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In this episode...

Jacob, Leah, and Rachel: Laboring for Worth

https://faithfulontheclock.captivate.fm/episode/jacob-leah-and-rachel-laboring-for-worth

Do you attach what you produce to your worth? Episode 136 of Faithful on the Clock uses the story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel to expose if you might be.

Timestamps:

[00:04] - Intro

[00:48] - Summary of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel’s story

[01:31] - The fact Jacob, Leah, and Rachel didn’t want or plan the kind of life they lived; how we also can be thrown into undesirable circumstances we have to deal with

[02:04] - The sexual dynamics and competition between Leah and Rachel in the context of how important motherhood was

[03:56] - How Leah and Rachel attached worth to output, and how we still do — particularly in Western cultures; the importance of attaching worth to our identity in Christ rather than to what we produce or do

[07:24] - Leah and Rachel’s scarcity mindset; how scarcity mindset influences teams today to be more competitive and self-protective and the role of leaders in conveying that dignity is a given

[08:53] - How culture delivers a sense of where worth comes from

[12:25] - God’s use of the overlooked and his elevation of Leah; identifying what we’re still trying to earn

[14:14] - What we name our work exposes hidden wounds or desires; the importance of naming from faith rather than pain

[16:56] - Prayer

[17:40] - Outro/What’s coming up next

Key takeaways:

• Jacob, Leah, and Rachel didn’t have a relationship they wanted or planned on. Like them, many of us are thrown into work or personal circumstances we didn’t expect and don’t enjoy.
• Jacob was physically intimate with both wives for complex legal and cultural reasons. But when God saw Leah wasn’t loved, he opened her womb. But both sisters were desperate to prove their worth through childbearing — that is, by producing what the culture considered to be of value.
• Many women in the world still use childbearing to gain a sense of internal and community worth. But in the corporate space, many woman also have simply transferred their sense of worth to different modes of production. Instead of building your values based on what you can do, build them based on who you are, because what you can do is not static.
• Workers can have a scarcity mindset around pay, opportunity, etc., just as Leah and Rachel had a scarcity mindset around love. And just as it did for them, a scarcity mindset can lead to conflict. Leaders can step in to stop this undercurrent of fear and communicate that dignity is a given.
• Cultural norms are not neutral. They can shape our concept that production and worth are connected and dictate what to produce to matter. It’s better to chase what God values instead of what the culture preaches. What the world needs most is often what the world values the least.
• God doesn’t just choose the top performers. He picks the outcasts and those who are second-class. Asking what we’re still trying to earn can reveal where God needs to work in our lives.
• The way we name things often exposes hidden wounds or desires. Leah named her first sons based on hurt, but she eventually pivoted to naming things based on faith. We can pivot this way, too.

CTAs:

• Have a conversation with a trusted friend, mentor, or family about how you would feel if you couldn’t produce anymore. Would you still feel confident in your worth? Why or why not?
• Conduct a survey in your workplace through the appropriate channels to assess whether people feel like dignity is a given regardless of their production.
• If you have to name something — e.g., a new project — give it a name that honors God and shows a positive perspective, rather than a name that simply characterizes the project

What’s coming up next:

Episode 137 of Faithful on the Clock welcomes guest Matthew Terry for a discussion about courageously stepping into a new calling.

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Thanks for joining me, everybody — I'm Wanda Thibodeaux, your host, and as always, this is Faithful on the Clock, the podcast for Christian professionals where every apple goes into the pie to get your faith and work aligned. I know a lot of you out there have some family issues — am I right? I’ve been there myself. And we can see family strife all over scripture. But today, we’re looking at the story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel — the family who gave us the twelve tribes of Israel — to learn some heavy-hitting lessons about what it takes to see our worth while working in messy, complicated roles and dynamics. Let’s start to unwrap it.

