The Blessing: Preparing for True Blessing (Andrew Meher)

Andrew Meher: All right, and while you're doing that, would you open up in your Bibles or your Bible apps to Genesis chapter 37? Chapter 37. We're gonna read the first four verses, one through four, and then we'll spend most of our time in verses twelve through twenty-eight. So chapter thirty-seven, verses one through four, and then twelve to twenty-eight. as I mentioned, we are in our last couple of weeks here. we'll finish in in two weeks from now. Will finish out our series, summer series in Genesis, learning about how God blesses even in the midst of the messes of our lives. And we've been learning about the nature and the character of this God who created humanity and then, after creating humanity, blessed humanity, and then in the midst of all of the sin and the brokenness and the dysfunction that followed all of that after that happened, God's continued to turn. around situation after situation after situation we've been reading about. Often when the people completely blow off what God wants them to do and act in ways counter to his blessing, God still uses those situations and turns them into something good. And we're going to continue that today. And I want to consider this idea of how God prepares us for true blessings. So let's read chapter 37, verses 1 through 4, and then 12 through 28. The word says this Jacob had lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan, and this is the account of Jacob. Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father's wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them. Now Israel, who is Jacob, loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age, and he made a richly ornamented robe for him. When more than any of them, excuse me, when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him, and could not speak a kind word to him. Look down to verse twelve. Now his brothers had gone to graze their father's flocks near Shechem, and Israel, Jacob, said to Joseph, As you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I am going to send you to them. Very well, he replied. So he said to him, Go and see if all is well with your brothers and with the flocks, and bring word back to me. Then he sent him off from the valley of Hebron. When Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, What are you looking for? He replied, I'm looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks? They have moved on from here, the man answered. I heard them say, Let's go to Dothan. So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. But they saw him in the distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him. Here comes that dreamer, they said to each other. Come now, let's kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns, and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we'll see what comes of his dreams. When Reuben heard this, he tried to rescue him from their hands. Let's not take his life, he said. Don't shed any blood. Throw him into this cistern here in the desert, but don't lay a hand on him. Reuben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the richly ornamented robe he was wearing. And they took him and threw him into the cistern. And now the cistern was empty. There was no water in it. And as they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm, and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt. Judah said to his brothers, What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover his blood? Come, let's sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hand on him after all. He is our brother, our own flesh and blood. His brothers agreed. And so when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for twenty shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites who took him to Egypt. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Let's pray. Holy Spirit, as we open up the word of the Lord this morning, I pray that you would open our eyes to see and our ears to hear and our hearts to receive and our minds to know and understand what you are saying to us. And we pray, Lord Jesus, that you would take us deep into how you prepare us for blessing this morning. In your name, Jesus, we pray. Amen. So as we close out this series in Genesis over the next few weeks, we're going to be looking at the life of Joseph, and as you can tell, it doesn't start out great. Starting here in chapter 37, it will go all the way to the end of Genesis in chapter 50. Joseph is an interesting character for us to consider because, in a sense. He kind of wraps up everything that we've been thinking about when it comes to blessing over the last several weeks. We see God's nature and character on full display in Joseph's life in many ways. But before we reflect more on the story of Joseph, I just want to ask a question for you to consider. What cost are you willing to pay? For true blessings from God. What cost are you willing to pay for true blessings from God? Now, what I don't mean by this question is: are you willing to do enough to be blessed by God? That's not what I'm saying. You follow me. God has already, as we've seen in Scripture, blessed humanity fully. And completely remember our definition of blessing from the very first week of this series when God created humanity. Very simply, in Genesis, when it comes to blessing, blessing is a gift of being united together with humanity, working together, sharing life together with everyone. And when I ask what cost Are you willing to pay for true blessing from God? I'm assuming you remember that definition. But I'm also assuming that we understand that sin has broken and fractured our ability to walk in true blessing and being able