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It is soap opera ugly!  And one of the funniest chapters in the bible.  What a family! Jacob falls desperately in love with Rachel, works seven years to marry her — and then wakes up the morning after his wedding to discover the wrong woman in his bed.  What follows is a painfully messy story of deception, rivalry, infertility, jealousy, sexual bargaining and a family desperately trying to manufacture for themselves the blessing God has already promised to give. Yet through all the dysfunction, God sees, hears, remembers and keeps his promises.

What if the way to God isn’t something you climb? A man on the run. A night in the desert. A rock for a pillow. Jacob has grasped his brother’s blessing, but now he’s alone, far from home, with nothing to hold on to except promises made to his father and grandfather. Then heaven opens. A stairway reaches the earth, angels ascend and descend, and God promises this undeserving deceiver: “I am with you.”  We don’t climb the stairway to God. God comes down the stairway to us.  Grace comes first. The question then is how we respond?

What do you do with a God this big? Twins wrestling in the womb. A father who plays favourites. A mother who schemes. A firstborn who trades his inheritance for a bowl of soup, and a younger brother who cons his way to the blessing instead. Genesis 25-28 reads like a royal scandal — heir and spare, golden child and disgrace — except the twist is that God had already chosen the *younger* son before either boy had done a single thing to earn or lose it. "The older will serve the younger." Because God is God, and the choosing is his to make.

In life there are so many moments where our faith is tested. It happens every day.  But the question is when the test comes - will our faith look like Abraham’s?

Our passage today finishes with this amazing statement about an ‘Indescribable Gift’?  What is it?  It’s the generosity of Jesus that changes selfish people so that we live generously as well.  Dominic Steele helps us explore what it means for people in the inner west to be truly generous.

We think today about God’s grace to us and how we might best respond holistically to that.  We look with the Apostle Paul to the example of the Macedonian Christians and we hear the challenge to him on whether love is really genuine?

“Rejoice in the Lord always.” This Sunday at Village Annandale and Concord we are listening to one of the most loved, and perhaps most pastorally delicate, passages in Philippians. What does it mean to rejoice always when life is hard? What does it mean to “not be anxious about anything” in a church family where many of us know anxiety personally, medically, relationally or spiritually?  Join us as Dominic Steele leads us as we push into these issues together.

What keeps you going when life is hard, distracting or disappointing? In Philippians 3, the Apostle Paul gives us a bigger goal than success, comfort or simply getting through the week: “My goal is to know Christ.” This week we’ll think about what it means to press on toward that goal, to keep our eyes on heaven, to resist being pulled off course by earthly things and to live now as citizens of the world to come.

Today we are looking at Paul’s warning against putting confidence in the flesh. We examine the danger of trusting in our religious background, moral record, ministry activity or achievements and the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.