Sermons in the He Has A Plan Series

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Last week, Joseph's story reached its incredible conclusion in an emotional reunion with his brothers. Now we reflect on everything that happened in Joseph's life and all we have discussed in previous weeks. We will marvel at the sweeping and stunning sovereignty of God as we ask together what it means for us today to continue to believe that He has a plan. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. If we haven't gotten the chance to meet, I'd love to meet you afterwards between the service and the meeting that I have to go to, but I'd still love to meet you afterwards. If you're watching online, thank you for doing that. If you're catching up during the week, we are grateful that you are doing that as well. This is the last part of our series in Joseph, going through the life of Joseph, and I hope that you guys have enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed kind of diving into the story and getting to preach it every week. I love the stories of the Old Testament. I love trying to help them come to life and taking time to go through them and see that there's really so much there for us to learn from that points to things that are relevant to us today. Just for my own curiosity, by show of hands, those of you who have heard most of these sermons and been in here or watched online for most of these sermons and seen the bumper videos, how many of you have picked up on the fact that it changes every week, that there's different words being said every week? Not very many of you. Some of you are like, wait, what? Yeah, we rewrite them every week to catch you up with the story. And we were joking as a staff, wondering if anybody knew that we were actually doing that. And my bet was no, and I was mostly right. So there we have it. We're not doing that for you ever again. We're just going to make the same bumper videos. And you're just going to have to be stuck with them. So sorry. As we finish this week, I'll remind you that last week, we really, we reached the end of the story, right? We reached the end of the narrative. We had moved all the way through, and Joseph was finally reunited with his brothers. His father was told that Joseph was alive. Jacob was told that Joseph was alive, and he was going to go down and meet him. And he looked, and he said, when he saw all the workings of God, he said, it is enough. And we kind of talked about the profundity of that phrase and everything behind it. And so the whole time that we've been moving through, I've been saying, this is really one big long seven week sermon. And so this is the part of that long sermon where we reflect on all the things that we just learned and saw. And it just occurred to me, I'm going to have to take my watch off. The Falcons are about to start playing, which means my friends are going to be texting like crazy. It just went off and something happened in the game already. This is actually why I had this installed. I'm watching the game as I preach there this morning. That's not true. And that joke was given to me by Kyle before the service. So thank you, Kyle. It worked great. Everybody seemed to love it. Yeah, it was very good. It's very good. Part seven. This is the part where we watch and reflect on all that we've learned. And we ask, what does this mean for us? What's the overarching point of the story of Joseph? Not just what do we see when we drill down into the individual details, but as we move through the whole story, what is it that we learn and how does that impact us? And that, to me, what we learn from the entire story of Joseph is probably my favorite thing about the story. As it was said in the intro video there, that this is the most sweeping and stunning depiction of the sovereignty of God, I think, that we find in the Bible outside of Jesus himself. And so I want us to see the story of Joseph the way that I look at it and see it now. To help us do that, we first look at this summary verse from Joseph. This is in Genesis chapter 50. The family has moved down. Pharaoh has given them the land of Goshen. That's where they're living. And Jacob's life is coming to an end. Their dad is about to die. The brother's father is about to die. And the brothers kind of start to murmur and realize, hmm, dad's about to pass away. And when he does, the gig may be up. Joseph may still be mad at us. He may still be harboring some anger against us. So there's a chance that once dad dies, he's going to let Benjamin stay alive and he's going to kill us for revenge. And Joseph catches wind of this thought. So he calls the brothers to him and to ally their fears, to help them just relax and know that he has nothing sinister planned. Joseph says this in Genesis chapter 50, verse 20 to his brothers. And this is a great summary verse that many of us have probably heard before. He says this, as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. Now, many of you probably heard that verse before. You meant it for evil, but you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. But I think put in its proper context, in this big narrative of the life of Joseph, to know exactly what his brothers did, that Joseph had those dreams and the brothers did exactly the exact opposite of those dreams and sold him into slavery and they meant it for evil. But Joseph, now presumably 20 years later, knows that that was God working and that God meant it for good. So for Joseph to say that, what does he mean? How does he know that God meant it for good? How does he see God's plan come to fruition? What are the layers behind God meaning it for good? And all of the implications of the story of Joseph and what kind of plan and for whom was God weaving it exactly? And so to do that and to think through really all the repercussions of the plan that God had for Joseph throughout his life and the story that we just looked at, I want you guys to think about something with me. This is going to be handy for me to use as we go throughout the sermon today to kind of refer back to this. But I don't want you guys to take out your phones because then you might just stay there and I'll get real discouraged. But think about looking at your map on your phone or on your computer. You pull up Google Maps or Apple Maps or whatever it is you use, and you zoom in on one particular property. Maybe it's your property. That's all you can see on the screen is just your house. And then imagine pinching it or zooming back or whatever it is and pulling back, and now you can see most of the city. You can see where your property sits in relation to the rest of the city. You can see the streets that surround your community, the different shops and restaurants and different things and schools that are in your community, and you kind of realize that your house exists within the broader context of this community, and then zoom way out until you can see the whole country. And realize that this one house exists in this community, which exists within this country. And you could zoom in on any different portion of the country and find your own community, find a different community. And then within those communities, you can find your own house or another individual house. So it's kind of the same idea that's working on three levels, right? At the home, and then at the community level, and then at the country level. And I bring that up because I think it's helpful to think of Joseph's story as a home within a community, within a country. I think there are layered truths to the story of Joseph and layered evidences of God's plan. And here's what I mean. When we read the story of Joseph, we've said all along, he has a plan, he has a plan, he has a plan. Each one of the voiceovers that we wrote for the videos ended with the phrase, he has a plan. He has a plan. Each one of the voiceovers that we wrote for the videos ended with the phrase, he has a plan. Each week we leave ourselves in a place where Joseph has to choose to continue to cling to the belief that God has a plan. And so this week, I want us to see the multifaceted levels of that plan. So the first one is God has a plan for his child. What do we see when we look at the story of Joseph? We see that God has a plan for his child. God has a plan for Joseph as an individual. God gave him those dreams when he was young. He said, your brothers and your mom and your dad are going to bow down to you one day. God knew that in his arrogance, he was going to go tell his brothers. He knew that in that arrogance, he was going to get thrown into a pit and sold into slavery. And God knew that he needed to plant Joseph for Joseph's own sake, that he needed to be associated with Pharaoh. But if you go back through the whole story, there's no way to get a nomad from Canaan into the court of Pharaoh in Egypt. So how's he going to do that? So God enacts a plan. And part of that plan is to let Joseph be a snot-nosed brat so that his brothers don't like him. And then they throw him into the pit. And they're going to kill him. But Reuben whispers, maybe let's not do this. Maybe let's just sell him into slavery. I don't know this or not. This is total conjecture. But what do you think are the chances that the Holy Spirit whispered into the ear of Reuben, hey, why don't you sell him into slavery instead? What do you think are the chances that God was present in that moment to change the mind of his brothers to what he needed them to do? His chances are pretty good, personally. He sells them into slavery, the exact opposite of the dreams that he was given. How could this possibly be the case? He's been promised that this is going to happen. He's been promised, he's claiming the promises of his great-grandfather Abraham that were passed down through his grandfather Isaac, through his father Jacob, and now bestowed onto him as the firstborn son of his beloved wife. Joseph is going to live out all of these things, except now he's in the back of an ox cart on the way to Egypt, and it feels like none of those things are going to come true. But God was working in the details of that plan. God sent him down there. He gets down there. He's still got to get him associated with Pharaoh. How's he going to do that? Well, he gets bought by Potiphar, a royal servant. So that when Potiphar's wife would eventually accuse Joseph of sexual harassment falsely, and he gets falsely imprisoned, he doesn't end up in the general population prison. No, he ends up in the royal prison with royal prisoners who are associated with Pharaoh this whole time. Even though it doesn't look like that the dreams are going to come true, even though it doesn't seem like God is with Joseph this whole time, God is working his plan and his child. He interacts with the cupbearer. The cupbearer goes to Pharaoh two years after that interaction. He's swept up into Pharaoh's court. He's put where he needs to be. He's got the preparation that he needs. He's had time to age and mature. He's got experience and leadership already when he rises to prominence in jail and when he rose to prominence at Potiphar's house. And now he's ready to step into his role as the secretary of agriculture for the most powerful nation in the world. Number two in command right behind Pharaoh. He's done this before. He's interpreted the dreams before. He was ready for his moment. And this whole time, God has been working his plan. Do you see? To get Joseph into that place. That was his plan for his child. And throughout the whole plan, there was plenty of circumstances where Joseph could look around and say, God, this plan ain't working, man. The things that are happening in my life are not what I expected based on the plan that you gave me. So we just had to trust that God had one. And so we see this whole time that God has a plan for his child. And we talked about when he rose to prominence last week, I said, the story could end here. When he's in charge, he's got his sons. He names them Manasseh and Ephraim. And it means the Lord has provided it for me in my time of trial. Like that story could have been done there. It's good. It's done. But the story is about more than God's child because God has a plan for his children. Joseph is the house. He's the child. But if you zoom out, you see that God has a plan for his children, for his community, for his people. God has a plan for Joseph's family. Last week, we saw in the verses, we saw in the passage a couple of verses where Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and he says, don't worry, I'm not angry at you. You intended this for evil, but what you think you're the one who sent me here, it wasn't you, it was God. And he sent me here to preserve many lives. And so what we also see, this kind of pulled back layer of the story, is that God wasn't just preserving the life of Joseph to get him where he needed him to be, but he needed Joseph to be there because he needed to protect his children. He needed to protect his people. He needed to protect the offspring of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Because we learned in week one, God made promises to Jacob and God's commitment to his promises are not contingent upon our behavior. Remember? And so God made a promise to Abraham that you're going to have the land of Canaan. You're going to have so many descendants, it's going to be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. And you're going to have one descendant that's going to come and bless the whole earth. That's the plan. And so God keeps his promise to Abraham. He gives him a son, Isaac. He keeps his promise to Abraham through Isaac, giving him a son. He keeps his promise to Jacob by showing him favor until Jacob finally realizes you've been wrestling against God your whole life. Just relax and enjoy God's favor. Joseph figures out to enjoy God's favor, even when it doesn't make any sense. And he looks around and the plan doesn't make any sense. He's just hanging in there and trusting that God has a plan. And now God's put him in this place where he can provide for everybody. And the whole time he's not just doing it to provide for Joseph. God is doing it, I think, because he knows the descendants of Abraham will not survive a seven-year drought in the land of Canaan. They can't do it. When the brothers came asking for grain the second time, they were in year two of the famine. Now this is conjecture. I don't know this for sure. But when are they going to run out of money to feed a small clan of people? When are they going to start? How many more trips to Egypt can the brothers make before they have to start choosing who gets grain when they get home and who doesn't? They have no idea the famine is going to last seven years. They've probably got a year or two left before they've got to start asking some really hard questions questions because if there's nothing growing on the ground, then there's nothing that their flocks can eat. And if there's nothing that their flocks can eat, then they have no way to make money. And if they have no way to make money and there's nothing on the ground and they have no flocks left for them to eat, then what are they going to do but perish? So God, to protect his children, not his child, his children, takes one of his children and places him in a place where he can, according to Joseph, preserve many lives. And so in the story is God keeping his promise to Abraham and preserving the promise to the community, preserving the promise to his children to keep them where he needs them to be. They are brought down, put in one of the most fertile places in Egypt, the land of Goshen, and they are told to live there and flourish there. So when we pull back from just Joseph, we realize that God was working a plan for his children this whole time too, for all of Joseph's family. The brothers had no idea that they were part of this plan, but they were. They were just pawns in what God was doing. Then you pull back even further at the kingdom view, and you realize that God has a plan for his kingdom. What he's working in the life of Joseph, those individual details and the ebbs and flows that we've followed over the last several weeks, he's not just working for Joseph's benefit. He's not just working for his children's benefit. He's working for his kingdom's benefit. We're in Genesis 50 this morning. When you flip the page to Exodus chapter one, what do you learn? You learn that 400 years after Joseph had passed away and Pharaoh had forgotten about them, Moses is on the scene. That's how the stories are linked together. And by the time Moses comes on the scene in Exodus chapter 1, theologians believe that there was between 500,000 and 600,000 Hebrew people living in Egypt as slaves. I have to believe that for some reason, God didn't believe that this family from Abraham was going to make it in the land of Canaan on their own. He had to believe that there was no way they were going to grow to what they needed to be to be able to conquer the land of Canaan and possess the kingdom that he had promised them that they would possess. So what does he do? He takes his children down to the most powerful nation in the world and he incubates them for 400 years where they can grow and develop culture and develop a faith and develop a way that they interact with their God so that when Moses comes on the scene, who by the way, another stunning view of God's sovereignty, God plucks Moses out of Hebrew slavery and puts him in the palace of Pharaoh where he gets the best education in the world. He's exposed to leadership his whole life. He grows up, he's haughty, he goes out into the wilderness and gets humbled, and then he's called in Exodus 3 and 4 back to Pharaoh from the burning bush to go lead his people out into Canaan because now they are finally ready to go live where I want them to live. None of that happens if Joseph isn't sold into slavery when he's 17 years old. None of that happens if Potiphar's wife doesn't falsely accuse him. None of that happens if Joseph doesn't get chosen to go interpret the dream for Pharaoh. None of that happens if Joseph isn't placed as second in command to help preserve the line and bring them down and incubate them. God is planning things on such a bigger scale than Joseph would ever acknowledge or imagine. And so we go from the house to the city to the nation where God's really enacting his plan. We've been saying this whole time, he has a plan, he has a plan, he has a plan. And we've been spending most of our time focused on his plan for Joseph and what it means for him. But as we finish the story, we need to peel back and say, what does it mean for God's children? And then we pull back even more and say, what does it mean for God's kingdom? What is it that he's doing on this huge eternal scale that he's enacting through the life of Joseph? And suddenly we begin to see God's sovereignty woven all throughout the story, understanding that he's in every detail, that he's allowing and disallowing all the different things to bring about the future that he once brought about. And the great part of Joseph's story and seeing God's plan on that scale is realizing that if God has a plan for Joseph, that he has a plan for us. If God had a plan for his children then, then he has a plan for his children now. If God had a plan for his kingdom then, he has a plan for his kingdom now and still. And as