Genesis 39

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. 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. 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.

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.

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.