to share life with God and humanity the way we are created to be. That being blessed by God, if we're going to really receive true blessing from God, I am assuming that we understand that God actually requires things to be kind of restructured or stripped away because of sin. Kind of put into perspective in order for us to be able to return to our created intent. So we can think about. Things like material things in your life that can sometimes get in the way of caring for and serving other people. You may find maybe some of these things are nice comforts to have. But sometimes the comfort of maybe my phone or watching a favorite TV show or staying in my house and not going anywhere. Those can actually become barriers for being able to share life with another person, especially one who might be in need. Or maybe think about trials that we go through in life that bring us to our lowest point that we didn't think we could get any lower. We'd prefer to avoid those trials, wouldn't you? Yep, at least someone's honest, thank you. We prefer to avoid those trials. We might even actively try to stay comfortable when trials might be coming. We often find ourselves, though, when we go through the trials, we become much more empathetic and understanding of what other people are going through in their circumstances. Or think about times perhaps you've been betrayed or hurt or there's been strained relationships with friends or families or co-workers. These are painful and often disorienting experiences. But if we allow ourselves to go through that painful experience faithfully, We often find that we are much more willing to open our arms up to receive anyone into our lives because we know what it's like to be rejected. Thinking about these kinds of experiences and about the true nature of blessing, then, I want to come back to that question a third time. What cost are you willing to pay for true blessings from God? Because if our material comforts get stripped away, we may find it easier to get outside ourselves and pay attention to one another. If we enter a painful low season, we will be able to empathize better and can then care for others in the future as a more humble person. Or if we experience the pain. Of strained or broken relationships, we can often become very thankful for the gift of any kind of friendship or relationship with other people. And we become more open to all kinds of people that God brings into our lives. If these things happen to us, wouldn't it sound like we're blessed? We're more attentive to others? We're grateful for the people and the way that God is using us to bless them and get beyond ourselves. We would think of that as a blessing, wouldn't we? We might have less material comforts in one way or another, or it may mean we experience hardships of various kinds, or maybe we are going through strained relationships. But wouldn't we ultimately be more blessed by God's definition of sharing life together with humanity and with Him if we were freed from some of these things? It kind of sounds like blessing to me. But what cost would you be willing to pay to see that blessing happen? At the beginning of Joseph's life, we see someone who's never had to ask that question. Or maybe even worse, he's kind of had backwards what the idea of blessing is. God was going to do a work, though, in his life, through some painful circumstances that would ensure that Joseph would begin to realize what true blessing was. Joseph's Joseph's life is is one that has captured the imagination of many generations. Many of you might be familiar with Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. It looks so pizzazzzy. I don't know what to I don't know how to describe it. this is kind of often what we think of when we think of Joseph. We think of this amazing, brilliantly colored coat. But the thing about this coat, as we see in the text, is this coat was not a good thing. We should actually see this coat as a sign of the dysfunction of Joseph's life and Joseph's family. The coat might have seemed to Joseph to be this wonderful blessing. This sign, look at how favored I am by God. But in reality, this coat was the mark of a mess. The coat was A display of his dishonesty toward his brothers, while the text here says that Joseph gave a bad report about his brothers. more literally, it says Joseph maligned his brothers to his father. He was a bit of a punk. He was like 17, he was a tattletale. You're not doing it right. Dad's not gonna like this. And then he ran to Dad, and Daddy gave him a special coat. How many of you have younger siblings and are feeling the rage of this at this moment? You know what this is like. This was a mark of a dysfunctional kind of generational issue that it was happening in the family. Because of his father's favoritism that he learned, I'll mention more in a second, he learned this from his parents. And he passed it on. This was a sign of terribly strained relationships with his brothers. It says at the end of verse 4 that they hated him and could not speak a kind word of him. There's another translation that says they could not speak peaceably with him. We might look at the coat of many colors and see it as a sign of God's favor, but God looks at that coat and he sees the emptiness of a depraved soul. Underneath that, he's in need of healing and restoration to be able to learn to receive true blessing. God would need to do a deep work, not only in Joseph's life, but in the family's life, and but in right now, in this moment in Joseph's life, to strip away the layers of material comfort in order to bring the family back to the original calling that God had given to this family through Abraham. That they would be a people who