Christians, and this is the great part, this is the part that I want us to sink into. As Christians, we have to understand that we are still in the land between, right in the middle of God's plan. We slowed down and we looked at one phrase that Doug did such a fantastic job with, the fact that Joseph had to wait in prison for two years and that land between promise and fulfillment and the already and the not yet. And God, I know that you told me that this would be true, but it's not true yet. And so I wait on you. If you are a Christian, that is where you are. And the promise that Jesus died on the cross for you and that one day he's gonna come back and get you. That's where we find ourselves, in that land between, in that land between promise and fulfillment. All Christians live there. And we cling to the truth and to the promise that God still has a plan. And his plan, by the way, is, was, and will always be Jesus. That's his plan. That's what we cling to. As a matter of fact, what I would tell you is that the story of Joseph ultimately points us to Jesus. It's the whole reason that it's there. I've just been waiting for six weeks to build it up so that we could point ourselves collectively to Jesus because he's God's plan. He was God's plan here in Genesis 50. He's God's plan in Matthew chapter one. He's God's plan in Revelation 19. Jesus is God's plan. And that's what we sit in the middle of. God's plan from the very beginning was to send a Messiah through the line of Abraham. We go all the way back to Genesis chapter 12. We get out of what's called the prehistoric narrative to kind of set up the story. Genesis 1 through 11 basically set up the story for us to focus on Abraham and hear the promises that God gives Abraham. And the promises are land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. All the way back in Genesis chapter 12, God knew what the plan was. And the plan was to establish a nation, establish a faith, let them come to the realization again and again and again that they desperately needed a king, they desperately needed a savior. The plan was to send Jesus in the flesh to live amongst us, to stay here for 33 years, to be crucified, to raise himself from the dead on the third day, conquering death and sin for all time and giving us a hope that we can cling to that Romans tells us will not put us to shame. That was the plan. And then one day, he's going to come back. And when he comes back, he's going to have righteous and true on his thigh, and he's going to take us home with him. That's the plan. It's always been the plan. It's what we cling to. And so right now, in this life, for a little while, Paul tells us, we will endure hardship. And right now, in this life, we're going to look around sometimes, like Joseph did on his way down to Egypt and go, God, this doesn't feel like the plan. None of my circumstances make any sense to me with what I thought I was promised. There's going to be times when, like Joseph, we're falsely accused and we're thrown in whatever version of prison awaits us. There's going to be times when we feel like God promised us something or that something's supposed to go our way and instead we're going to languish for two years waiting for that thing to happen. There's going to be times when the plan doesn't seem like it's going how it's supposed to go. And in those moments when the plan doesn't seem to be making much sense to us, it would help us to not be so focused on our own house and to take a step back and say, God, what are you working in the community around me right now? How is what I'm walking through affecting the children, your children that I'm around? How is it affecting my church? How is it affecting my community? What's the bigger thing going on here? And this is what I mean. Many of you guys know that part of mine and Jen's story is that we struggled for a long time to get pregnant. And then when we finally did, we lost our first child. We had a miscarriage. And at the time, here, looking at my house, God, how could you let this happen to us? We serve you, we love you, we do good things, we don't have secret sins. There's a bunch of people who are way worse than us and they're just like slipping and having children. We can't have any. That's not fair, God. But then I pull back and I look at the community. And what God knew that I didn't is that I was going to be the pastor for a lot of people who struggle with infertility. And he knew that it was going to make me a much better pastor to be able to mourn with them and hope with them and pray with them. He knew that Jen was going to have the opportunity to comfort a lot of women along the way. And so it was a hard part of our plan, but I think it was absolutely a part of God's plan. On another level, I believe that one of the reasons that it took us so long to have children, and now I'm going to be in retirement when John graduates from college. I believe that one of the reasons that it took us so long and that we are older parents with younger kids is because I think that he knew where we were going to be and what we were going to do. And he wanted us to have children of a certain age so that they would make friends with children of that age so that we would have friends of a certain age so that he could build a community with us and for us. I think it all works. Now, do I pretend to know where God is interjecting himself and diverting our plan towards a particular path that we might not see the end of and when it just really is coincidental and then God's working within those circumstances to bring about his goodness and our joy. No, I don't know how to tell you the difference between those things and when they're happening. But I know that God has a plan. And I know that sometimes we have a hard time seeing it because we're so focused here that we can't pull back to here and see what's going on in our community. And then when that still doesn't make any sense, we pull back to the eternal view. And we trust that God still has a plan. That one day Jesus is going to come back. And he's going to restore creation to itself. This is what Romans 8 tells us, that all of creation groans with the beginnings of birth pains for the return of the king, that creation groans, that when someone gets cancer, that's creation groaning. When abuse happens, when divorce happens, when we lose a loved one too early, when things happen that don't make sense, when we see a school shooting, that's creation groaning. That's our very nature saying, God, this isn't how it's supposed to be. And God is in heaven and he says, I know. And I'm coming. And until I do, just trust me. Trust that I have a plan. This trust is the fundamental Christian trust. That even when things don't make sense, even when we don't understand them, even when we can't explain our faith, we still choose it. Because we trust that our hope will not be put to shame and we trust that Jesus is going to do what he said he would do. That trust in Jesus is the fundamental Christian trust. And what we know and what's amazing about our Jesus is that at every level of the plan he is working. He's working in his child. He is working in his children. He is working in his kingdom. He's working in his child and that he's near us. In John 11, it says that Jesus weeps with us. He's working for his children. In Romans 8, where it says that Jesus is the high priest, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. And it says that again in the Hebrews. He's working for his children and then he's working for his kingdom when he's waiting for God to say, yeah, now's the time. And he comes back and he gets us. And he delivers us into that sweet moment in Revelation 21 where it says that God will be with his people and we will be with our God and there'll be no more weeping, no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. That's the plan to get us to that moment. And your job is to take as many people as you can with you as you go to that moment. And your job is even when I don't, I look around and I'm on an ox cart on my way to be a slave and none of this makes sense. It's to still hold fast and hold firm and hold true and steady to Jesus, trusting that Jesus is God's plan. And if I just cling to this, even when I don't understand it, that one day it'll all make sense to me. That when we get to heaven, we'll look around at everything and we'll go, yeah, this was a good plan. And we'll be very glad that we clung to it. That's the story of Joseph. The story of Joseph points us to that plan. I hope that you'll go back and read it. That you'll read it again thinking about the layers and see different details that you didn't see before. I hope that you'll never think of Joseph the same way you did before we started this series seven weeks ago. And here's the really fun part about where we end this series talking about God still having a plan and that we sit in the middle of it and we are awaiting the fulfillment of that plan. You know the very next thing we're talking about? The end of the plan. Revelation starts next week, where we skip to the last chapter of the book, and we find out how it ends so we don't have to be so stressed about the middle part. And it's just pretty cool to me how even as I sit up here and I say every week, God has a plan, God has a plan, God has a plan, that I believe his plan was to weave these two stories of Joseph and then the account of Revelation together to prepare our hearts for what we're going to begin to dive into next week. I hope that you'll come back for that. I'm very excited to share Revelation with you guys and for us to walk through that as a church. And as we finish up this story, I hope that you'll never, ever read Joseph the same way again. And then I'm going to pray. I'm going to pray and we're going to have communion. And I'm excited about doing communion together with you guys in light of what we just covered. And I'll tell you why in a second. Let's pray. Father, you have a plan. You have a plan for your child, for your children, for your kingdom. We are grateful to sit in the middle of that. God, if there is anyone here who does not have the hope of that plan, who does not have the hope of a coming Savior to rescue them, would they place their hope in you just this morning? Would they cling to that hope and never let go? God, for those of us who look around and feel like maybe our circumstances don't really line up with our expectations, would you give us the strength and the faith and the courage to cling to you and to cling to your plan and to trust it? God, I pray for our church family as we go throughout our weeks. I pray that you would draw us near to you, that we would hear your spirit speaking to us, that we would feel moved and directed and guided by you, that we would have a heightened sensitivity to your timing and to your plan and be grateful that we are a part of it. Help us to be more obedient followers of you. In Jesus' name, amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. This week we remember the dreams God gave Joseph as a teenage boy. The promises that one day his family would bow down to him. Joseph's life has seen remarkable twists and turns since those fateful dreams. But now we will finally watch them come to fruition as the story of Joseph arrives at its hopeful conclusion. Joseph will finally see that he was right to believe being here. Thank you for joining us online, if that's what you're doing. Thank you to Doug Bergeson last week for carrying the torch and doing such a great job on that idea about the land between promise and fulfillment. The only correction I would make if you were here last week is that he said that I assigned him only one verse out of the whole story. That's not true. It was just part of a sentence. It wasn't even a whole sentence in the verse. That's all he got was just that fragment there, but he really did a bang-up job with it. And this week, we pick the story back up. And I've said the whole time that this is a, it's one big, long seven-week sermon. We're driving and have been driving to what we want to talk about next week as we reflect on God's sovereignty in the overarching story of Joseph. So this week, we're going to move through the last part of the narrative together. It's a lot to cover. There's a lot of ground to cover and a lot of story. So this is the least sermon-y sermon of all seven of these sermons, okay? Because we're really just going to spend a lot of time in listening to the story, moving through the story, connecting to the nuances of it. And then we're going to end in a place that left me weeping on a bench outside of Starbucks. I'll explain that to you in a minute. And hopefully it will encourage us to, and then we'll be ready to come next week and reflect on these last six weeks and everything that God did as he wrote the story of Joseph and the profound impact it had on everybody around him. So last week, you'll remember that Joseph was left languishing in prison for two years. He interpreted the dreams of Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. He told the cupbearer, you're going to be reinstated. He told the baker, you're going to be executed. And those things came true. And he asked the cupbearer to remember him to Pharaoh when he got out of there. And the cupbearer forgot about Joseph. And so he was in prison for two full years after that. And that's what we talked about last week was that two-year wait between promise and fulfillment, which is really a much longer wait between promise and fulfillment. Because when we pick up the story this week, we'll learn that he's 30 years old, which means it's been 13 years since he had those dreams that we talked about in the second week and in the video that we watched just here before the sermon. So we pick the story up in Genesis chapter 41 with Joseph still in prison. The cupbearer is out. He's free. He's forgotten about Joseph. Two years later, Pharaoh starts having some dreams. Pharaoh starts having some dreams and he can't figure out what they mean. He's assembled all the magicians. He's assembled all the philosophers, all the priests of Egypt. He's brought them to the palace. He shared with them his dreams and no one can interpret any of them. And he said, is there anyone who can tell me what this means? He felt that they had profound meaning. And the cup bearer, the light bulb goes off. He's like, oh yeah, I know a guy. I got a guy who can do this. And he tells Pharaoh about the Hebrew in prison who can interpret dreams. And so Pharaoh says, let's go, bring him here. I'm going to do some loose paraphrasing during the storytelling, okay? But it's in the Bible, I promise. Chapters 41 through 45 is what we're going to cover today. He says, well, bring him to me. Let's just, let's try it. Worst case scenario, I'll just throw him back in jail, right? So he brings Joseph to him and Joseph comes up and they shave his head and they get him all ready to be presentable to Pharaoh. And he goes in and Pharaoh addresses him. And he says this to him in Genesis 41. And Pharaoh said to Joseph, I've had a dream and there is no one who can, I've been having dreams that no one can interpret. I hear that you can interpret dreams. And Joseph's response to me is pretty remarkable. He says, it's not me. Interpretations belong to God. And this is by no means the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I did not make this point. So this is parenthetical to the sermon. I'm going to step over here. I'm not preaching about the thing I'm preaching about anymore. I'm just making this point and then I'll move back. After years of proficiency, Joseph still doesn't claim interpretation as a skill. After years of being good at this thing, he still doesn't claim it as a skill. And it makes me think to myself, what are the things that I feel like I'm good at or gifted at or gifted to do? And how long have I been doing those things? So long that now I forget that God has gifted me to do some things and it's not my skill that I developed. It's not my thing that I do. If you would believe that I have an ability to communicate, I forget that that ability is not a skill that I have. That's something that God gave me. It is his gift to allow me to communicate, and that gift can be taken away at any time God wishes. It is not my skill. And it makes me wonder about us, after years of proficiency at closing the deal, at charming the right people, at having the right amount of empathy, at having good insight, at being able to give good and wise advice, after years of proficiency at being discerning, at being professionally effective, how many of us have begun to think of those things as our own skills and not gifts from God? I won't belabor it. I just thought it worth pointing out and questioning. So Joseph says, yeah, go ahead. Tell me your dream, and I'll do the best I can to listen to God and to interpret it. So Pharaoh shares his dreams with Joseph. He had two dreams. He says, in this dream, I see seven fat plump cows coming out of the Nile. Now, for those of you who are not Egyptian geography experts, the Nile is the heartbeat of life in Egypt. It's the river around which the whole civilization is built. So he says, I saw seven plump cows come out of the Nile and they began to feed on the grass right there on the banks of the river. But then after that, I saw seven skinny, starving, impoverished cows come out and they ate the fat, healthy cows. And then I woke up. And then I went back to sleep. And when I went back to sleep, there was seven stalks of wheat, big and strong and healthy. And after those came up and came to fruition, there was seven stalks of unhealthy wheat, of dried and shriveled wheat that it says, the Bible says, was blighted by the east wind, which sounds really bad. And those unhealthy stalks of wheat ate the healthy stalks of wheat. And Pharaoh says, what does that mean? And Joseph tells him, he said, here's the deal. Here's what's going to happen. In Egypt, there's going to be seven years of plenty. You're going to see your crops flourish like they never have before, and it's going to be great. But immediately following those seven years of plenty, there's going to be famine. There's going to be famine for seven years. And so you need to get ready for it. And he says, Pharaoh, and I thought this was an incredible detail. He says, the doubling up of the dream, the fact that you had the same dream in two different ways, the doubling up of the dream means that it is fixed by God and it will happen. Now, if you've been paying attention this whole series, where does your mind just go? It should have gone to week two when Joseph had his dreams as a boy, as a 17-year-old kid, when he has one dream that his brothers are going to bow down to him, and then he has another dream with stalks of wheat where his family is going to be bowing down to him. The first one is his brothers with the stalks of wheat. The second one is the sun and the moon and the stars are bowing down to him. So somehow, somehow Joseph, if he says this to Pharaoh because of the doubling up of the dreams, this is a fixed thing that God will bring about. If he says that to Pharaoh 13 years later, you can rest assured that somehow, some way, through 13 years of turmoil, Joseph had clung to the belief that because God gave him those dreams and because they were double dreams, that those were still going to come about. I would have long ago left those be. I would have long ago thought that's not true. That's not going to happen. I would have let go of those things. But I can't help but believe that because Joseph told Pharaoh that the doubling up means that it's fixed by God and it will happen, that Joseph believed the same thing about his dreams. He still clung to that faith and to that hope. I don't know how. And so Pharaoh responds. He believes Joseph. Everyone there is awed by what Joseph says and does. And Pharaoh says, what do we do? And Joseph says, you need to find a guy, man. You need somebody in charge of this. You need a secretary of agriculture. You need someone who watches all the fields and all of the empire, who can be in charge of gathering it. And for the next seven years, you need to store one fifth of the grain that you harvest in this country. And then when we enter the seven years of famine, we'll be able to sell off that grain to the surrounding nations. We'll be able to feed ourselves. We will thrive and we'll get rich while everyone around us suffers. And Pharaoh's like, this is a great plan. Let's do this. So then he talks with his advisors. Who do we think should do this? And he looks at Joseph and he's like, you seem smart. Why don't you do this? And so in an instant, Joseph, once again, goes from being brought low in prison to being brought high. Except this time, he's the second most powerful man in the world. And that's not an exaggeration. Egypt is the most powerful nation in the world. It's the superpower. And Pharaoh says to Joseph, you're in charge. And he looks at all of his other servants and all of his generals. Whatever he says to do, you do it. