The Blessing: Pulling Out Splinters

Andrew Meher: Alright, as we return to our text this morning, I want to invite you to open up your Bible to Genesis chapter 45. This is our last week studying Genesis. And we have been, if you remember, we've been following in Genesis this theme of blessing. We've been tracing this theme of blessing that God starts in the very first story in Genesis at creation. He blesses humanity. And we talked about how God has never stopped blessing humanity. He's just had to work with all of our mess ever since we messed everything up. But God has never changed his plan. God has never had a plan B, only a plan A. He desires to bless humanity and through humanity bless his whole creation. And so we've been journeying following that theme and what it might mean for us as a church. And this morning we're going to To wrap that up by looking at verses 1 through 15 of chapter chapter 45 here in in just a moment. And we'll use this as a way of sort of reflecting on this series as a whole, how God blesses, and more importantly, how we trust the God who blesses. But let me let me start maybe to frame what I what I want to get at this morning by just giving you a little bit of a mental image or a physical image you can put on the screen. how many of you Hated getting splinters as a kid. I mean, maybe you hate getting splinters now too. But I remember, you know, differently than now, as a kid, there was something particularly disastrous for my life as a child when I had a splinter. And the idea that my mom or my dad was going to go in there with tweezers and pull this thing out was the most horrific idea I could possibly imagine. I would rather live with the splinter. How many of you know what I'm talking about? How many of you who have had children or or young people in your care and you've had to try and remove a splinter from a child? That is also a horrific experience that I do not want to go through as a parent. The fighting, the holding people down, I'm like this close to ordering a strait jacket to keep in my home just for these instances. Especially when they were little and they were first learning to walk. I remember once one of my kids going across our deck out and they're playing outside barefoot, and they came in and they had tiny little splinters covering the top of their foot and all up their leg, and they were so So small I couldn't get it off. We just like soak them in the tub for a while and eventually they just kind of like loosened up and came out, thankfully. But there's some when you know when there's a big one, you've got to like yank it out. Like this is like, we got splinters, we've got to deal with this right now. We've got to deal with the splinters, but no one wants to deal with the splinters. And for a child, in order for them to go through this horrific, excruciating experience and moment, they have to trust their parent enough to To help them through it to get to the other side. But there's a ton of pain they're going to have to endure and discomfort in the meantime. When our lives are a mess in the same way, whether that because we did something irresponsibly, or maybe something happened outside of our control, but either way, when we have a mess in our lives, like that splinter, how many of us would just prefer leaving it alone and ignoring it instead of trusting God to deal with those splinters in our lives? It becomes very evident very quickly when there are messes in our lives, whether we've created them or others have created them for us, it becomes very evident whether we trust God or not when these things happen in our lives. Whether we're going to let God deal with these issues. Will we face them or will we hide them and just let's just not talk about that or go there? And now, as we're wrapping up this sermon series in Genesis, what I want to talk about is how, when we have these messes in our relationships, in our church, in our lives, in the world, all these things, how do we learn how to trust the God who blesses when we are faced with these messes? And I want to read Genesis chapter 45. Verses 1 through 15 to help us learn a bit about how we trust God to pull those splinters out. Let's read the text together. It'll be here on the screen, or you can follow me in your Bible. It says this: Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all his attendants, and he cried out: Have everyone leave my presence. So there was no one with Joseph when he made himself known to his brothers. And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him, and Pharaoh's household heard about it. Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph. Is my father still living? But his brothers were not able to answer him, because they were terrified at his presence. Then Joseph said to his brothers, Come close to me. And when they had done so, he said, I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt. Uh-oh. And now do not be distressed, and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will not be ploughing and reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, Lord of his entire household, and ruler of all Egypt. Now hurry back to my father and say to him, This is what your son Joseph says. God has made me Lord of all Egypt. Come down to me. Don't delay. You shall live in the region of Goshen and be near me, you, your children and grandchildren, your flocks and herds and all you have. I will provide for you there. because five years of famine are still to come. Otherwise you and your household and all who belong to you will become destitute. You can see for yourselves, and so can my brother Benjamin that it is really I who am speaking to you. Tell my father about all the honor accorded me here in Egypt, and about everything you have seen, and bring my father down here quickly. Then he threw his arms around his brother Benjamin and wept, and Benjamin embraced him, weeping, and he kissed all his brothers and wept over them, and afterward his brothers talked with him. