Pastor Jonathan Suggs preaches from Genesis 28.

This week, we skip ahead a few chapters in Genesis and parachute into a tumultuous moment in Jacob’s life. On the run and alone, exposed and unprotected, God visits him in a crazy dream of stairs coming down from heaven. Through this encounter, we see a host of profound changes: a rock becomes a temple, an ordinary place becomes the house of God, and a fugitive becomes a pilgrim. As modern people, we often lack a sense of the presence of God, but what if our failures of the past, fears of the future, and that awful dread of meaninglessness could be transformed by encountering him? What if we could learn to say with Jacob, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it”?