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get through this. He has the wisdom to lead us through this. And he bestows on Joseph a house and wealth. And he even gives him a daughter that he can get married to. And so Joseph is risen to prominence and he's pulled out of obscurity yet again. And here's God's favor on him and interpreting the dreams. And he's raised to second in command over all of Egypt. And not only that, but he's given the daughter of a priest named Potipharah, which sounds like a girl's name, but it's not. It's a boy's name. So he has a daughter and his daughter marries Joseph. And with the daughter, Joseph has two sons. And the Bible, the narrative pauses to tell us about the two sons and to tell us what Joseph chose to name them. And I think it's significant enough for us to pause and take a look at that too. If you pick up the story in Genesis 41, verse 51, it says, Joseph called the name of the It's pretty profound faith to move through Joseph's story, to finally be blessed with a family and with children that we're sure he always longed for, and to immediately name them Manasseh and Ephraim, which means my hardship is done, and then God has made me fruitful in the land of affliction. He turns and he gives praise to God. Look at the favor that rests on my life. Look at the joy that I get to experience right now. Look at the way that God has worked. And his story comes full circle. And he's the favored son. And then he's the slave. And then he's elevated to Potiphar's house. And then he's falsely accused and thrown in prison. And then he's elevated in prison. And then he's elevated to Potiphar's house and then he's falsely accused and thrown in prison. And then he's forgotten, he's elevated in prison and then he's forgotten about it. And now he's elevated finally into Pharaoh's house, second in command over all of Egypt, second most powerful man on the planet. And he turns and prays to God. And he says, look at how my story has come full circle. And he gives praise to God in what he names his sons as reminders of his journey. And the story could end right here. Joseph exists in prominence. He sees them through the famine. He incurs wealth. He sees them in the years of plenty. He incurs wealth and sees them through the years of famine. And if this story were just about Joseph, this would be a perfectly fine place to end it. His brothers, even by now, figuratively, everyone is bowing down to him. You could even make an argument that those dreams have come true. And this would be a fitting and satisfying end to the story of Joseph. And he and his wife and his sons lived happily ever after as he oversaw Egypt for the rest of his days. But the story's not just about Joseph. And God's plan was never just for Joseph. And so there's more to the story. If you flip the page to the next chapter, chapter 42, the narrative takes you back up to Canaan, where Joseph's family was. His father, Jacob, also called Israel, and his 11 brothers. And Jacob looks at the oldest son, Reuben, and he says, hey, we're hungry. We don't have anything to eat. We're in a famine. I heard Egypt has some grain. Load up the boys, go down there, buy some grain and come back. And so they go down there. They head out, 10 sons of Jacob, but Jacob doesn't allow Benjamin to go. You remember, if you've been following along, that Benjamin is the son of Rachel. Rachel is Jacob's favored wife. This is a good reason why you shouldn't have two wives. Because then one's going to be the favorite. It's going to be a real bummer for everybody. There's some terrible family dynamics going on in Jacob's house. You'll see more in a second. It's remarkable. But Jacob got tricked into marrying Leah, who apparently had weak eyes. And this is bad in the Old Testament. We don't want to marry all you girls wearing glasses. Sorry, you're out of luck. He married Leah, and Leah immediately had many sons for Jacob. But he didn't really love Leah. He loved Rachel. And it took Rachel a long time to get pregnant, which is something that comes up in the Bible over and over again. And then Rachel had two sons, Joseph and Benjamin. And Joseph, as far as Jacob knew, was dead. So all he's got left is Benjamin. He's the youngest of the sons as well. So he's got a special place in his father's heart. So he tells Reuben, take your brothers, go down there. You're not taking Benjamin. He's staying with me. And Reuben says, okay, sounds good, pops. And they go down. They go down to Egypt to buy the grain and they get their passport stamped. They receive like the visa for whatever they need to do. They go through all the paperwork and they end up in the office of, wouldn't you know it, Joseph. That's who you have to talk to. And when they came in to where he would receive people, he recognized them immediately, but they didn't recognize him. He looked like Egyptian royalty. He didn't look like a nomad from the hills of Israel. So they didn't recognize him at all. And they say, we're 12 brothers. We're here. We need to get some grain to go back to our dad who's up in Canaan, a little bit north of here. We'd love to buy some off of you if that pleases you, master. And Joseph treats them in a way, and I'll just say this up front. At this point in the story, Joseph starts doing some things to me that just feel like, why did he do that? Like, why did he behave like that? Why did he treat them this way? Even if you understand what he's trying to get at, which is ultimately to see his brother and to see his father, it seems odd that he would choose this course of action. And I did a little bit of research and read about it. Why do people think that Joseph acted in this way? And the bottom line is people have some ideas, but they were flimsy to me. So I'll just say, I don't know why Joseph acts this way, but this is the story, and so this is what we're going to tell. And so Joseph begins to treat his brothers roughly, the Bible says. And he begins to accuse them, you're spies. You're not seven brothers who came down here innocently to buy grain. You're spies, and you came to see the nakedness of the land. You're going to try to attack us. You're going to try to manipulate the situation. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. We promise that's not us. That's not what we're doing. We're just, we're 12 humble brothers. We've lost one brother. There's one other brother who our dad loves and he's back home and it's just us 10 dudes. And we're just here to try to get some grain and go back home. We, we, we mean nothing by it. We would not seek to do that to you. And, and Joseph continues to press them. No, you're lying. You're spies. And they go back and forth. And Joseph says, okay, I'll tell you what. We're going to see if you're telling the truth. You're going to go home and you're going to fetch this younger brother that you say you have. And you're going to bring him back to me. And if you can bring him back to me, then I'll trust you and believe you. And we can continue to do business. If you can't bring him back to me and you show up here again, I'm going to kill you because I know that you're spies. And just to make sure that you're going to go get him and come back, one of you is going to stay here as my prisoner until they come back. You're going to leave him as a deposit on the life of your other brother and of yourselves. And so they talk amongst themselves and they decide that Simeon was going to be the one to stay behind. Simeon was clearly the second least favorite brother. That would have been a tough conversation. He's going to stay behind and be thrown in jail. And the rest of the brothers are going to go back and get Benjamin. So that's what they do. Simeon hands himself over and the brothers pack up and they head home. Before they headed home, Joseph went to his steward and he said, take all the money that they paid us for the grain and put it back in their grain satchels. We don't want their money. And the steward says, all right, so he does that. So on the way home, the brothers discover that their money has been returned. They open up the grain to look at it, probably just to stare at it and look at the grain and we did a great job. But then they see the money in there and they're freaked out. Oh no, that guy, that master, they don't know it's Joseph, but Joseph is going to think that we stole this money. We're in a heap of trouble. So then they get all worried and stressed out about that. They eventually get home. Dad says, how's it go? And they told Jacob everything that happened. The guy down there spoke roughly to us. He accused us of being spies. It was really pretty difficult. It was stressful there for some minutes, but he sent us home. Simeon's down there. He's in jail. We got to take Benjamin back to this guy. This guy wants to see Benjamin for some reason to believe us that we're not spies. And then we can get Simeon out of jail and we can come back and we can be one big happy family again. And oh, by the way, for some reason we found the money in our sacks of grain and we don't know what to do about it. We think we might be in trouble when we get back there anyways. And Jacob gets ticked at him. Jacob says, why did you tell that man that you have a brother? What'd you do that for? And they're like, what'd you want from us? How were we supposed to know that he was going to ask us to come back and get our brother? And so they go back and forth about it. They say, dad, let us take Benjamin. We'll go back down. We'll get Simeon. Everything will be straightened out. We'll come back. We'll have the food that we need. It'll be good. And Joseph or Jacob says, no, absolutely not. Can't do it. And Reuben, the, comes up with this idea. He says, listen, I swear on the life of my sons, I will go and I will get Benjamin for you. And if I don't come back with Benjamin, you can kill my two boys, which is one heck of a promise from a dad. And then can you imagine being a grandfather that's like, deal. Yeah, I've always found those two annoying anyway. They're my least favorite grandsons. But even at that, with that kind of guarantee, Jacob says, no, absolutely not. We're not discussing it. And so we turn to chapter 43. In chapter 43, they're hungry again. They're out of grain. And Jacob says, boys, it's time to go back to Egypt and get the grain. And Judah says, I mean, okay, dad, but we got to take Benjamin with us. Nope, can't take Benjamin. They go back and forth about it. Judah swears on his life. Dad, we need this. We've got to go do it. We can't show up without him. We'll bring you back Simeon. And Jacob is angry. And he says, you boys have already cost me the life of my son Joseph. And now I've also lost Simeon. And you want to heap this grief upon me. You're going to lose Benjamin too. And when you do, it's going to kill me. And you're going to have to carry my gray beard down to Sheol, which is what they explained the afterlife to be at that time. But Judah gets him to relent and they take Benjamin and they go back down to Egypt. But before they go, Jacob knew the art of the deal a little bit and he sent them with a bunch of gifts and all the finest things from the land. He sent them with double the money to pay for the first grain and then buy another thing of grain to kind of grease the skids a little bit to keep this guy happy down in Egypt. And so the boys go. They get back to Egypt, and they find Joseph's steward and Joseph says, oh, or the steward says, oh, it's good to have you back. Joseph would actually like to have a meal with you guys. And they're like, oh no, he's gonna kill us. He's bringing us to his house. He's gonna put us to death. He's not gonna believe us. He's gonna take our money and that's the end of us. And they're really nervous and they even told the steward, listen, we hope that he's not mad. We found money in our sacks on the way back. We didn't take it. We don't know how it got there. We've brought double here to pay for the grain that we took the first time. And the steward actually responds to them and says, the Lord your God put that money in those sacks himself. I have received the payment for what you took. You're good. And so maybe they could begin to sense that something was up with us. So the next day they go into Joseph's house. Now they're in his personal chambers, personal house. And they're having a meal with him. And as Joseph goes to prepare for the meal, he looks and he sees his brother Benjamin, but Benjamin still doesn't recognize him. And so Joseph continues to play dumb. And he looks and he says, is that your youngest brother? Have you brought him with you? And they said, yeah, this is our youngest brother Benjamin. And scripture tells us that Joseph was so moved with warmth, it says, that he had to go back to his chambers and weep for a little bit and compose himself before he could come back out. And when all the food was served, everybody received a great portion, but Benjamin got five times the portion of everyone else. And they had this big feast and they were merry. And Joseph began to press on them a little bit. He said, you mentioned a father, an old man back where you're from. Is he still alive? And they said, yes, he's old, but he's alive and he's longing to see his son Benjamin again. So we need to get on the road. And Joseph says, okay, you guys can go ahead. And when they go ahead, he tells the steward, put the money back in their sacks again. And this time I want you to take my silver cup and I want you to put it in the youngest one's bag. I want you to put it in Benjamin's bag. So the steward does as he's asked. The next day, the brothers leave. And after they had been gone for a little while, Joseph again gets his steward and he says, I want you to chase them down. I want you to find that cup and I want you to accuse them of theft and bring them back. I want you to arrest the one who stole it. The steward's like, all right. I wonder how many times the steward had to do things like this for Joseph. Like, was this weird or was this just normal? Anyways, he tracks the brothers down and he comes to the brothers and he says, what have you done? We have given you nothing but good and you repay us with evil. And they're like, what are you talking about? And the steward says, one of you stole something that belongs to Joseph. And they said, go through our bags, arrest whoever did it. And so it was discovered that it was in Benjamin's bag and the brothers are beside themselves. This is the very thing that cannot happen. So the steward arrests Benjamin, brings him back to Joseph's house and the brothers pack up and they go back to Joseph's house because they got to figure this out. And in chapter 44, you see this impassioned plea from Judah who goes to Joseph. And he says, he says, please understand, we didn't do this on purpose. We are simple shepherds and farmers. We are just trying to get this grain back to our family. I know you think we stole this cup. We didn't. And I know that you think it was Benjamin that stole it. He didn't. And please, I'm begging you, if you keep Benjamin here and we have to go home and tell that old man that you asked about that his son Benjamin is in prison and is probably dead. He is going to die on the spot. His life is intertwined with the life of Benjamin. And he is too old and he loves him too much. And his heart cannot bear the news that he would have lost his son because he's already lost his brother. And that broke his father's heart. And he can't take it again. So please, Lord, take me and put me in prison and let Benjamin go home. And it was at this point that Joseph was so moved that he just broke down. And we pick up the story in chapter 45 and I want to read to you what it says because I think it's so powerful. And he wept aloud so that the Egyptians heard it and the household of Pharaoh heard it. And Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph. Is my father still alive? But his brothers could not answer him for they were dismayed at his presence. So Joseph said to his brothers, come near to me, please. And they came near. And he said, I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And listen. God sent me here, but sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh and Lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. We're going to remember those verses next week. He tells his brothers, don't feel bad. Because earlier in the story, when he was first accusing them of being spies, Reuben muttered to his brothers, you guys understand that this is punishment for what we did to our brother Joseph, right? We reap what we sow. Now we're finally getting punished for that terrible thing that we did. And Joseph heard them and he understood them because he didn't need an interpreter. And so here, as they reconcile and he reveals himself to them, he's saying, don't worry, don't carry guilt about that. What you intended for evil, God worked for good. What you thought was gonna be terrible for me, God was working the whole time. You think you sent me to slavery in Egypt? You didn't. That was God pulling the trigger. It's the same realization that Jacob had. It's been God pulling the strings all along. And then the scripture says that they hugged and they kissed each other and they wept. And then they sat and they talked about all the things. I don't know that there's a conversation in all the Bible I would rather get to hear than to sit in that room and listen to Joseph and his brothers catch up and tell all the stories about all the things in Canaan and for them to hear all the things that happened to Joseph over the years. What a sweet, sweet reunion that must have been. And what a picture of the incredible sovereignty of God as he