The story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel is often summarized as Leah was the unloved but fertile wife, and Rachel was the loved but barren wife. But if we back up a little starting in Genesis 29, here’s the setup, OK? Jacob happens to meet Rachel at a well as she comes to get water for her father Laban’s flocks. And he’s instantly smitten with her. Like, he’s got it bad. And he makes this deal with Laban that he’ll work seven years for her. But at the end of the seven years, Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Rachel’s sister, Leah. He ends up working another seven years so that he can still marry Rachel, but at the end of it, he’s married to both sisters. So, that’s the dynamic this all starts on.

But what I want you to note here as we get started is that this was not a dynamic they wanted. They didn’t plan this. It only happened because Laban was manipulative for his own benefit. And I emphasize that because many of us out there, we get into situations or roles we didn’t think we’d be in, too. And just like these three, we kind of have to let what we thought we’d have, just toss that out the window, because we’ve been thrown into a completely different life from factors outside our control.

But the basic scene that evolves is that Jacob is being sexually intimate with both wives at the same time. And in that time, once you were married, sex was just part of the marriage contract. And to not be intimate with Leah would have been seen as a real dishonor on the family. So, if some of you are wondering how he could keep being on with Leah when he loved Rachel, that’s a big part of it. But what we see unfold is that God sees what Leah has to deal with. He sees that Jacob doesn’t love her the way he loves Rachel. So, God blesses her womb. But at the same time, Rachel has a really hard time conceiving. Now, why is this important? Because back then, for a woman, being a mother was really important, because children meant that the family line and legacy would continue. So Leah and Rachel become locked in what’s essentially a race to arms. They both give Jacob their maidservants, because since those servants didn’t really have legal standing, Leah and Rachel legally could claim the maidservants’ children as their own. And for a while, every time Leah has a kid, she names the kid after her struggle and basically says, “OK, maybe now that I have this child, my husband will love me.” It’s like the bee Barry in The Bee Movie, where Barry’s just ramming himself against a closed window trying to get outside and he’s like, “Maybe this time! This time! This time!” And Rachel sees her having all these kids, and she gets jealous. She says to Jacob, “Give me children or I’ll die.” And he’s like, “I’m not God. I haven’t kept you from having children.” And Rachel even barters with Leah and lets her have a night with Jacob for some mandrakes, which were considered to be helpful for infertility issues.

So, how does this all tie to the workplace, you’re wondering? Well, if we look at these women, I mean, there’s no question that there’s a lot of hard feelings and animosity. But the core insight is that both these women had internalized the cultural message that their value came from what they could produce. Now, for them, what they produced was the kids. It was essentially their job to, you know, have children. And that was a huge part of their identity and how they thought they could win affection and status. And some of you women out there, especially if you’re in certain parts of the world, there’s still this concept that childbearing is the path to value. But in the business setting, especially in the Western world, we just gain the value by producing in a different way. Maybe that’s, you know, making shoes or cars or some kind of service like electricity. And so we absolutely still equate what we produce or what we are able to do with our sense of self and worth. And the feeling becomes that we are invisible unless there is some kind of output. So, my first message to you is, remember the difference between achievement and accomplishment. We talked about that in depth in Episode 125. But achievement is, you know, you just win the award or the title. It’s another notch in your belt. But accomplishment is really doing something that changes you, other people, or the world. You make a difference for God. And my advice is, build your values based on who you are, not what you can do. Because, I mean, what you can do is so unpredictable, isn’t it? It’s not static. I can tell you, I used to go out and run 10 miles every Saturday. Loved it. It was my alone time when I got to think. But now, you know, I'm not old, but I’m not as young as I was, either. I can’t run 10 miles all the time like that anymore. And some of you out there, I mean, look at what’s happening with AI. You used to be able to really compete doing stuff like software engineering, and now the machines are writing the code. So, even though we absolutely can learn and become able to do new things, the only thing that we really can count on is who we are, and as children of God, our identity as heirs is never gonna change. The value we get from being part of God’s family, we don’t have to earn that by doing and producing. That’s what the apostle Paul was emphasizing in Ephesians 2:8-9, where he says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is a gift of God — not by works so that no one can boast.” And I think a lot of the time, you know, we understand that in the spiritual context, when we talk about the church and whatnot, but when we clock in, we start listening to culture again and we forget it all. And just like Leah and Rachel, we go through the workday thinking we have to prove ourselves with visible output to be visible ourselves. So, every day, I want you to ask yourself, “Am I working to be seen, or am I working from a place of being already seen by God?”