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, as we learn about you, the God who blesses, we pray, God, that you would show us how to trust you, even when it's messy, to be able to see the blessing on the other side. Help us to trust you in facing every mess that we face. Spirit, would you empower us this morning to see with spiritual eyes and receive with spiritual hearts and spiritual minds to understand what it is that you want us to learn this morning from your word. In Jesus' name we pray. And all God's people said Amen. This morning, as I said, we are closing out a three-month journey we've been in through the book of Genesis, tracing this theme of blessing. And I hope, I hope, what I and others who have preached this summer have proclaimed from the scriptures has done at least two things. First, I hope that you have understood. How different we often imagine blessing to be than what the scripture actually teaches. Blessing, remember, is not about our material comfort necessarily, but it is about a life in God shared with people, working in this world that we call creation together. Every second we have here, and have the ability to share it with each other, is an utter and complete gift of God's grace to be received and enjoyed. So I hope you've learned that about what blessing is. Second, though, I hope you have seen that even when sin entered the world, when death began to reign. When brokenness and the messes that we have made ourselves and that others have made, when all those messes began to increase, I hope you have seen that God did not ever flinch and never changed his plan. We are fickle. God is not. God stays faithful, even as we were singing this morning. You are who you say you are. God is faithful to God's plan to bless all of humanity. And we've seen time and time again how God has taken terrible, even horrific situations that we've read about in Genesis, and he has brought profound blessing out of them. Not because he's excusing what happened, but because God takes what was evil and turns it into good. And today, as we reach the end of our story in the Ark of the Book of Genesis, with the sons of Jacob all finally reconciling with Joseph and ending up saving their whole family from what would have been starvation in the midst of this massive famine that was over the ancient world, we see this beautiful moment between all the brothers, Joseph and his brothers that betrayed him, happening. The brothers' mess had created a situation where the older brothers, Had by this point they had been keeping a decades-old family secret that they were ready to carry to their grave. That they had sold their brother because they were jealous of him. And then they lied to their dad that he'd been killed. You can read the rest of the story that we skipped over since chapter 37 of Genesis. Chapter 37, all the way to where we are in 45 and the last few chapters concluding the family story. But just a brief summary for you. Remember, Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. And those traders that purchased him brought him to Egypt, and they sold him to a very, very powerful Egyptian named Potiphar. And he sold Started working there, and Potiphar worked directly for Pharaoh. He was one of the guards and the captains there in Pharaoh's house. And Joseph eventually was so good at his work and so faithful to his employer that he eventually was promoted to be in charge of all of Potiphar's household. And that drew the unwanted attention of Potiphar's wife, who tried to get Joseph to have an affair with her. Now he refused and ran away, but then Potiphar's wife was so outraged that she had been refused that she lied that Joseph was trying to do things forcibly to her, and immediately Joseph was taken away to prison. Now, these are not prisons where they get three square meals a day. These are usually like holes in the ground that they drop people. They don't care about you. If you get fed, they don't care. If you don't get fed, they don't care. And while he was in jail, God used him even there, even though it had gotten worse. The jailer there put Joseph in charge of all the other prisoners. He was such a good, faithful prisoner that the jailer said, Joseph, you can be in charge of all of these prisoners. And he interpreted the dreams of others. And eventually Pharaoh heard about Joseph's ability to interpret dreams and offer wise counsel. And Pharaoh asked Joseph to interpret. Interpret a dream, a set of dreams, that were terrifying him. They were like nightmares to him. And these dreams that Pharaoh was having were from God, and they were warning about a coming famine that wasn't just going to be over Egypt, it was going to be over the land of Canaan and the whole ancient Near Eastern world of that time. Not only would the crops die, they wouldn't be able to plant anything and be like a dust bowl. Nothing was going to last. And so once the famine came, and Joseph provided wisdom and instruction on how to store food to make things last, and then oversaw the distribution of the food, he was so wise that Pharaoh put Joseph in charge of all of Egypt. So Joseph is now running all of Egypt to the point where Joseph tells his brothers in the story we read, I've become like a father to Pharaoh. He hears from God and he is giving Pharaoh Wise counsel to get everyone through the famine. But people are coming from far and wide, from other places all around the known world, because they hear there's food in Egypt once the famine starts. And guess who comes looking for food? The very brothers who were trying to destroy Joseph. And they actually go back and forth and have several interactions before this where Joseph doesn't tell them who he is, but he realizes these are his brothers and they're asking for food. And they go back and forth several times. They come for food, and Joseph does different things because he's trying to figure out, you know, if his father's alive and how the whole family's doing without giving anything away. But we come to our story finally, and we realize. That Joseph can't handle it, and he lets the cat out of the bag and tells them who he is, and we get the story that we are at. And it's in this