wove those things together to bring that day about. Shortly after this, word gets out to Pharaoh and the palace that those men who keep coming back here for grain, those are actually Joseph's long lost brothers and Pharaoh's overjoyed. And he goes to Joseph and he says, bring your family here. Go get your father, bring the whole clan down here. I'm gonna give you the land of Goshen. It's this really fertile, good, vibrant land. Your family can live there. They can have it. No one's going to mess with them. We'll give them the protection of the sovereign nation of Egypt. Go get your dad. And he gives them wagons and he gives them riches to go back. It's basically, he says, here's a bunch of U-Hauls. Go load up everybody and bring them back here. And so the brothers go, and they're overjoyed. And they get back to Jacob, and they tell him the good news. They say, your son Joseph, he's alive, and he's second in command over all of Egypt. And it says that Jacob was numb, and he couldn't process the news. And so they brought him near and they repeated to him, Joseph is alive and he's waiting for us to come and see him. And it says that Jacob looked out and he saw all the wagons and all the riches and all the gifts, and he believed his son. And he said some incredibly profound words in response to all of this. At the end of his life, after all the striving and all the stress and all the worrying and all the wondering, he looks out to the news that his son is alive and that he will see him again. And he says this, and Israel says in Genesis 45, 28, it is enough. My son Joseph is still alive and I will go see him before I die. And this week, for just a weird set of reasons, I was doing my sermon prep on a bench outside of Starbucks at North Hills, and I read the whole story to get a sense of it. And when I got to this phrase, when I got to Jacob at the end of it, looking out after his whole life of striving, and he could see God's provision, and he understood the story, and he understood the plan, he said, it is enough. And I wept. I put my head in my hands like a crazy person in public and I just cried on the bench. Because it's enough. Because how remarkable is it for Jacob to have gone through everything that he went through? All the ups and all the downs and all the hopes and all the dreams and all the strivings and all the realizations and all the healthy times of faith and all the impoverished times of faith, all the arid times and all of the fruitful times. All of the striving and wondering about his sons and the grief that he had gone through and lamenting the loss of Joseph and probably wishing he'd have done things differently and all the stress about sending Benjamin down and how is my family going to survive in the midst of a famine and all the worries that a man would have carried with him throughout his entire life as he went through all of those griefs and all of those trials and to arrive at the end of it and look at the blessings of God and see how he wrote the story and say, it is enough. And I didn't just weep for Jacob. I wept for us too. Because there's coming a time in all of our lives when we will collectively say, it is enough. It's good. If you're struggling with infertility, there's coming a time when you will say it is enough. We struggle. And I look at John and Lily, and it's enough. If your marriage is going through lean years, and it's a struggle, and it's hard, but you trust God with it, there will be a day where you say, it is enough. All the struggles and all the trials of raising kids and hoping that they turn out right and running the business and working out the things and all the things that stress us and keep us up at night. All the things that keep us worried. All the financial situations and should we move or should we should we do this, or how do we handle this situation, or our kid has crippling anxiety, and we don't know what to do, or I've struggled with depression, and I don't know what to do, all the things that stress us out over all the years, God is in heaven, and he is sovereign, and he loves you, and he has a plan for you, and there will be a day coming in this life or the next where you say, it is enough. And there will be all these little it is enoughs all along the way. Where you look at your situation, you look at your life and you go, this is good. I understand God's plan now. It is enough. But there's one big one coming at the end of time, which is what the whole next series in Revelation is about, where Jesus returns and makes the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, and we say together, collectively, it is enough. And this is so beautiful, because it's the hope that we cling to. It's the one that won't put us to shame. It's the ardent and fervent belief that keeps me clinging to what I do and keeps me believing in church and keeps me believing in faith and keeps me believing in Jesus that one day, even with all the stuff that doesn't make sense, right? Even with all the human suffering, even with early diagnosis that don't make sense to us, even with losses that don't seem fair, even with all the things that we go through that just don't make any sense to us and we can't fathom that God would let that happen. What we'll know is that one day we will be in heaven before God and his throne and we will see Jesus face to face. And on that day, in that place, we will say, it was always enough. And this is enough. That's the promise of faith. That if you believe in Jesus, one day you'll say beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is enough. Let's pray. Father, you're enough. You're everything that we need. Father, I know that you have a plan for us. I know that you didn't stop weaving stories together when you wrote Joseph's. You didn't stop making plans for your children when the Bible was finished. But you still do those things today. So Father, I pray that for those who are in a time of plenty, that as good and blessings abound, that they would look around and be grateful at your provision. God, for those who are in lean times, who are in uncertain times, would they cling to the truth that you have a plan and that that plan is enough, that plan is good. God, for those of us walking through hard times, will you just give us the strength to cling to you? To have a faith that surpasses understanding? Will you help us to trust in you, God? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Now Joseph remains in prison after being falsely accused by Potiphar's wife. We learned last week that God's favor rested on Joseph, which resulted in his being in charge of the other prisoners. Two of the prisoners under his care were Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. These two men had dreams that Joseph was able to successfully interpret. In exchange for the interpretations, Joseph asked that the cupbearer would remember him to Pharaoh so he could get out of prison. But the cupbearer forgot about Joseph, and so he remains a prisoner. Joseph must once again choose to trust God and cling to the hope that he has a plan. Morning. Thanks for being here and online. It's great to be with you all. My name's Doug Bergeson, and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's been one day shy of exactly a year since I last preached, so I hope I'm not too rusty. I was asked to speak this past April, but had to decline as I was having a full hip replacement. I only mention that because, and I didn't anticipate it was going to be dark, but if you had seen me spring up on stage, you would have reacted, wow, what quickness, what energy, what, for lack of a better word, cat-like agility. Though I looked like a janky, wrinkled, liver-spotted 64-year-old on the outside, on the inside, I'm now literally bionic, mostly titanium and advanced ceramics. So I just thought that was important for you to know. But getting back to not having preached for a year, I am clearly not the only one who was worried that I was going to be a little rusty. Now, I need to be careful here. I'm flattered and privileged to have been asked to speak. However, over a seven-week sermon series covering 26 chapters in the book of Genesis, Nate has asked me to speak on one verse, Genesis 41.1. Not one chapter, one verse. What's up with that? Now, not what I'd call a ringing endorsement or an unwavering vote of confidence, right? 26 chapters over seven weeks, and I get one verse. Not that anyone would be petty enough to count, but in a series in which Nate will preach on 872 verses, I've been asked to preach on one. And to be perfectly honest, that's not even that good a verse. This is what it says. When two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. You tell me, am I overacting? I don't think so. Thank goodness I have a phenomenally large ego, or else I might have been easily devastated by such an obvious slight. A lesser, weaker person, perhaps one humbler and more grounded, probably would have been. Frankly, I don't know what to say about this verse. I don't have much to add. So, and I know this is a little unusual, I'll read Genesis 41.1 one more time, and then I'm going to ask Steve and the band to come back up and lead us in worship for the remainder of the time. Now, for those of you who know me, when I said I had nothing to add, you immediately knew I was kidding. I always have something to add, even when I don't. However, this morning, I hope and pray I do have something to add and that it's helpful. In preparing for this morning and thinking about what I might have to add, I ran across a quote from Howard Hendricks who was a former pastor and professor of theology who passed away several years ago. Hendricks said, it is not too difficult to be biblical if you don't care about being relevant. It's not difficult to be relevant if you don't care about being biblical. But if you want to be both biblical and relevant in your teaching, it's a very difficult task indeed. So as we continue this week to move through one of the greatest stories in the Bible, Joseph from the book of Genesis, That is my goal, to be both biblical and relevant. And to begin, I'd like to open us in prayer using the Apostle Paul's words from his letter to the churches in and around Ephesus, written while he was in prison. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may know him better. Amen. Those two words, wisdom and revelation, are going to be key for us this morning. Wisdom, according to the Bible, is acknowledging and submitting to the fact that God is God and that we are not. And revelation is the process by which God makes something known that was previously secret or unknown. Although God can reveal things to us in other ways, such as through nature, the primary way he chose to reveal things to us is through his written word, the Bible. Now, for most of us who call ourselves Christians, that's not a very controversial statement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. The Bible is God's revelation to us. In fact, most Christians I've met or read or listened to hold the Bible in high regard and would make that claim without question. Yet it is also my experience that many of us, including me, who make that claim, take our eye off the ball a little bit and lose sight of just what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation to us. How do we take our eye off the ball? How do we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's primary way of communicating and revealing himself to humankind? Well, we do it in a variety of ways. One popular method is by making Scripture primarily about us. How do I lead a good life? How do I raise my kids? How do I handle this or that problem? How do I have a God-centered marriage? Et cetera, et cetera. Now, don't get me wrong. Those aren't bad things to seek and to want to know. They just aren't the primary things, the first things we need to know. Another way we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation is when we make it say what we think it should say or what we want it to say. It's an easy and not uncommon thing to do. Happens all the time in churches. We interpret things a certain way, emphasize some things at the expense of others, ignore or downplay the historical, cultural, literary, and or biblical context of a passage to shape its meaning. When we do that, we read Scripture through our lens rather than God's. And that's not okay. Not if we profess the Bible to be God's revelation, God's word to us. This is no small point. What makes scripture the most valuable thing we will ever read is that it is God telling us about himself. This is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is what's important to me. This is how I operate. This is what I intend to do, and this is how I'm going to do it. It is God's take on things, his revelation, his perspective, his lens. The Bible is also history, but not any old history, not history for history's sake, but a very special history for, again, it's God's take on history, what he deems important, what he thinks we should know. And that is what gives Scripture authority over our lives. It is God's revelation of himself, his purposes, and his plans. Given that, the first question we should always ask ourselves when we read the Bible, the very first question is, what is this passage revealing to me about God? I'll say that again. When we read the Bible, the first question we should be asking ourselves is, what is this telling me about God? My favorite commentary series is the NIV application commentary. As I can't say it any better, I quote, there is nothing more fundamental to biblical revelation than the picture of God that it offers. If we set aside the picture of God affirmed in the text, we have lost our last foothold of authority, unquote. So, despite having been given only one verse, the reason I was still so excited to preach and so looking forward to this morning is that the story of Joseph has few, if any, equals in so clearly and powerfully revealing two giant things we need to know about our God. The first is that he's going to do what he intends to do, what he says he's going to do. And the second is that he's going to do it his way, not our way. Now let's turn back to our story and see the picture of God that it reveals and what it might mean for us today. As a quick recap, way back in time, long before Joseph, humankind had fallen into sin and self-destruction by choosing to reject their creator, the one and only true God, and the world was a complete mess. God began his magnificent plan to forgive, redeem, and restore fallen humanity by choosing one guy to whom God made a most lavish and unconditional promise. To this one guy, a man named Abraham, God promised land, a multitude of descendants who would become a great nation, and that through Abraham's offspring, all peoples in the world would be blessed. The remarkable promise was affirmed to Abraham's son Isaac, and again to his son Jacob. And this is where we are introduced to Joseph, the 11th of 12 sons born to Jacob and Jacob's absolute favorite. We meet Joseph when he is 17 and quickly learn that Jacob's unconcealed love and favor for Joseph, evidenced in part by a fancy robe, have poisoned the waters between Joseph and his older brothers. It probably didn't help that Joseph had given an unflattering report to his father about his brothers and the crummy job they were doing tending the flocks. And if that wasn't enough dysfunction for one family, and apparently it wasn't, Joseph thought it might be a good idea to share with everyone two separate dreams he had which both foretold of a time when the entire family would bow down to him. Scripture matter-of-factly states that his brothers hated him all the more. Imagine that. So the next time Joseph visited his brothers in the countryside, they conspired to kill him. At the very moment they were deciding Joseph's fate, a caravan of merchants heading to Egypt approached their camp. And the brothers had a brainstorm, kind of like a V8 moment. Rather than kill Joseph and deal with all that guilt, why not just sell him to these merchants and make a little cash to boot on the side? As an aside, the text seems to imply that you feel better about yourself and a lot less guilty if you simply sell a sibling into slavery rather than actually killing him. Just something to think about for those of you not getting along with all your brothers and sisters. Anyways, that's what they did. They sold Joseph, and they took his fancy robe, dipped it in goat's blood, and convinced their father that Joseph had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. The story continues with remarkable twists and turns, wild ups and downs for Joseph. He's first sold into Egypt to Potiphar, Pharaoh's captain of the guard. And when his new master sees that the Lord is with him and gives him success in everything he does, Joseph is put in complete charge and entrusted with all that Potiphar owned. But when, out of loyalty to Potiphar and fidelity to God, Joseph refuses the repeated advances of Potiphar's wife, she falsely accuses him of assault and he is thrown into prison. But once again, the Lord is with Joseph, this time prompting the prison's warden to eventually place Joseph in charge of the entire prison and all of its prisoners. Later, when the chief cupbearer and the chief baker both offend Pharaoh and are tossed in jail, they are attended by none other than Joseph. While in custody, both officials have disturbing dreams the very same night. When he heard the cupbearer's dream, Joseph explained that in three days, the cupbearer would be restored to his former position. And Joseph asked that when that happened, for the cupbearer to please remember him and plead his innocence before Pharaoh. Upon hearing such an upbeat interpretation for the cupbearer, the chief baker asked Joseph about his dream and was told that in three days Pharaoh would cut off his head and impale his body on a tree. Not as upbeat. Three days later, everything happened just as Joseph had said, and now, starting with the last verse of Genesis 40, we come to today's scripture. The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph. He forgot him. When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. So just halfway through our story, it's becoming increasingly clear that what God is revealing to us about himself, what he deems of tip-top importance for us to know, is that he's going to do what he says he's going to do no matter what. And he's going to do it his way, not our way. So that begs the question, the big question for us this morning, what is God's way of doing things? What does His way look like in practice? For starters, not like anything you or I would dream up. Steeped in mystery and far beyond our full comprehension, God's way uses people and circumstances which make little sense to us and which we would never choose. Operating according to his own timetable, God could pretty much care less about ours. Actively at work in all human decision and action, both good and evil, God's way by its very design frustrates and confounds human wisdom, intuition, and preference. And as an added kicker, not only won't we necessarily understand how God is at work in any given situation, oftentimes it won't even be obvious that he's working at all. Today's scripture may be short, but it is packed with significance as it illustrates God's way in action, focusing