another day?
Fortunately, Jacob isn’t subtle in his deception. He’s blatant, so we can see the cost of his deceit. He was acting from a belief that he inherited from his culture. He thought that the most important thing was material wealth, so he should do whatever was necessary to get it. He paid the price for following this belief, rather than following God’s plan.
Again, the worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. Last week, the Way Forward committee held a meeting. I haven’t discussed it with anyone, but I hope it went well and the process goes well in the coming weeks, months, and years. The key to its success is embracing the Stockdale Paradox. I’ve probably mentioned that before. Admiral Stockdale was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam. He was once discussing his ordeal with author Jim Collins and said, “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
We can and must have faith in the central message of the book of Revelation: in the end, God wins. But we must also be truly honest about the facts of our current reality. Today’s congregation is far removed from the one I joined eighteen years ago. Many members have left us, due to death, illness, moving to another city, or simply moving on in their faith journeys. Those of us who are still here are eighteen years older. Ignoring this reality will surely lead to poor decisions about our future together.
The good news is that it’s never too late to acknowledge your truth. Eventually, Jacob realized that he had strayed from the path that God had laid out for him. Eventually, Jacob found his own truth, the truth that he needed to reconcile with Esau and return to the Promised Land. When he did, he became the father of a great nation. God did not intend for Laban’s actions, but worked through them for good. Leah, the unloved elder sister who was betrayed by both her father and her unwilling husband, was the mother of six of Jacob’s sons, including Judah, patriarch of the southern kingdom, and Levi, patriarch of the priestly tribe. Jacob returned home with many livestock, ready to establish himself without needing his ill-gotten gains. His time away, including an extra seven years that Laban tricked him into, gave Esau time to establish himself and forgive Jacob for what he had done.
We too can turn our lives around. We can acknowledge the ways we are living out of alignment with our true selves. We can discern God’s voice among all the other voices in our heads telling us what to do. We can speak the truth in our families, in our church and other organizations, in our communities, and in our workplaces, and lead everyone to a life more aligned with God’s will. In so doing, we can find meaning in any suffering, shed the emotional baggage of cultural expectations, and pursue a life of flourishing. May each of us individually, and all of us as God’s people, discern our truth and have the courage to live into it. Amen.
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