Now, I want you also to see that Leah and Rachel, they kind of had this idea that love and validation were finite. They thought they had to outdo each other to win because there wasn’t enough affection to go around. And we live in cultures of scarcity at work, too. We have this idea in our heads that there’s only so much praise or pay or opportunity to go around, that we’d better beat the other guys to the punch or we’ll lose out. And what that signals to me is that the leaders in the business have not communicated to the workers well enough that dignity is a given. And what ends up happening because of that is, workers really can stop collaborating and just start surviving. Because what are coworkers in that scenario? They’re just people who could steal what you want, right? And so rather than really appreciating each other as children of God who have all kinds of different, unique gifts to offer and working together to glorify Him with something bigger, workers end up self-protecting. And if leaders don’t sense this undercurrent of fear, if they don’t step in to make sure that people know the value they have, it really can create this negatively competitive culture where the people on a team don’t really look out for each other. So, if you’re a leader, ask yourself, “Am I really cultivating an environment where everybody knows they are valued regardless of output?”

A third really big thing is that, to a big degree, we listen to culture for a sense of where worth comes from. Again, for Leah and Rachel, culture said worth was in having kids. Today, a lot of us, it’s more about being busy. You know, do you have the side hustle? Are you always plugged in? I thought that was what I had to do, you know, that if I didn't win the awards or work the hours, then people just wouldn’t care. I’d just disappear into the void. And I did it for a long time until finally, I reached a point where, you know, I was doing all the things, but I was like, dreaming of escape. Because I was just so exhausted all the time trying to make sure I was okay. And so what I want you to see is that these cultural norms, they’re not neutral. They train us to believe specific things about our worth, and unfortunately, that often means believing we can’t rest or that we behave in ways that lead us away from grace and relational health. So, the question to ask yourself here is, “Am I chasing what God values, or am I chasing what the culture is telling me you have to produce to matter?” And sometimes, that gets so tricky, because it ties so closely to the ability to just make a living, right? Like, I’m a writer and musician. I am told all the time, especially now with AI, those aren’t real jobs. And here in the United States, we have a lot of legal cases going on where writers like me are having to fight and say, “No, what we do does have value. We do contribute something to the world.” And so I can tell you, that has been really hard for me, because those gifts, those skills, they are such a part of who I am and such a part of the way I connect to others and to God, and it’s quite frankly put me through the wringer watching the perceived value of what I do just continue to decline over the past few years. It’s absolutely made me wonder where I fit and — just, you know, what God really wants me to do. And I’ve had to really work hard to just focus on the sense of calling He’s given me and not listen to what’s going on. So, if you’re out there today in the same kind of situation, I just wanna remind you that what the world needs most is often what the world values the least. And nothing demonstrates that better than Jesus being put on the cross because people couldn’t see what He was really bringing to the table. The culture said He was nothing but trouble, made fun of Him from where He came from. But hear this, OK? What everybody said didn’t erase the reality of Who He was. And in the same way, culture might be telling you that you have to do x, y, or z before you matter or that this and that is a quote unquote good job that’ll make you a somebody with status and security, but God says you have mattered even before you were born, and the reality is that all you need for status and security with Him is faith. Folks, this is why in Romans 12:2 Paul tells us not to conform to the pattern of the world. It’s so we can focus on God, yes, but it’s also because conforming to the world doesn’t give us the correct picture of our identity and place with the Lord.