on the following three short snippets of text. The cupbearer forgot, two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. We see three defining features of God's way of doing things. All three are inextricably linked, all are shrouded in mystery, all are beyond our full understanding. And all are woven together in a way that ultimately and inevitably accomplish what God wants done. The first snippet of text, The Cupbearer Forgot, highlights the upside-down, counterintuitive nature of how God works. My first reaction is, what? The cupbearer forgot about Joseph? Are you kidding me? How is that helpful? Joseph did everything right. How is that fair? Yet almost without exception, we see in the story of Joseph and throughout all of Scripture, God's overwhelming preference to use people and circumstances that defy the odds and confound human wisdom and logic, devastating and demoralizing turns of events, great sorrows, constant obstacles and roadblocks, deeply flawed characters, good punished while evil seems to thrive, conflict, jealousy, forgotten obligations, in parentheses, see cupbearer. The list goes on. of the crummy circumstances that God seems to relish. Although we don't know all the reasons, Scripture does explain that God operates this way to humble us and to disabuse us of any notion that we deserve the credit, to make it perfectly clear that it is He who is responsible. He is the one in charge, and it is He who is at work. In 1 Corinthians 1, two full years past, illustrates what might be the most vexing and frustrating feature of God's way of doing things, his timing. It's now been 13 years since Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. By all accounts, Joseph has done the right thing at every turn. It's even been obvious to those closest to him and in the best position to know yet here joseph still sits in prison and now when the tides of fortune finally appear to be moving in joseph's favor and he at last has an important advocate to plead his innocence before pharaoh the cupbearer completely forgets about Joseph, who then remains in prison for two more years. It's enough to want to pull your hair out, particularly if you're Joseph. But again, rather than being the exception, Joseph's experience with God's timing is more the rule in Scripture. Over and over again, we see periods of waiting, periods of silence, periods of struggle and sorrow, periods of absence and denial, periods of the wilderness, periods in exile. These occur on a grand global scale, as well as in the smallness and intimacy of individual lives and families. In the Bible, God reveals himself to be both a promise maker and a promise keeper. But just as we see with his magnificent promise to Abraham, which won't reach its complete fulfillment for another 2,000 years in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Bible is really a story of the land in between. That time between promise and fulfillment, often very long. This is where the story of Joseph takes place. This is where God operates. And to further compound the mystery and complexity of God's timing, just as with his promise to Abraham, many of God's promises unfold over time, with some elements fulfilled sooner, while other elements of the very same promise must wait. We tend to focus on the ending and are anxious for its resolution. God, on the other hand, is all about playing the long game and is infinitely more patient, knowing that to achieve what he has ordained and promised, there is simply no substitute for the land in between. If given the chance, we would skip right past this land, avoiding its mystery, its uncertainty, its challenges, its obstacles, its disciplines, its heartbreak, disappointments. It's waiting. We hate wandering in the wilderness. I'm sure Joseph did too. Yet God's redemptive purposes don't happen without it. It's in the land in between that God shapes and changes us, redeems and refines us, preparing us for and moving us towards the ultimate promise fulfillment that will be eternity within. The third and final snippet of text is Pharaoh had a dream. And as we'll see next week, the dream prompts the cupbearer to finally remember Joseph. Was that just lucky that the Pharaoh had this dream? A coincidence? A bit of good fortune finally for Joseph? Not according to the Bible. This might be the most mysterious feature of how God operates. The scripture reveals that God sustains his creation and is involved and exerts his sovereign influence and control over all things. In so doing, God moves all of history steadily, inexorably, towards his appointed end. To be completely candid, even as I speak about it this morning, I struggle with this notion that God is involved in exerting his influence and control in and over all things. On the lighter side, I've been around church long enough to have heard the story of the person who, when going to Bible study on a rainy Wednesday morning, was late and praised God that a parking spot opened up right near the front door just as they pulled up. Isn't God great? Oh, all I can do is roll my eyes. Really? I don't want to be overly cynical, but come on. What about poor Sally who got there early and had to park all the way around the block and is now stopping wet? Was God judging her? Does he not favor and love her too? Is God really involved to that level of detail? But on a more serious note, what about all the terrible and tragic, unfair and absolutely evil things that happen in the world and sometimes in our lives? How can a just and loving God be involved in those things too? Now my go-to default answer has always been to ascribe all the bad things to the fact that we live in a fallen world, a world in which, for the time being, God accommodates the presence of evil and everything doesn't happen according to his will. But when I read the story of Joseph and reflect on the full testimony of scripture, I know my default answer is too simple, a bit too cut and dried. Our tendency is to want to attribute to God only the good things that happen and give him a pass on the bad things, explaining them away by saying it's a fallen world. However, God doesn't ever ask us for a pass. He doesn't need or want a pass from us. We might not intend to, but when we think he needs a pass, we shortchange and underestimate his mystery and his sovereignty. Rather than needing a pass, the story of Joseph affirms the picture of a God who is in control of all things and uses his influence in all things, even very bad and sinful things, to advance his redemptive plan. Very early on in the Bible, God is revealing that there is no human choice or decision that can derail what he intends on doing. In fact, we see God using those sinful choices to further rather than frustrate his plans. Scripture leaves the clear impression that more than simply allowing bad things to happen to Joseph, God is actively orchestrating, arranging, and in a sense, cooperating with those things. Joseph is only 17 when he is sold by his brothers, and he is 30 before things start turning around for him. Yet all those intervening events, conspiracy to murder, sold into slavery, framed and falsely accused, wrongly convicted, imprisoned, forgotten, all are woven together to bring us to this point in our story. The Bible teaches both God's sovereignty as well as human responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Now, if you find that difficult to reconcile, how can God be involved and in control and yet hold us accountable? If you can't tell where God's influence ends and human responsibility begins, if you find it even a bit frustrating that you can't fully understand or that it seems unfair, Scripture has a clear and consistent answer for you. Tough. Tough. I am God and you are not. It's of ironic, as we like to think we live in the age of science and enlightenment, but how enlightened are we really? As difficult as this idea might be for us to wrap our minds around, our modern minds around, it wasn't for Genesis' original audience, the Israelites. They didn't struggle with trying to figure out when, where, how, and if God intervened in human affairs. They did not think things unfolded naturally and that only on occasion, if at all, God might supernaturally intervene. Rather, they understood that things only happen naturally, like rain in its season, because God ordained it. In their worldview, nothing happened independently from God's cause and effect. Events and decisions were never either natural or supernatural, but always both and. Our way of looking at the world would seem odd and naive and perhaps even heretical to the Israelites, as if there was some dividing line between the natural and divine. They wouldn't spend much time trying to figure out if God was involved in a particular situation or not because they knew he was always involved somehow, some way. That doesn't mean that God and nature are one. They're not. But only that God is involved all the time. So we see in these three short snippets of text, the cupbearer forgot. Two full years passed. Pharaoh had a dream. God is revealing the mysterious and confounding methods, means, and timing of how he goes about accomplishing his purposes and plans. Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a Hertz car rental commercial from the 1990s. It opens with two businessmen, one an executive and his junior assistant, hustling out of a crowded airport. The boss says to his assistant, we've got to move fast, Kirby. I hope you've booked Hertz. Kirby replies, not exactly, but this company is fast. The boss asks, as fast as Hertz? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick up the car. Like Hertz? Not exactly, but it'll be waiting. Under a canopy with the keys in it? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick it up. Protected from the weather? Not exactly. The final scene is of the two men in their suits running to their car in the pouring rain. And the boss asks, counting on that promotion, Kirby? No, not exactly. I still love that commercial, even though I messed it up there, and have adapted it to the story of Joseph and what it means about God's way of working. Are we always going to understand what God is doing in our lives and how he's doing it? Not exactly. Is God concerned that everything makes sense to us? Not exactly. Does God care if everything seems fair? Not exactly. Does God want everything to go smoothly for us, avoiding obstacles and challenges that might confuse and discourage us? Not exactly. Doesn't God prefer to use mostly A-teamers, people who seem to have their acts together, rather than the weak, the flawed, and the foolish? Not exactly. Does God care if we're super busy or in a big hurry and have important things to do? Not exactly. Is God involved in control of only the good things in our lives? Not exactly. There is a sweeping passage from the book of Isaiah which captures in poetic language what the story of Joseph reveals and affirms so powerfully through story. Reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 55. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. He says, So God's thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. They are higher, better, eternal. And God's word that goes out from his mouth will not return to him empty, but will accomplish all that he intended and achieve the purpose for which he sent it. So when God says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. So why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because God still works this way. Seeing the mysterious and perplexing way he operated in the life of Joseph, we should not be surprised when God operates that way in our lives. Why is this important? Why should this matter to us today? Because we live in the land in between. God's redemptive plan is ongoing, still somewhere between promise and fulfillment. I was raised in a church which taught that once you placed your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, that you were saved, sort of past tense, and you were pretty much good to go. I've since come to believe, based on a fuller reading of scripture, that's not really true. More accurately, I'm in the process of being saved. While now free from the penalty of sin, which Jesus bore on the cross on my behalf, the fullness of God's promise still lies in the future. When not only will the penalty of sin have been paid, but the very power and presence of sin and death will be vanquished, and we will be resurrected to new life. But for the time being, we are in the land in between, and God is still working in all things for good as he moves all of history towards his appointed end. Why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because it frees us to trust in him. When we finally stop trying to fit God in a box that we can understand, when we stop foisting our expectations and preferences on him, when we finally accept the fact that we won't understand what he's doing most of the time, why he's doing it, or how it might possibly be good or redemptive, it's actually easier to let go, easier to trust, easier to rest in the knowledge that God's got this. In closing, we will never understand God's ways, how he operates to accomplish his purposes, but we don't need to, as he is always faithful and always true to his word. And like so many people of faith down through the ages, we can find great comfort and confidence knowing and trusting in that. Even Jesus' disciples had no clue what was happening or why at the end of Jesus' ministry and were completely overwhelmed and distraught at his death. Only later were they able to look back and understand that God was in control all along. The disciples explicitly acknowledged this when they prayed the following words. Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. God, they only did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. In just a minute, the band is going to come back up here to perform a song, Promise Keeper. It's an absolutely gorgeous song, and as our closing prayer, and I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes, I'm going to read a few stanzas of unfolding, with everything I've seen, how could I not believe? You are a promise keeper. Your word will never fail. My heart can trust you, Jesus. I won't be overwhelmed. I'll see your goodness in the land of the living. I'll see your goodness right here, right now. You know the ending before the beginning, and I know that you have worked all things out. Amen. Thank you.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Last week, even though Joseph was sold into slavery, we saw that he chose to trust God and honor Him in his service to his new master, Potiphar's wife, attention that eventually forced Joseph to make a decision to run from temptation, even though running ultimately landed him in an Egyptian jail. A prisoner once again, we wonder together, will Joseph still choose to believe in his God and that in the end, he has a plan? Well, good morning. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that after the service if you're not afraid of me. Thank you also for joining us online and to the people in the back right of the room, there's other rows. So you guys don't, you don't all have to sit there every week. Just, I'm just throwing that out there. There's other places if you're also not afraid of those. This is the fourth part in our series where we're moving through the life of Joseph in the Old Testament. We find the life of Joseph in basically the back third of the book of Genesis, the very first book in the Bible. And I've said from the beginning a couple of things. First of all, that the story of Joseph to me is one of the most sweeping and stunning portrayals of the sovereignty of God that I think we find in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. I love the story of Joseph. And because it's a big, long story that points to the sovereignty of God, we are approaching this series not as seven individual sermons, but as one big long seven week sermon. So we stop and we make points along the way that are applicable to us and that help the text come alive to us. But really we're driving to the end of this narrative and the end of the series as we get to week seven and hopefully see the story in a light that maybe we haven't thought of it before. Because it's one big long sermon, and I've said that from the beginning, this week in particular highlights that. So I would tell you if you're watching online or listening online and it's not Sunday morning right now and you haven't heard week one, this would be a good place to pause and go listen to week one and then come back and listen to this. Now I know that it's ambitious of me to assume that you're willing to listen to 60 minutes of Nate in one week, but if you are, then it would be worth it to listen to week one before you consume this. If you haven't heard week one and you're just, this is fresh for you, don't worry, I'm going to bring you along, but it's going to resonate more if you really drill down into the life of Jacob like we did in the first week. So that's just an upfront for you. I'm going to assume a couple things of your knowledge of Jacob when we get to his portion of the sermon today. But like we said last week, Joseph is accused of sexual harassment in Potiphar's house and is subsequently thrown in jail. Potiphar's wife kept trying to seduce Joseph. Joseph wouldn't have it. Eventually in this scene, she grabs a hold of him. There's no one else around and he chooses to run away. And we spent a lot of time last week on what it means to run away from our temptations. He runs away and he leaves behind his outer garment because she had a hold on it and it was the only way for him to get away. And then she lets out a cry and she falsely accuses him of accosting her. When Potiphar hears this story, the master of the house, he's enraged and he has Joseph thrown in jail, which is a good place to acknowledge this idea that just because we're obeying God doesn't mean our life is going to immediately go better. Joseph chose obedience, and his life immediately got worse, circumstantially. So simply choosing to walk in obedience sometimes makes our life more difficult. Obedience is a long-term decision. It's not a short-term decision. But Joseph chose obedience. He chose to honor his God, and it lands him in jail. He gets thrown into like the royal jail where the prisoners of Pharaoh are thrown in as well. This becomes important a little bit later in the story and in this week's sermon. But he gets thrown in that jail. And when he's in the jail, he's again, Joseph has these patterns in his life where he has these dreams, right, early on that his brothers are going to bow down to him and his father and mother are going to bow down to him. And then he's sold into slavery and he's brought low. And then he ends up in Potiphar's house and slowly he ascends to second in command in Potiphar's house. And he's in this unprecedentedly high place for a Hebrew person to be. And then he gets thrown in jail and he's brought low. And spoiler alert, okay, if you don't know the story, we're gonna get into the details in the future. But then eventually he gets out of prison. He's put in Pharaoh's house where he rises to prominence again. And so Joseph's life is this constant ebbing and flowing of being brought high and then being brought low. And in these low moments being faced with the