interaction that we just read this morning that we gain insight into what it looks like to fully trust the God who blesses. Even when those splinters are in real deep and we would prefer to leave them alone, when the messes are really bad, when there is family betrayal, like we see in the life of Joseph, when there is utter contempt and there's an opportunity for things to change, we see what it looks like to really trust God when the mess is deep. And I believe for us as a church, as we end the summer and head into the fall together, it is so important that we learn from this text a few things about what it looks like to really trust God when they're our messes in our lives. And it shows that when we when we do these things that we're going to talk about, when we do these things, it demonstrates how much we trust God when the splinter is right there. When it's really we're not sure if we should go forward with this or if we should just try and leave it alone. Our trust in God is shown by how we choose to deal with the splinter. with the mess. And Joseph, through his actions in this text, shows us what it really looks like to trust God's work of blessing, even when it's really messy. So three three instructions that I want to give us from this. And I'll just say three of them now and then we'll look at each of them very briefly. When we are faced with a mess, These things that, this is really deep. I don't know if we should go there and deal with this. It might hurt other people. There's a there's things that this is this is gonna open up a can of worms. You know what I'm talking about, these really messy situations. It looks like trusting God when we do this, when we name the messes. Ours and help other people name theirs. It looks like trusting God when we then encourage repentance and extend graciousness in our messes and in other people's messes. And then it also looks like trusting God when we take the long view of God's work through the messes. I want to just talk about each of these instructions for us so we can see as a church how. We can trust the God who blesses. And the first thing we need to do is name the messes. If we really trust God, we will name the messes. Joseph named the mess right off the bat when he introduces himself to his brothers. I'm Joseph, your brother. But he doesn't stop there, does he? He says, you know. The one you sold into slavery. That one. You imagine them like Joseph. We don't recall having a brother named Joseph. They don't think they know this guy at all. And then he goes, he tells them information that no one else would know. You know, the one you sold into slavery. Now they're sitting up. Now they're afraid. They see how powerful they've had multiple interactions. He has the entire power of the Egyptian kingdom at his disposal. And he just called them out. It's not looking good for Joseph's brothers right now. He names the mess Joseph does. His brothers were afraid and they wanted to keep their distance. They're afraid of this mess. They don't want to go there again. They've tried to leave this in their past and not talk about it again. But Joseph is trying to get them to come closer. You notice that? Come closer. And then he says it again. No, it's me. I am your brother who you sold into slavery. He says who he is, gives them a bit of insider information, and names their secret that hasn't been talked about in years. He then exposed and laid open this mess. He still addressed what they did. We gotta talk about what they did. You guys we gotta talk right now, he says to his brothers. I am Joseph and If we really trust that God is working, as we're gonna see, Joseph really does trust that God's working, we just gotta talk about this mess you guys made. Because it wasn't good. It was bad. But notice how Joseph did it. He did it from a posture of wanting to reconcile with his brothers. Come close. He didn't, he told all of the Egyptians to leave. He had no guards, no aides. It was just him and the brothers. He wanted to level the playing field as much as possible. He didn't want them to feel threatened in this moment. He wanted to restore their relationship. Bring them back into life together. But that was only going to be possible if they named the mess. We got to talk about the mess. He knew that God had orchestrated all of this for their good. And because he knew that, he trusted God to make it right, even though it was going to be kind of nasty to bring up. some of you may have heard about or seen there's been a lot of buzz about a new Netflix documentary recently called The Death of a Pastor's Wife. it might be a little bit upsetting and triggering for some people, so do some research before you watch it. if that's something that might not be helpful for you. But the gist of it and why I'm bringing this up is it it tells the story of a a man who was pastoring a church and was having an affair with the woman that the Documentaries about. His wife found out and children, and they left. He had no interest in dealing with this. He didn't acknowledge it as a problem. And there was another woman who was another pastor on staff at this church, and she found out what happened, and she went to him and said, This is not okay. You need to make this right, you need to repent of your sin. He didn't want to have any of it. She went to their to the board of the church and and went to them and said, we have to do something about this. This is messing things up. There's a big, we gotta name this. We gotta bring this out into the open. We gotta deal with the problem. And the board said, this could hurt the church and the church's reputation if we talk about this. Let's let's not let's not dig up the mess. See, these are two different perspectives on where we put our trust. If we are putting our trust in what we can do, then we have to hide the messes. Because we have to try and manage it ourselves. If we're putting trust in what God can do, then we can be like, whew, not that we're happy about it, but we can name the messes. We can let the messes be exposed because we're not afraid of those messes