The Esau Syndrome

May 11, 2019 Gaspar Anastasi

Making positive change, Relationship with God, Success & victory

Esau, the first born, came in from hunting and said to his brother Jacob who was cooking pottage, “Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I’m famished!” Jacob replied, “First sell me your birthright.” Esau said, “Look, I am about to die. What good is the birthright to me?” So he swore an oath, selling his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew. The Bible summarizes this heated exchange with one cold statement: “So Esau despised his birthright” (Gen. 25:34).

Position, Privilege and Power

As the firstborn and heir to his father’s fortune, Esau was to come into Position, Privilege and Power. That was his birthright. However, he wasn’t willing to wait.

Every day the enemy tempts us to compromise future blessings to meet an immediate emotional need. How often we Christians fall prey to the Esau Syndrome! How often we sell our place of Position, Privilege and Power to meet a carnal craving, a lustful appetite! Yet, only God satisfies.

Just like Esau, we reason, “What good is my birthright? I’m hungry now! Why wait? I need someone to love me now!” We see an opportunity to get what we think God wants to give us…but our way. So we close our eyes and leap into sin, emptiness and spiritual death, trying to meet our need instead of relying on God. Thus, the Esau Syndrome has crippled the body of Christ and made us dysfunctional.

No Shortcut to God’s Best

In God’s house there are no elevators, only steps. You must go through the steps He ordains in order to inherit the blessings He has prepared.

I know so many Christians who have promises from God, but they are not willing to allow God to take them on His journey in order to receive them. How sad that is! They end up losing everything for a pot of beans.

It’s like the weight lifter who wants the bulging muscles, so he takes steroids. He looks good on the outside, but inside his body is being destroyed.

Exodus 13:17 says that God led the children of Israel “not in the way of the Philistines.” There was a way to the promised land that was quicker, but in the shortcut, they would have dealt with the lusts of the flesh and they might have gone back to Egypt and into bondage.

Stop Selling Your Birthright

God is re-training us to trust Him rather than ourselves. He wants us to be led by His Spirit and not by our emotions.

Church, stop living out of your soul. Stop selling your birthright. Any time you try to be self-sufficient rather than God-sufficient, you go right back into bondage like before. Allow God to take you on the journey that will mature you. Don’t fall for the devil’s counterfeit. No shortcut will produce a Christ-like result in your life.

Have we not yet come to realize that, unless God meets our need, we will be left hungry and thirsty? Have we not hit enough dead ends to know that God has to bring it to pass? It takes a mature Christian to say no to the lusts of our flesh and yes to Jesus. Let’s be disciplined. Let it not be said of us, “So they despised their birthright.”…

A dwelling place for God

January 5, 2019 Gaspar Anastasi

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Relationship with God

We see in the very beginning that our God wanted specifically to have fellowship with man, His highest order of creation. You could go so far as to say that God created man so that He could have fellowship with him.

The Book of Genesis is the Book of Beginnings, the seed plot of the whole Bible. In other words if something is presented as a principle in Genesis, it’s a principle that God intends to keep throughout the whole book. It’s called the Law of First Mention.

So from the beginning of time until this day, our main purpose as God’s people is to have a close, intimate, personal, on-going relationship with God. I’m talking about a relationship with the tangible presence of God, not just the “idea” of God.

Yet, for the most part, that has not been the primary focus of the Church today. We have been so committed to serving the God of our salvation we forgot about walking in the cool of the day with Him. That’s equivalent to the Old Testament priests who spent all of their time in the Holy Place right next to the Holy of Holies (the raw presence of God). They lost focus of their whole purpose of being priests, which was to dwell in the presence of God.

If we satisfy ourselves with just serving God instead of dwelling with Him, we will miss the whole purpose of our existence.

It’s not that serving God is wrong. It’s just not the end result. It is just one of the steps along the way in our journey as Christians. Ultimately our direction and purpose is to become a dwelling place for God’s tangible presence. It’s in His presence that everything we hope for, everything we need, and everything we desire is fully met.

It’s in the Holy of Holies or the tangible presence of God that He equips us to overcome Satan and all his evil forces of darkness and bring the kingdom of God to bear in our lives and the places that He appoints us to.

Let’s look at the tabernacle once again, since we are the New Testament tabernacle of God today. When the priests went into the Old Testament tabernacle, they first entered the outer courts. It was there that the animals were sacrificed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Today, this is the place where we deny our flesh and praise God and give Him thanks. It’s a beginning and not an end. It is a starting point—not a destination.

Yet so many Christians never get beyond developing a life of praise. It’s good but not the finish line. The whole purpose of the tabernacle was to continue on past the outer courts, then into the holy place, and ultimately into the Holy of Holies—the tangible presence of God. God is longing for us to dwell in His presence and to build Him a place that he would be comfortable to dwell in, not just visit. If you build it, He will come.

Who today will go back to the first principles that God laid out in the Book of Genesis and make His presence the focus of his or her life? Who will build a resting place for the Lord God Almighty? Let our answer today be a resounding “I will, Lord!”…

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