decision, am I going to choose to honor God or am I going to resent him because he's disappointed me in some way, because he's allowed these things to happen to me? And so as he's thrown in jail again, he chooses to honor God, he chooses to obey him, and his life gets harder. And again, he's faced with, do I honor God or do I do my own thing? And this is what we're told in the text at the end of Genesis 39, beginning in verse 21, which in the ancient world was kind of employee-employer relationship. And it's understandable to see that someone could rise to prominence there, but you don't really expect someone to climb up the ranks in jail, right? So much so that they're now entrusted with everything, that whatever prisoners, whatever task the jailer gave Joseph, he didn't worry about it. Joseph had total integrity. I'm sure there were systems that he could have taken advantage of. I'm sure there were things that he could have gotten away with, but his integrity wouldn't allow him to do it. And so he garnered more and more trust, even within the prison system in Egypt, which to me is remarkable. And often when we think of the story of Joseph, I know that I do this and you might as well, and maybe this is one of the things you're picking up on as we move throughout the story together, that it seems like at every turn Joseph chooses to honor God. So then in turn, God continues to honor Joseph. But one of the things that stands out to me in the text is every time I read it, every time I get to the next portion of the story where he's brought low again, what you'll notice is that God's favor always precedes Joseph's behavior. This passage starts out, but the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. So it's not that Joseph went to jail and then in his uncertainty and disillusionment, he says, you know what? I'm just going to choose to trust and obey God. And then God is there with the favor. It's important that we understand that Joseph's obedience was a response to God's favor. God's favor is not a response to Joseph's obedience. Do you see? We don't win God's favor. We don't win God's blessings by how we behave. One of the things I said in week one at the end of it is that God's commitment to his promises are not contingent upon our behavior. That works both ways. We don't lose God's promises with bad behavior, nor do we gain them, we see in Joseph's life, with good behavior. They're simply there. God's favor simply rests on us. God's love and concern for us simply rests on us. God has a plan for us and a way that he wants to use us and things that he's gifted us to do and people that he's placed in our life. And the spirit works in our hearts in mysterious ways. And he does all that despite our behavior. So we can't look at the life of Joseph and teach, look, if you honor God, God honors you. That's not the lesson. Because at every turn, God's favor precedes Joseph's behavior. So God's favor simply rested on Joseph's life. Which is why, as I was trying to plan to preach this, when we wrote the series out, when I wrote the series out months ago, this week was gonna be a lesson on obeying God where we are. Wherever you are, serve God. And I think that's a fine lesson, but I wasn't happy with it. And so Tuesday, I went on a walk. I've never done this before, but I left the little office complex and I walked all the way down to the end of the street where it stops in the woods and then I got scared and I came back. I went on a walk and I was just thinking and praying about this passage and what's going on in the life of Joseph, and it occurred to me something that's worth reflecting on. Joseph is brought high over and over again in his life because God has favor on him, because God has a plan for Joseph, because God has a plan for Joseph that echoes throughout the centuries, that is seen far beyond even what we're going to arrive at a place in chapter 7, it's going to be like, or in the seventh week, and we're going to go, oh my gosh, that's amazing. Look at how God was taking care of his brothers. But no, no, no. Look at how God was taking care of his people. And look at how it's a picture for what happens all time. So yes, God is showing favor to Joseph because he has a plan for him, but it's at this point worth stopping and reflecting on the life of his father, Jacob. Because listen to me, Jacob had that same favor. Remember? Jacob enjoyed the same favor that Joseph did. Jacob came from the same line. God had the same plan, was going to bring about the same things, was going to display his sovereignty in the same ways and in the same favor that Joseph had. And they didn't have it because of how they acted. They had it because God promised them something. And God keeps his promises. That's what his righteousness is. And so it occurred to me as I was thinking about the difference between Jacob and Joseph and kind of reflecting on their lives, that Jacob, his dad, was a person of strife. The father of Joseph, Jacob, was a person of strife. If you'll remember his story, at every turn he is scheming and he is planning and he is controlling and he is stressed and he is anxious about bringing about the life that he wants. He wanted his father's blessing. He wanted to be a claimant of the promises of Abraham. He wanted to be the one through whom the blessings would flow to future generations. He wanted to be the top guy. He saw the life that he wanted and he did everything that he could to bring it about. Even though, even though before he was born, God spoke to his mother and said, in you are two nations and the older will serve the younger. The younger will rule over the older. These promises were made before Jacob was ever born. God knew what his plan was and how he was going to bring it about. And yet Jacob chose to either not open his eyes to those promises or not trust those promises or not trust God's favor. And he spent his entire life scheming and planning to try to bring things about in his own life, and all it caused him was strife and stress. He wants his father's blessing, so he schemes up a way to get the birthright from his brother, and then he schemes up a way to get the blessing from his father that required him to lie to his dying father on his deathbed, which is a despicable thing to do. Then he has to flee to a family member where he's then deceived by Laban. And then he has to work for 21 years to be able to go out on his own. And on the way out, he has to lie and cheat and steal again. He's still a deplorable person. And then at the end of the narrative, we see him, he's going to be reunited with his brother Esau, who is coming for him. And he schemes again on how to mitigate the anger and the wrath of his brother Esau so that maybe he won't get murdered by him. And we see throughout his whole life this striving and this anxiety and this stress and this sense of control and scheming and how can I bring about the things that I want? And then at the end of his life, or at the end of the story, about halfway through his life, he wrestles all night with someone that I said humbly is possibly Jesus. But we can disagree on that and it's fine. And Jesus renames him Israel. And he says, you have striven with man and with God. And Jacob realizes that he's seen the face of God. And in that moment, he realizes all the striving that I've been doing to bring things about in my life were things that God was going to make happen anyways. If I'll just get out of the way and let him do it. And so what we see in Jacob and Joseph is two men upon whom the favor of the Lord rested. Two men with whom God had made plans, to whom God had made promises, who he had gifted, who he had blessed, and who he loved dearly, and he cared about what happened in their lives. But the contrast is that while Jacob was a person of strife, that Joseph was a person of peace. Jacob was a person of strife. Joseph was a person of peace. When you read the narrative about Jacob, you see stress and anxiety and control and worry and all these things leaping off the page and scheming and lying and manipulating and kind of being a jerk. And when I read the story of Joseph, I don't see any of that springing off the page to me. When I read the story of Joseph, I see remarkable peace and humility. I see a man that's never shaken in his faith. I see a man that seems to not worry too much about his circumstances. I see a man who humbly chooses to serve God at every turn in his life. If you continue to read down through chapter 40, and we'll talk about this in just a minute, there's two prisoners in the prison with Joseph, a baker and a cup bearer. And they go to him and they say, we've had some dreams. We've heard that you can interpret dreams. Will you tell us what they mean? And Joseph, instead of puffing himself up, says, aren't interpretations of dreams, don't those belong to the Lord? Sure, I'll listen to what you have to say, but listen, it's not me doing this. At every point, he gives the credit to God. Last week, we talked about the temptation with Potiphar's wife. And she comes to him and she tries to entice him and get him to commit sin with her. And what's his response? I've been blessed in so many ways. How could I possibly sin against my God in this way? He's humble. He's obedient. He gives God the credit. A few chapters over, we're going to see that he's brought to Pharaoh. Pharaoh's had a couple dreams and he says, I've heard you're good at interpreting dreams. Let me tell you about my dreams. And in front of Pharaoh, where he could take credit again, he could say, I'm the guy. He says, don't dreams belong to the Lord? You can tell me your dreams. Let's see what he says. With Joseph, we see this profound peace. We see this profound joy that exists through his whole life, that runs like a stream through his whole life. No matter the ebbs and the flows, as he's brought high and he's brought low, we see this stream of joy and peace that runs through the life of Joseph. And it absolutely relates to the song that we sang a few minutes ago, that we're going to have joy and we're going to sing whether we're brought high to the mountain or low to the valley. And we see this displayed in the life of Joseph. That he's this person of incredible joy who in every moment simply chooses to trust God and honor God in the moment. And know that even though I don't know how this is going to work out, it will. God loves me and cares about me. So I'm going to control the things that I can control and I'm going to love him the best I can now. And this point, I was actually, I got done with the walk and I came back and I talked to Kyle. He was sitting in his office and I was all excited. Listen to what I just thought about. I think this is really fun. And I was telling him about it. And he made this point, and I think it's a great one. That Jacob's striving prohibited his joy. If the same favor rested on both of them, if God's sovereignty rested on both of them, if God had plans for both of them that he was going to bring about regardless of their behavior, then Kyle's point was the same joy was available to them the whole time. That if you can put yourself in the place of Jacob and imagine the relief that he felt when he realized, oh my gosh, I've been striving with God my whole life and I don't have to try so hard. If you can imagine the joy and relief that he felt when he met his brother who didn't want to murder him, who actually wanted to forgive him. If you can imagine how relieving and joy-filled those days were for Jacob, the disappointing thing is that joy was available to him for his entire life. And he lived half of his life without the joy of the Lord because his striving and his control and his anxiety and his worry and his scheming blinded him to the peace of the Father and prohibited him from experiencing the joy of the Father. And you contrast that with Joseph, who saw it the whole time, whose peaceful nature, whose trust in God, whose belief that God would come through, allowed him to be joyful and calm and peaceful in the moment, no matter what happened. And what you see, really, as you juxtapose their two lives and acknowledge that the same favor rested on both, is you see what it really means to trust God. I'm not talking about believing in God. Believing is an intellectual exercise. Are there enough facts in my head that I can willing to put my faith behind God? That's an intellectual exercise. And actually, every time we see the word belief in the Bible, in the original text, it means trust. And to trust is to rely on something fully, knowing that it will hold me up. There's belief mixed in there, but trust is really an action. And the difference between Joseph and Jacob is that Joseph trusted God and Jacob didn't. He may have believed in God, but Joseph trusted him. Because Joseph trusted God, he was a person of peace. Because Joseph trusted God, there was a river of joy that flowed through his life, irrespective of the circumstances that surrounded it. Because Jacob did not trust God, he merely at times when it was for him, chose to believe God. He was a person of strife, arrested with anxiety and worry and scheming and stress. And so where the rubber meets the road here for us this morning is for us to reflect on this question. Are you Jacob or are you Joseph? In your life, in the things that matter to you most, are you Jacob? Are you a person of strife? Or are you Joseph, a person of trusting peace? When I think about this for me, I think about grace. When the pandemic started and we can't meet in person anymore, and I lead an organization that it kind of matters whether or not we meet in person. That's a pretty big part of what we do. I got really worried. And I became Jacob. And I schemed and I stressed and I controlled. Who's coming? How do we reach out to them? How do we make our online product better? How do we keep people engaged? We just had this great campaign. We had a ton of people coming. How do I keep 330 people coming online every week? This is so challenging. I haven't talked to so-and-so in a couple of weeks. Are they gone? And then the other people would, I would talk to so-and-so and they said, yeah, I saw so-and-so this week. And I would go, do they still go to Grace? Do I need to call them? And every day I would just think about Grace. How do we hold it together? How do I keep this church where it is? And I made myself feel like, without realizing it, that it was all on me. And I Jacobed the heck out of that situation. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, it made me miserable. I didn't realize it. It made me miserable. And poor Jen, it made me grumpy at the house. She put up with some stuff. It was not good. And somewhere around four months ago, I wouldn't have used this language at the time, but somewhere around four months ago, I became Joseph about grace. And I finally realized, you know what? God loves this church. I don't know why. I don't know why he does. He just does. He loves us. And if you've been here for any number of years, you've seen him see us through time and again. God loves this place. And if he loves this place, he has a plan for this place. And if he has a plan for this place, he's going to execute it regardless of what I do. So I can keep trying to Jacob the situation and fix it and figure out what we need to do and stress out about it all the time. Or I can be Joseph. I can trust that God cares about this place and has a plan for this place that he's going to bring about regardless of my behavior. So the best possible thing I can do is to rest easy in the sovereignty of God, to choose to trust him with the church and simply humbly obey Jesus whenever the opportunity for obedience is presented to me and quit worrying about the things that I can't control. And it brought peace. Parents, with your children, are you Jacob or are you Joseph? Do you stress out about who they are and how they behave and how we can augment this behavior so they don't embarrass us in public? Do we stress out about where they're going to go to college, if they're college, what kind of decisions that they're making? Do we stress out about every little thing and be a helicopter parent and stress and scheme and worry and control and be anxious? Or are we Joseph? Do we trust and acknowledge that, you know what? God loves my kid way more than I ever could. And because God loves them, he has a plan for them. And he has a design for them. And he has promises for them. And the best thing I can possibly do for my child is to step out of the way and be Joseph and try to simply obey Jesus in the moment when the moments present themselves. But to be people of peace about our children. About your career, are you Jacob or are you Joseph? Are you constantly trying to scheme and align yourselves with the right people and form the right relationships and do the right thing and impress the right person by putting that right time stamp on the email early in the morning or late at night? Are we constantly trying to figure out how to advance ourself in our career? Or are we Joseph? I know that God loves me. And I know that he cares deeply about who I work around and what I do and my witness for him as I work with my coworkers. And so I know that if I work hard and honor him, that he's going to do with my career whatever it is he needs to do. Many in our church are facing retirement. We've recently retired. We're thinking about it. Are you Jacob about that or are you Joseph? Are you trying to control every aspect of it and think through it and plan it all out and map it out and know exactly what's going to happen or can you acknowledge, you know what, I think God loves me and he cares deeply about what I do in the rest of the years of my life. And he's going to direct me to the right place if I trust him with him. In our relationships, in our marriages that we might be trying to save, in broken relationships with friends or with family, are we Jacob or are we Joseph? Are we people of strife or are we people of peace? Are we people who are trying to arrest control from God or are we people who trust God enough to give him control? And if you are a person who's answering over and over again, gosh, I'm Jacob. I'm Jacob and I want the peace that you're talking about, but I don't know how to get it. What do I do? I would simply tell you that our peace is found in Jesus. This is why I think Paul writes in Philippians 4, 6, and 7, be anxious for nothing, but in everything with prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in who? In Christ Jesus. If you're anxious, if you're controlling, if you're worried, if you're not trusting God with things, what does Paul tell you to do in the letter to the Philippians? He tells you, And you know how he's going to do that? By giving you more Jesus. By pointing you towards Christ. Hebrews writes the same thing. Run the race that's set before you. How? By focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. Jesus says the same thing in John 15. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the other things. Don't worry about all the scheming. Don't worry about everything else that I'm going to do in your life. You focus on me. You abide in me. And I'll abide in you. And because of that, everything's going to work out. You're going to bear much fruit. If we want to be like Joseph, and we want to walk away from being like Jacob, then we need to acknowledge that our peace is found in Jesus. And our anxiety and our desire for control should be a reminder to us that we simply need more Jesus. That we simply need to follow him harder. That we simply need to press into him more. That we simply need to let go of something more. If you want to test this, trust him with something that's stressing you out in your life right now. Just this last week, I had a conversation with a couple in the church that I knew was going to be a hard conversation. And I had been stressed out about it for a while. The conversation happened the day after I stumbled on this lesson and this comparison of person of peace, person of strife. And I thought, all right, I'm gonna preach to myself here. Normally, when I go into a difficult conversation or a meeting, I have thought through, Jen will tell you, I have thought through every scenario. I've had every conversation in my head already. I hate being unprepared. I like to have thought through what's gonna happen so that I don't respond emotionally. I respond reasonably. I like to know that there's nothing that's going to happen that I'm not expecting. But for this one, I just chose to be Joseph. And I said, God, I know you love me. I know you love them. I know the results of this conversation matter to you. And that was good. And I went into the conversation trying to honor God with what we talked about, and so did they. And we would all tell you, the results of this conversation were far better than any of us thought they would be going into it. And the Holy Spirit was present with us that night, and he met with us that night. If this is a difficult concept for you, pick one thing that's stressing you out in your life and hand it to Jesus and watch him come through. Because here's what happens when we're people of peace and people of strife. Strife and peace permeate. Strife and peace, they bleed out onto other people. They act like my four-month-old son, John, right now. John permeates, man. He is a drool monster. Like, he wakes up. First of all, he's just drooling like crazy. I don't know what's going on in there. Jen picked him up in the living room the other day and was holding him up and smiling at him. And I saw what she couldn't, which was a bead of spit glimmering in the sunlight through the window that landed square on her forehead, and I died laughing. That is John. I did not even get her a towel. I was laughing too hard. Not only that, not only does he drool constantly, the kid wakes up, and the only thing he cares about in life is how much of his hand fits into his mouth. That's the only thing that matters to him. Nothing else. He doesn't care about a single thing else. It's just how much of this can I jam in here? And it's all he does. And it gets his hand all slobbery. So he'll wipe it on your face or he'll grab you. You'll pick him up. I picked him up yesterday. I picked him up when I was holding him and put him down and my forearm was wet from his leg, from drool that had run down and somehow his legs are really chubby. They had gotten in places and just to touch John is to have drool on you. It just is. I don't know how it happens. It just permeates. Strife and joy work the same way. When you're a person of strife and stress, it permeates, man. It bleeds. It gets on everybody around you. It gets on your spouse and it changes their days. It gets on your kids, it changes their days. It gets on your coworkers, it gets on your friends. Strife bleeds and permeates and has ripples on everyone around you. And so does peace, particularly in a world of so much strife. Normally, when people of strife are around each other, their stress starts amping everyone up, right? We kind of get into a frenzy. You're complaining about this, and I'm complaining about this, and life stinks together, and then we get all worked up about everything. But to be a person of peace that actually calms those waves of strife, well that has a calming effect on everyone around us too. To be a person of trust and for people to see this trust that Joseph had, regardless of circumstances, well that begins to bleed on other people too. So I thought it worth it to pause at this point in the story and acknowledge this idea that the same favor rests on these two men. The difference in their life is how they receive that favor. Jacob's striving made him blind to it. Joseph's trust helped him to see it. And it gave him peace and joy for his whole life that it took Jacob 40 years to experience. And so in our lives and in our situations, which ones do we want to be? Now, as Joseph is in jail, eventually Pharaoh gets angry with his cupbearer and his baker, and he throws them in jail too. And they're under the care of Joseph. While they're there, they have some dreams. And they go to Joseph and they say, we've had some dreams. We've heard that you're a good, good at interpreting dreams. Can you tell us what they mean? And Joseph again says that I'm not good at it. God is, but let's see what you got. And they tell Joseph his dreams. I'm not, their dreams. I'm not going to detail those for you. Those are in the text and you can read them if you like. I hope you will. But they say, these are our dreams. What do they mean? And he looks at the cupbearer and he's like, great news. You, here's what's going to happen. In three days, Pharaoh is going to call you back to service and you're going to serve him. And he's going to restore you to your former position. You're going to go out of prison, back to your former life. Everything's going to be good. And the cupbearer is like, that's great. What's mine mean? And Joseph's like, not as good of news. You're going to get called out of here in three days as well, but when Pharaoh calls you out of here, he's going to hang you, and you're going to die in three days. And as they're leaving, Joseph looks at the cupbearer, and he says, don't forget me. When you go, and Pharaoh restores you, remember me, that I might get out of this pit. I know I'm doing great here in jail. I don't love it. So remember me to Pharaoh that I might get out of here as well. And chapter 39 ends with the somber news that everything that Joseph said would happen did happen, except the cupbearer forgot about him. And we're going to pick up the story next week and spend the whole week on the very first sentence in the next chapter. And it may just be the best part of this whole seven-week series. So I hope that you can come for it, and I hope that we'll get to see you for the hootenanny. Let me pray, and we'll carry on next week. Father, thank you for the way that you speak to us out of Scripture. Thank you for the way that you speak to us through circumstances. Lord, I just pray that... I pray that we would be sensitive to those things. God, give us ears to hear. We know, we know and we've seen over and over again that the same spirit that speaks to Joseph, that spoke to Jacob, that speaks to me, speaks to us. So God, speak to grace and move in grace and press on the hearts of grace for what you would have us do and where you would have us go. Give us the faith to trust you even when we can't fully see the results of that trust yet. Give us the peace that comes from trusting you. Let us this week, those of us who are Jacobs, experience just a taste of the joy that comes when we trust you with a stressful situation and watch you come through in the way that only you can. Father, help us to trust you in all things, to acknowledge that you care about the details of our life even more than we do, and that you have a plan for us that is better than any we could ever come up with. Help us to walk in trust of you, and in turn, walk in peace and influence the people around us. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. In part two, we encountered Joseph as a teenager and learned his arrogance earned him such resentment from his brothers that they eventually sold him into slavery. This event changed Joseph forever. Joseph believed, based on God-given dreams, that he would one day rule over his brothers. Now, facing the disillusion of those dreams, Joseph must make a choice. A choice that is eventually faced by all of us. Will he choose to resent God because he feels God let him down? Or will he still cling to the hope that even though he can't see it, he knows that God has a plan? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching online. If you are online and you saw that Hootenanny announcement or here, I know that you did. I would add one thing to it that I'm very excited about. There's actually, we have a guy who comes to the church who is a private chef that you can hire and bring into your home. And then we have some other folks who are a part of the church who have worked as professional chefs. And they are conspiring to come up with kind of an elevated grill menu that they're gonna make for us for the Hootenanny. So we're not just gonna have frozen pucks that we melt on the grill and then slap between buns and expect you to call them good. We're gonna have actual good stuff to eat at the Hootenanny. So come on, invite your friends. I think it's going to be a really fun, special time. I'm looking forward to getting to do that together as a church. Last week as a church, we did Grace Serves. And for those who weren't able to make it, we had a really great turnout. I was very much encouraged by it. We did some work at Fox Road. We packed lunches or meals with Rise Against Hunger. And I was told this week, where's Doug Funk? Are you in here? Are you out in the lobby? Okay. Yeah, you're here. Is it 300,000 meals in 20 years? Yes. 350,000. Sorry. Let's just call it 500. Let's just round up 500,000. But no, we were told by Rise Against Hunger that over the course of 20 years that Grace has helped to pack about 350,000 meals for people who need them a whole, whole lot. So I thought that was great. I don't know if it's appropriate to cheer for ourselves. Let's just know that we did that. No, don't cheer. That's great that we did that. And finally, it's kickoff Sunday. This is a good Sunday. If you're here, your team has a chance to be good this year. If you're watching from home, they're going to be terrible. All right? That's what you get. I wish the best of luck to all of you and your teams, unless your teams are the Panthers or the Patriots or whoever's playing the Falcons. Otherwise, best of luck to you. Let's go. This morning, we're focused on Joseph and moving through his life. As we said in the video, that we ended last week with Joseph facing this decision. He was an arrogant teenager that built resentment with his brothers that got him thrown into a pit and sold into slavery. And then we see, we leave Joseph on the back of presumably an ox cart chained, being carried down to Egypt into a life of slavery. Joseph had just received dreams from God that said that he was going to rule over his brothers and rule over even his mom and his dad. He had received these dreams from God, these promises from God, and then the exact opposite of those promises happened to him as he's riding down to Egypt as a slave? How can he possibly rule over his brothers? He will be irrevocably separated from his family and is now bound to live a life of slavery. And so in that moment, he faces a choice that every God follower faces at some point in their life. He's in a place where he feels disillusioned by God. He's in a place where he feels disappointed by God. And you've been in that place too. And if you haven't, you will be. I was taught this about God and yet it's not happening. I read this in God's word. It says, if I did this, then he would do this. And I did this and he's not doing that. To be a believer is to sit in a place at some point or another where you feel like God should do this thing and he's not doing it. And you're disillusioned and you're disappointed. And you feel that maybe God's not going to keep his word to you. And in those moments, we're faced with the same decision that Joseph was faced with as he's going down to Egypt in the ox cart. Do I resent God because he broke his word to me, because I think he's let me down, or do I choose to love God and trust him because I know that he loves me and I know that he has a plan. And even though I can't see how it's going to work out, I know that God is good and he has a plan. And so Joseph chooses, we see as we pick up the story, he chooses to continue to honor God. He chooses to continue to show God favor. And sometimes there are these times in life where we feel like we want to be resentful of God, but we have no other place to go but to run to him. There is this scene with Jesus and his disciples where Jesus offers this really hard teaching and a lot of people fall away from him because they don't expect that that's what Jesus, the Son of God, would teach. And he looks at the disciples and he says, are you going to leave too? And Peter profoundly and wonderfully responds, where else can I go? Where else can I find hope? And so maybe Joseph relates to that. God, I don't understand what you're doing here. I'm on an ox cart in chains to live a life of slavery. I'm supposed to be ruling over my family and be the head of the clan. This is the exact opposite of what you promised, but I don't know where else to go from here. And so we see that Joseph chooses to lean into God, to trust him, and to trust that God loves him. When he gets to Egypt, he's sold into slavery to a man named Potiphar. Many of you know this story, but in case you don't, Potiphar was the chief of Pharaoh's guard. We're told that he was the second most powerful person in Egypt, which makes him the second most powerful person on the planet at the time because Egypt is the superpower during Joseph's day. Potiphar had risen to prominence in the Egyptian empire and was in charge of Pharaoh's guard. He was tasked with keeping Pharaoh alive, which made him the second most powerful man in the nation. And he buys Joseph. And we don't know how many years for sure that he worked for Potiphar. And well, what we don't know is how many years it took to get to this place. But Joseph is bought by this powerful man in Egypt. He is a Hebrew slave. He's a foreign guy. He's about 17 years old and he sold to Potiphar. And remember he was faced with that choice. Do I honor God or do I run away from him? And Joseph chooses to honor God. And this is how we see that he does this. This is what happens to Joseph in Potiphar's house. We're going to be in Genesis chapter 39 and pick up the story in verse 2. If you read on, what you find is that Joseph ran the house so well and so efficiently and Potiphar trusted him with so much that it says that the only thing that Potiphar had to think about every day was what to eat. Joseph took care of Potiphar so well just saying, let's relate to the text a little bit. Wouldn't that be a pretty sweet gig? How would you like it if you had a personal life assistant that was so good at what they did that they ran your life better than you and all you had to do is decide what you wanted to eat. That's pretty good, especially on NFL Sunday. I wish that that was my life on NFL Sunday. That's how much Potiphar trusted Joseph, which I've got to believe. I don't know. Admittedly, I don't know a lot about the slave culture in ancient Egypt. But I'd be willing to bet that there's not many foreign slaves who rose to such a position of prominence as Joseph did. I bet Potiphar had Egyptian slaves that human nature tells us he would have preferred over the Hebrew slave. But for some reason, Joseph was so impressive that he rose to what I would argue is very likely an unprecedented position for someone who came from outside of Egypt. But Joseph chose to honor God. He chose to do the right thing, and God gave him favor. And God made all that he did prosper. You know those people? I've worked with people like that before. I've worked with people on church staff. I got a buddy named Heath. No matter where he got moved around at my old church, he got moved around to different positions every year and a half or two years. And everywhere he went, that ministry grew. He's just good at everything. I wish I had an ounce of what he has. He's good at everything. This is Joseph. Wherever God puts him, it thrives. And so he rises to prominence in Potiphar's house. At some point in his rise, which would have been over the course of years, this was not an overnight thing, Potiphar's wife comes to Joseph and says, would you lay with me? Now, we've covered this story before, and when we did, for this section, I walked over here and I said, this is going to be my reckless speculation box. This is not biblical truth. This is just me guessing. So with that in mind, I would just like to reiterate this point because I think it bears repeating, and many of you didn't hear it when I made it two or three years ago. And I don't want to be untoward with what I'm about to say, but I think that we can admit that this is objectively true in most cases. Potiphar is rich and powerful. Rich and powerful people tend to be good-looking and have good-looking spouses. Yes, you don't have to answer this out loud, but this is just a thing. It's a dynamic. People get money and they get better looking. That's why I look this way. I have an average amount of money. I look average. If I had a lot of money, I would look amazing. I bet Potiphar's wife was pretty. I bet she was. Joseph grew up in a nomadic tribe that wandered the fields and the hillsides and the deserts. You ever seen people who live a life exposed to the elements? They have a face of a catcher's mitt at like 35. They're not a good-looking people. Go to the coast of Maine and look around. You'd be like, that person's a grandpa. No, they're not. They just graduated college. That's what it was like to be a nomad. I'd be willing to bet. Again, this is conjecture. Joseph grew up in a rough and tumble nomadic tribe where all the girls were his cousins. All right, he didn't have a lot of options. And then this Hebrew nomad comes to the most powerful nation in the world, is elevated in the second most powerful home in the nation, and the wife of that home wants to sleep with him. That would be, for any human who's ever lived, a genuinely tempting situation. Right? Put yourself in his shoes and you tell me what you would do. I'm a big person. When we want to start judging people's sins and what they did and how far they fell and gosh, I can't believe that they would have done that or done that to their family or whatever it was. I always go to, okay, that's fine. Let's judge them. Put yourself in their shoes with their circumstances and the way that they grew up and you tell me that you would make different choices because I don't think you would. Put yourself in Joseph's shoes and ask yourself what choice you would make. Even if you didn't go through with it, would you flirt with it a little bit? Would you let it stroke your ego? Would you want to see if she was really serious? Would you just lean into it because it kind of made you feel good that someone like that would like someone like you? Human nature says that we probably would. Human nature suggests that many of us, including me, I'm saying us on purpose, would at least entertain it a little bit. Would at least want to search it out just a little bit. Would maybe want to see how close can I get to the fire without getting burned. But that wasn't Joseph's response. She