defining us for the rest of our lives. Because we know that God wants to work and bring blessing out of the messes. Now, certainly people will have to take responsibility. We'll talk about that in a minute. But this was a situation where they saw what they were doing as needing to manage a reputation instead of seeing this as a giant splinter that needed to be dealt with and healed. We cease to be the church, my friends, when we cease naming our messes. We are no longer a community where messes are redeemed by God at that point. We are instead a nonprofit corporation who is focused on image management. We can't be the church that really believes that Jesus is redeeming and restoring if we don't first name the messes. Naming the mess shows that we actually trust that God can work. And so just like Joseph, we can't ignore our own messes, and we lovingly cannot ignore our brothers and our sisters' messes. We gotta talk about these things. I want you to see how this works here. love, or or should I say this, it's not kindness to just let the mess go. If there's something really egregious going on, like, hey, we gotta talk here. We're not actually loving people and being kind to people if we just kind of like, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to judge them. That's actually the opposite of love. Because we're saying we don't need to expose these things and we don't need to come together to find reconciliation, deal with the mess, deal with the pain, and we don't need to allow God to heal things here. Y'all with me? So, what we actually need to do if we trust God is we need to begin to start naming the brokenness and the messes of our lives. Start with yourself. We don't go around pointing at everyone else's messes first. Start with the messes of your own life. But then work to help your brothers and your sisters name their messes as well. Not as an act of harshness or h hostility or because you're trying to throw them under the bus or shame them, but as an act of trust in a God who is faithful to bring blessing out of the mess. We need to name our messes. Now, when we name our messes, that's never enough because it can leave us feeling ashamed or exposed and just like not a great thing. But that leads to the Second thing that Joseph did, the second instruction for us, if we're gonna trust that God blesses here, and it's this: we need to not only name the messes, but we need to encourage repentance and extend graciousness in the messes. Encourage repentance and extend graciousness in the messes. Joseph extended graciousness and encouraged repentance. Towards his brothers. He says to them, after saying, Hey, it's me. You know, the guy whose life you tried to destroy? What does he say next? He says, Don't be upset. Don't be angry with yourselves for selling me to this place. Can you imagine the transformative work that God has to do in your life for you to not lay it on thick in that moment? Like do you imagine the bitterness you might carry? Like, I'm not even talking to them. Kill as soon as they come in the door. But here Joseph tells them, whoa, don't beat yourself up. I know I named the mess. But but there's something more for us here. Don't be angry. The literal translation in the Hebrew here is reproach yourself, he's telling them. which means, hey, you can, you don't have to feel really bad about this. If you repent, Joseph is saying. You will be free from that sense of shame and guilt you've been carrying for decades. I don't want you to live under this feeling of guilt about this mess that you're not naming. I've named the mess, but not to pile on. I've named the mess so that you can come out of that. You can repent. You can take responsibility. And Joseph, in doing this, extends graciousness to them. We tend to think of repentance as something where we guilt trip ourselves. But repentance is actually what frees us from beating ourselves up. I feel like I need to say that again. We think of repentance as something that guilt trips us. I'm a bad person, God. I did it again. No, no. But repentance is what frees us from the shame. Like Joseph is doing here. Do not be angry with yourself. Come out of the mess, the blame, the shame, everything. Come into this. Joseph extends such graciousness to them and encourages repentance in them. Go back to that splinter analogy that we made at the beginning. Just thinking about how much trust. That this will actually take to imagine. This is what we think about repentance. If I yank this out, it's gonna make it worse. That's what we think about repentance. But actually, what's happening is if I yank this out, it's going to be a whole lot better. It won't get infected. We won't get something worse happening. And repentance actually leads us into a space where we no longer can have to carry the shame. We can take responsibility without beating ourselves up. We seek to do differently, but we don't have to hide anymore. We can acknowledge what happened, but we don't have to live under the guilt of it, and when we confess our sin, as the scripture says, He is faithful and just to forgive us, and he cleanses us of all unrighteousness. Have you viewed repentance as a guilt trip? Or have you not extended graciousness to someone who's in the midst of their mess? Joseph teaches us how to do both because we trust that I can encourage people to repent. But also I can extend graciousness and know that even if this takes a little time, God will do the transforming work as we walk this together. Friends, there's also, I need to say this, messes that no one did to anyone. Things that are part of the chaos of our broken world that happened. And in those seasons where there is profound loss or lack or something's gone on that just is out of everyone's control, in those seasons, we assess. Especially need people to extend graciousness to us as we walk through our messes, to walk alongside us and stay with us, just as Joseph did with his brothers in this moment. So we must encourage repentance and extend graciousness in the messes. And when we do this, we're ultimately able to do this because, number