This leads me to say, God doesn’t just look at the top performers, the ones who get picked first for the team or catch the eye. He sees the people who don’t have any power, the people who aren’t chosen, the ones who are still trying to earn their place in awful situations they can’t get out of. You know, God understood that Leah felt second-class. Overlooked. That she knew that a deep sense of real intimacy with a husband who loved her, the feeling of being truly pursued for who she was, that wasn’t something she would get to experience. And He sees all of that, and He takes her and ensures that more tribes of Israel come through her than anybody else, one of which was Judah, which gave us David and Jesus. And what’s interesting to me in this is that God took childbearing, the very thing she was trying to use to earn her husband’s favor, and He took it back. He’s like, “This is not about your ability to be fruitful for your husband. It’s about your ability to be fruitful for me. I’m gonna reclaim the childbearing that the world says is valuable and use it to show Who I am through Jesus so that nobody on this Earth is ever gonna have to question their value ever again.” He does not just comfort her. He elevates her. So, I’ll just have you reflect for a minute here. What are you still trying to earn? What is there in your life that you’ve been fighting to do in the hope you’ll become somebody that God wants to repurpose?

The last thing I want to mention is, you know, as I touched on earlier, Leah named her first sons out of her grief and pain and longing. And what I want you to think about here is, what we name our work — our aspirations, how we define success — often exposes our hidden wounds or desires. So, when you think about your job or the way you’re living, are you still naming things after your pain? Because what we see with Leah is that by the time she gets to her fourth son, she stops looking so much to Jacob to fill her need. And when she has her fourth son, she says, “This time I will praise the Lord.” And that fourth son, the one where she shifts and praises God, that’s Judah, the same Judah that will offer the line Jesus comes from, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Friends, healing begins and the exponential power of God shows up when we stop naming things after our pain and start naming them after God’s faithfulness. So, what are you naming in your life or leadership right now? Does it come from insecurity or assurance? And if you’re on the insecurity side, let me just encourage you. Leah, I don’t think she shifted her perspective because some unicorn tapped her with some kind of rainbow wand and told her how awesome God was. I think she switched her perspective because by that time, she’d gathered evidence. She had tried earning Jacob’s love through her womb and it didn’t work. And so I think after having her third child, that was her rock bottom. That was when she really understood her situation and said, “God, my husband isn’t loving me, my sister isn’t loving me, the world isn’t loving me, so all I can do is put my faith in You now.” And if you are at that rock bottom point, you know, you don’t have to have a plan. You can leave that to God. You just have to get to the point where you’re willing to say, “This time, I will praise the Lord.” Because even though it might not feel like much in the immediate moment, that surrender — that moment of praise in the pit — can be the very moment God begins to rebuild your story and plant the seed of joy for you. Just write it on your heart — faith doesn’t mean ignoring what’s hard, and healing often starts when we stop hoping things will change and just see what is — and offer that to God.

Let’s just close it out with a prayer together. If you wanna bow your head or close your eyes, you’re welcome to join me in that.

Lord, the entire world — but especially the business world — is really, really good at telling us that value is only present when there’s a product. But You sent Your Son to remind us that we have value just for who we are. And as we reflect on this story of Jacob and Leah and Rachel, Lord, I ask that You be with everyone out there who is still struggling, who’s still making that pivot to praising and trusting You. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen.

That’s all I’ve got, listeners. Before I get going, I just want to remind you all, as I mentioned last time, Faithful on the Clock has a brand new devotional that’s gonna be coming out in the next couple of months. You can find more updates about that as we make progress at faithfulontheclock.com, or watch our posts on social media. Next show, I’m gonna be chatting with educator and missionary Matthew Terry. We’ll hear all about his work teaching in China and what the experience taught him about answering when God calls you into something completely new. It’ll be a great one for those of you out there who might be wondering where you should be and if you should move into a different path. Take care, everybody, and be blessed.