came to him day after day. And she tried to entice him. And in that, in that day after day enticement, do you think that it was a formal across the room? Mr. Joseph, as you would be so obliged, I would love to engage in some activities with you. I bet she did what she could to make it more and more difficult for him to stand firm. But this is what he said. And this is the remarkable character of Joseph. Look at his response. When she would come to him day after day and try to entice him, look at what his response was. We see it in verse 8, and I'll read through 10. That is some remarkable integrity. She would try to entice him, and he would say to her, how could I possibly do that? Your husband has entrusted me with his very life. He has given me all his authority. He's not even more powerful in this house than I am. How could I betray him and do this to him? And more than that, and I love the way that Joseph phrases this, how could I sin against my God? My God who has been faithful to me, my God who, yes, let me get sold into slavery, but has shown me favor here and given me a position here that I did not think I could attain to and who has helped me to find favor in my master Potiphar's eyes. How could I sin against him, and sin against Potiphar, and sin against myself, and sin against you, and engage myself in this? How could I possibly do that? I wonder what it would look like to see temptations in our life through the lens of God's blessings. If when we are tempted to sin or to go down a path that we shouldn't go down, I wonder what it would look like to call to mind God's blessings in our life. How could I do that to God after all that he's given me and list off the things that we are grateful for? I wonder what kind of impact that would have on our ability to stand firm when we face the tests of temptation. And as we keep reading the story, we find that one day it comes to a critical point where words are no longer enough. One day Joseph goes into the house and he and Potiphar's wife are alone. It seems that normally there was all kinds of servants around, so even if Potiphar's wife was being suggestive, there really wasn't a time or a place where it would be expedient. But this time, there's nobody else around. This time, there's no accountability. It's just him and her. And she apparently grabs hold of him because she was trying to seize the moment. And you know the story. He, in that moment, sets an example for us that rings through the centuries. He, in that moment, does something that I think is incredibly profound. And I wonder what we would do in that moment. We're a slave. We've risen to prominence. We are subjected to Potiphar. This person who we may be very attracted to wants us to cross a line with them. How many of us in our heads in that moment would justify it? What choice do I have? If I don't, she's going to tell on me, I'm going to go to prison or be killed. I may as well just do it. I may as well just follow through because I'm in an impossible situation. But Joseph doesn't do any of that. Again, he sets an example in that moment that rings throughout history. And he runs. He just gets the heck out of there. He runs away. And as he runs, she holds on to his cloak, his tunic, whatever the outer layer of his garments were, and he flings them off and he goes and he gets out of there. And he runs from that temptation. And this didn't even occur to me in my sermon prep. This occurred to me as I was praying about to get up and do the sermon. But do you understand that when he's running from temptation, that he's running directly to Jesus? It may have felt to him like he was running out of the house and to a safe place, but no, no, no, that's not where he's running. He's running away from evil and towards his Savior. When you choose to run like Joseph, you're running away from evil, the things that would seek to tear you down, and you are running towards your Savior. And I think that's a pretty cool picture. But in that moment, Joseph chooses to run. And it's here in the story that I want to ask a couple questions of us as we reflect on and relate to this story. The first question would be this, what tempts me? If you have notes, you can write that down. I'm not asking you to guess what tempts Nate, okay? I'm asking you to make it personal in your life as you think about yourself. I didn't want to say what tempts you because then we're tempted to think about what tempts other people. No, no, no, no, no. What tempts me? Think about it that way. What tempts you? Don't write it down. People around you will see. They'll be weird. What tempts you? Is it the temptation that Joseph faced? Listen, in a church our size, and the number of marriages that are represented here, you're kidding yourself if you think that people aren't currently facing that temptation. You're kidding yourself if you think people aren't currently involved in that temptation. If you think that people aren't flirting with the idea in their mind. Or maybe it's not a temptation that you have now, but it's not because you don't want that temptation. It's because you don't have the option. But you would invite the option if it came. Maybe that's the temptation that you face. If it is, then you're likely sweaty right now. And that's good. That's the Holy Spirit. Don't worry about that. Maybe the temptation we face is some sort of addiction, a reliance on chemicals. Listen, I've heard a lot of jokes over the course of the pandemic, but has there ever been an easier time in our adult life to develop a habit that's not healthy in the privacy of our own home? We work from home, don't have to be anywhere the next day, just have a couple more. Has it ever been easier to push alcohol into an area where it just doesn't need to be, to take that too far? Maybe that's what's tempting us. Maybe, maybe it's not something that is that blatantly corrosive. Maybe it's greed. Maybe the thing that tempts you is just to chase after the next thing, is to get the next job to make a little bit more money so that you can have the next nice thing. So that when you get that nice thing, you can become instantly dissatisfied with that and then want the next nice thing. And if you think I'm making that up, all right, I know that that's something that we all face. A year and a half ago, Jen and I bought a house. We were so proud of it. We were thrilled with it. This is the nicest house we've ever owned. And then within like nine months, we were like, this place is small. We need more space. Lily's asking us constantly, and on the next house, can I paint my walls this color? And I'm like, we don't have any money to do that. So sure, in 10 years. Maybe we just get caught up in greed for the next thing that we want. Maybe for many of us, I was really trying to think this week about what might tempt us. And I think that there's some obvious things, like the things I've already addressed. But I think that many of us face a temptation that maybe we wouldn't address out loud or we wouldn't even conclude ourselves, but I think it very much is one, but it's the sin of complacency or being good enough. Maybe what tempts you is to simply say, I'm good. I'm good enough. Yeah, I mean, I could maybe come to church with more regularity. I know I could get up and I could read my Bible more. Nate's always talking about that. I could try it. I know I could be more prayerful. I know that I could have devotions with my kids. I know that I could pray with my spouse more. I know that I could volunteer more. I know that I could probably give more if I wanted to. Like, I know that there's more that I could do, sure. But I'm pretty good. I'm okay. My life's not going off the rails. I wasn't in the first group. I'm not tempted by affairs or by alcohol. Oh man, those people are terrible. I'm in the good group. We often get to this place of complacency and good enough by playing comparison games, right? I know that I could be better, but at least I wasn't in that first group. I know that I could do more, but at least I'm not as bad as blank. So-and-so hasn't done this in years, and they seem fine. I think I'm fine, too. And so we find favorable comparisons to ourselves to convince ourselves that, yeah, I could be more healthy spiritually, but I'm doing okay. And I would encourage you to do this if this sounds like you. How about don't compare yourself to other people? How about compare yourself to yourself five years ago? To yourself three years ago? If I'm striking a chord with you and sometimes you think to yourself, yeah, sometimes I just think I'm good enough. I know I could do more, but I don't really want to do it. How do you compare? If you're 50 years old, how do you compare to 45 year old you? Are you healthier? Are you more vibrant spiritually? Do you feel a closeness to Jesus that you didn't feel when you're 45? Are you telling more people about Jesus than you did five years ago? Are you talking with your kids about Jesus more than you did five years ago? Are you seeing more people come to faith in your orbit than you did five years ago? Are you more engaged with scripture? Are you more breathing in God's love and God's goodness and breathing that out to other people than you were five years ago? Or are you about the same? Is it just steady and maybe sometimes a little worse? The sin of good enough just convinces us to flatline for our whole lives and not see any growth. And I kept saying, well, at least I'm not in group one, but guess what? All those sins are just as damaging to us. I thought of one more too. Maybe the sin that you struggle with is letting other people tell you who you are instead of your creator tell you who you are. Maybe you have people in your life who tell you that you're not good enough. Maybe you have voices in your head that tell you that you don't matter. That tell you that no one's going to listen to you. That tell you that you can't really change or that you can't really do or that you're not really that important. I don't want to press too hard on this because that's a difficult place to be, but I would just tell you gently as your pastor, that's sinful too. Because God tells you that you're chosen. God tells you that you're fearfully and wonderfully made. God watched his son die on a cross for you. God is orchestrating this whole thing to come back and get you and bring you to his heaven. God loves you dearly. God made you on purpose. God watches you every day and he roots for you and Jesus sits at the right hand of the father and he intercedes for you. And so maybe your temptation is to listen to voices who aren't God's tell you that you're something or someone that you're not instead of listening to who God tells us that we are. Whatever your temptation is, whatever it is, however you identify with that, I'm not all of them, that'd be too difficult, but pick the one that's most pernicious in your life. That's most relevant in your life. And let's think about that one. What does it look like to run from that sin? Joseph ran. He ran away from that sin and he ran to Jesus. So what does it look like in your life to do that? I would simply like to make this point about running as we try to figure out what that means in our own life. That to run is to take the option off the table. When Joseph ran, he was burning a bridge, man. I was just never coming back. This is never going to happen. I'm getting out of here. I'm not leaving any possibility for it. He didn't go to a different room. He didn't try to talk her out of it. He ran. I'm taking this option that you're proposing off the table. That's not possible. We're not doing it. Not happening. So in your life and the temptations that you face, what does it look like to run from them? What does it look like to take those options off the table? That thing is tempting me and I'm going to make it in my life so that it's not even a possibility. What do you have to do to run from it? What accountability do you have to invite into your life about complacency? What do you have to do to burn the bridge about the affair that you're entertaining? And listen to me, if that's your temptation, run, man, run. Get out of there. Run and burn the bridge. If it's substances, what do you have to do to burn that bridge and take it off the table? If it's complacency, if it's believing the wrong voices, if it's greed, if it's whatever it is, what do we have to do to burn bridges and run, to take that option off the table? And now listen. These are not my favorite kinds of sermons. This is a pretty classic sermon. Hey, what is the sin in your life? You should stop it. That's what this sermon is in its most simple form. And I don't really like to harp on stuff like that because I really don't want this to be a house of guilt. I don't want to bring you in every week, make you feel bad about what you're doing, and then send you out here trying to do better. That's really not the point at all. But it's where we are in the text. It's what happens in the story. And it's a theme of the Bible that we are to pursue holiness and purity. So why does this matter so much to God? Why does God want us to run from our temptations? Why does he want us to take those options off the table? Why does that matter so deeply to him? Well, I had a couple thoughts for that. The first is that we're told in Scripture that we should be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, that we should pursue holiness. God values purity, and so we should too. Jesus died to make us pure. And so we should value that purity. We also talked about in the middle of the summer, we focused in on Psalm 1611, that you make known to me the paths of life in your presence. There is fullness of joy at your right hand. There are pleasures forevermore. And we talked about how this full life is found in God. And we talked about this idea of really God invites us on, this is from C.S. Lewis, God invites us on this incredible vacation, this incredible life to live, and we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies thinking this is the apex of all human experience. When we choose to run away from sin and to Jesus, we're leaving the mud pies and we're pursuing the life that he has laid out for us that's far greater than we could ever ask or imagine. John 10.10 says that Jesus came so that we might have life and have it to the full. We find fullness of joy there. We find pleasures forevermore. He makes known to us the paths of life. So when we sin, we forfeit that. But that's not really the reason that I want us to focus on this morning. To me, the most compelling thought about why does purity matter so much and why should we run from the temptations that exist in our life is simply this thought here. What kingdom work can the enemy short-circuit if you give in to your temptations? What kingdom work can the enemy short circuit if you simply give in to the temptations that you face? It's becoming more and more one of my more favorite used thought about verses in my life, Ephesians 2.10, where Paul writes that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. I know some of you might feel like, listen, man, I don't have any great kingdom work to do. Yes, you do. The Bible tells me so. That God created you in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in him, that he has mapped out for you in your life based on your gifts and your abilities and your spiritual gifts and the way that God has uniquely created and crafted you, that he has laid out for you good works, things to do to build his kingdom for all eternity, to live out our purpose for being here, which our purpose for being alive, I don't know if you know this, is to know Jesus and to bring other people with you as you go to him. That's why we exist. That's why he doesn't snap us up to heaven as soon as we get saved. We were created in Christ Jesus for those good works that we might walk in them. So you might say, gosh, Nate, I'm a stay-at-home mom. My life is a two-year-old. I don't have good works. Bull, you're discipling that kid. You're loving on the families that you invite into your home. You're loving on the friends that that kid has. You're volunteering somewhere. You're loving on your neighborhood somewhere. You're coming to church and loving on kids here and loving on other folks here. You're influencing them, and they're seeing the ripples of God in your life. You cannot tell me that your life doesn't matter. God created you in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. He's got a plan to use you if only we open our eyes to see it. And I wonder, what kingdom building do we short circuit when we allow temptations to take over our life? Here's what I mean. If I allow my temptations to take over my life, what does that do to the work that we're doing at Grace? To what God is doing here in this place? How does it short circuit God's kingdom work here? If you give in to the temptations that you have in your life, how does it short circuit your ability to reach your neighbors, your ability to share Christ's love with your coworkers? How does it short circuit your ability to disciple your children if you give in to the temptations that you're facing? How does it short circuit your ability to love on your family members who don't know Jesus yet but you desperately want them to? If you give in to your temptations, how does it short circuit your ability to be used in those ways? I think this is a huge reason that we pursue purity. So that God can do the work in us and through us that he's always wanted to do. And in being used for that work, we find the greatest joy imaginable. There's another point on your notes, but I'm not going to end it like that. I'm going to end it like this. I don't know what tempts you. I don't know how the enemy would seek to short circuit the work that God has for you to do. But I do know this. That the best choice, the wisest choice, the choice you need to make today is to run from it. Run. Take the option off the table and run to it. And your life may get harder for running. Joseph ran and it landed his butt in prison. Your life may get more difficult if you run, but run. Get away from it. Pursue purity. Know God. Experience his pleasures forevermore and know what it is to live a life of service to his kingdom and live in that peace and that contentment and that fulfillment. If you run, you won't regret it. If you stay, you will. Let's pray. Father, you are so good to us. You're so good to us in how you love us. Father, if there's anybody here who just can't hear your voice and they want so desperately to believe that they are who you say they are, would you just shout at them so they can hear you? God, for those tempted with the same temptation that faced Joseph, give us the strength and wherewithal to run. Whatever we're facing, whatever tempts us, however the enemy would seek to take us off course so that we can't know you like we should and we can't show others who you are. God, I just pray that you would give us the strength and the conviction and the determination to run, to run away from that sin and to run towards you and find the joy that you offer us there. God, let us not think for a second that this is somehow about behaving ourselves better. But let us know and understand that this is all about pursuing you and experiencing the life that you have for us. It's in your son's name who provides us that life that I pray. Amen.