three, we have taken the long view of God's. work through the messes. No less than three times in this text, Joseph says this God sent me. And then he says again a little bit later, God sent me. And then again, another point, God sent me. Now, when you're reading a text in the scripture and you come across a repeated word or phrase like three times in quick succession like that, it's usually a clue that you should pay attention. And when you see three times God sent me, what we're meant to be drawn in here is the whole reason that Joseph is comfortable trusting God and can name these messes like he is, very not casually, but without guilt and shame. The whole reason that Joseph is able to invite them and encourage repentance and is extending graciousness to them is because he has been able to learn from the Lord how to take a long view about How God works through the messes of our lives. Like, this is not something that happens overnight. If we took the short view on our physical health and infections, sometimes we would leave those splinters in. Because the short view is it'll be better just to not try to yank this out right now. But the long view knows if I get this out, I'm gonna feel a whole lot better and it won't get infected and cause more problems. The same with the messes that we face in life. We recognize with Joseph that God is doing something through this that is way beyond what any of us can imagine. They were young men in a field when his brothers betrayed them. They had no idea it would lead to Joseph saving half the world from starvation. Imagine that turnaround. Over a few decades. But Joseph recognizes that this entire process has been not just for his sake, it's been about saving his family, who God promised to bless humanity through, going all the way back to Abraham. He also recognized it's about saving humanity in general, all around the world. People were starving, and here God has used Joseph to literally save people and let the human species continue. That's what's at stake here in this moment. Joseph has taken a long view of his own life. He's taken a long view of the life of his family, a long view of humanity as a whole, and to say what we're going through, this mess right now, is temporary. And I don't know exactly how, but I trust the God who blesses, and God will do something through this mess. And so for you and I, when we consider our lives, our lives will ebb and flow through seasons of clear blessing and clear disaster and everything in between. You can look at the world right now and what's happening in history, and we can trust that even as messy as it looks, God is at work. We still name the messes and name the brokenness of our lives and in the world, but we seek to be a witness of God's reign and good news in Jesus Christ. We take the long view in all of this to say with the Apostle Paul, he that began a good work in me will bring it to completion. We we go with him to say, What you have meant for evil, Joseph says to another place to his brothers, what you have meant for evil, God has turned into good. We see the whole of the world, all of the mess and chaos, and we don't ignore it, but we recognize there is a God who is going to work through it. And bring blessing. And it is out of this posture of naming messes, encouraging repentance and extending graciousness in the messes, and taking a long view of how God works through the messes, that we are able to walk in and trust the God who blesses. Chapter thirty seven, if you remember, it says at one point they were so jealous of Joseph that they couldn't even talk peaceably to him. His brothers were so mad. Here I want you to notice that the last verse we read says afterwards his brothers talked with him. At the end of the day, God's blessing on humans is about all humanity living and working well together. The Psalm 133 says, How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity. As a church, we need to see this big picture of how God is so set. on finishing what he starts. There is no plan B. God only has a plan A, and that is to bless humanity. By blessing this people of God. So they can be used to bless the whole world. Our Lord Jesus came from this family, from Joseph's family, from Jacob, his father's family, from this tribe that would be this people that would be known as Israel, the Hebrew people. Jesus would come from this family. And Jesus would make a way for us. here in twenty twenty six in West Milford, New Jersey, would make a way for us to become called children of Abraham. We as the church are the fruit of what Joseph was trusting in in that moment. We are here today because God has never stopped blessing and working through messes. And because of the Lord Jesus, we have been able to join into this story and make it our story. So, in light of all this, let's trust the God who blesses by naming our messes. Let's trust the God who blesses. By encouraging repentance and extending graciousness in our messes. And let's trust the God who blesses by taking the long view of what God's work through our messes can look like. So I have one question for you to consider as we close and prepare to take communion together. Do you consider what trust looks like? Naming messes, repenting, graciousness. Taking the long views, we consider that that's what trust looks like. One question. How is your trust in God doing lately? Hiding the messes. You're not wanting to go there. Are you encouraging repentance and extending graciousness? Have you taken the long view on your life and the messes that you're experiencing, the long view of the messes you see around you? How is your trust in God lately? Do you trust the God who blesses? Do we as a church trust the God who blesses? Will we reflect that in our actions of how we allow God to work through the mess and redeem us for the sake of others? May we receive the strength to trust our Father through the work of Jesus Christ his Son and by the power of the Holy Spirit. Let's pray. Would you stand with me?

Genesis 45 · chapter mention Genesis 45 · chapter mention Genesis 37 · chapter mention