were blessed by God to bless all of the nations and the peoples of the world. They were very far from that at this moment. They needed to be prepared for true blessing. I know this isn't fun to hear, but there are times when we think we are being blessed because we have these material comforts or social status are being added to us, but in reality, it's the signs of a mess. Because we're not living well with our brothers and sisters, whom God created us to live alongside and work alongside. There's no actual blessing there. In fact, Psalm 133 says how good it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity. That Psalm's often paired with stories about Joseph and his brothers in various lectionary readings for a reason. Like Joseph, we sometimes are in the midst of this dysfunction, and we need to be stripped of our worldly blessings in order to learn how to truly be blessed. Joseph's father would send him to check up on his brothers, not knowing he was sending this young man on a transformative journey that would change the course of their entire family forever. And I pray this morning, as we just reflect on a few moments of Joseph's story, I pray that you and I would be sent by the Spirit on a transformative journey as well, as we learn how to be prepared for true blessing. What we're going to see here in this text is how the Lord works through three moments in the story to prepare Joseph for blessing, and how that helps us learn how to prepare for blessing as well. And I'm just going to highlight each of these briefly in order to hear me, in order to help encourage you that when you go through these things, you can see how God wants to work in the midst of them and bring about true blessing and prepare you for true blessing. So let's look at this first moment together. This first moment that happens in the story here is the removal of material blessing. Joseph had been handed a coat by his father. Some say it was a coat of many colors. More translations now kind of seem to think that the language is implying a long sleeve coat, possibly used from various patches of cloth, which give it a variation of colors and textures. It may have had ornaments hanging from it. And however you translate it or or interpret it, this was an extremely elaborate coat for these nomadic shepherding people. coat was a status symbol. He had been given a kind of material comfort and material status that showed and communicated to him and to his brothers that he was better than them. It was meant to remind him of his favored status by his father. Yet, as I mentioned already, this favoritism was sinful on Jacob's part. It was divisive, and it wasn't based on anything that God had done, but on Jacob's own dysfunction as a father. You see, Joseph was the favored son because he had been born of Jacob's favored wife, Rachel. And there was technically an even younger son, Benjamin, but Rachel seems to have died giving birth to Benjamin. And this put a bit of a stain on Jacob's relationship with Benjamin. And so Joseph has this favored status with Jacob. the youngest son born of his favorite wife. And it was out of Jacob's own pain and woundedness that he favors Joseph, and it creates a horrible set of problems. The coat plays a role in the story as Joseph goes to check in on his brothers for his father. The text says that when he got to them, they stripped him of his robe. And then the text goes even further just to emphasize the richly ornamented robe he was wearing. The text will later mention that they stained the robe with animal's blood to make it look like Joseph had died at the hands of a wild animal when they bring the coat back to their father and lie to him about what happened to Joseph. And here the coat kind of serves to remind us all that the material possessions we typically associate with blessing are not the blessing we seem to think they are. We assume that these signs of outward status or material possession, our careers, our bank accounts, our homes, whatever else we can think of, provides us with some kind of sign that we have been blessed by God. Yet, like Joseph, life can strip these things from us at any given moment and reveal it to us for what they really are: rags. The prophet Isaiah would later point to the nation of Israel's achievements, to their material prosperity, their pious religious acts and social status, and they would say that it was all like filthy rags. None of that showed them that they were righteous or that they were blessed by God. Joseph had been deceived into thinking that this coat said something about his importance and his value and what God thought of him. I think we're also often deceived about thinking of our own importance based on what we have or do not have. If we have just a little bit more, then we'll have arrived. Or since I have this, then I know that I have been, I can show that I've been faithful to God, because look at what I have. But none of it in reality shows what true blessing is. Thus, at times. When the circumstances of life strip away our material goods that surround us and comfort us, while God doesn't orchestrate those moments, God certainly uses those moments as opportunities to prepare us for his blessing if we let him. If we let him. The Lord can actually use those moments to say to us, like He did to the Apostle Paul, My grace is sufficient for you. That's all you need. Or say things like, You have everything you need already for life and godliness. That nothing more is needed but the gift of the Holy Spirit that has been poured out. When we try and live as if we need something else beyond God's spirit, we suggest there is some other God that is needed for our survival. When we begin to imagine that we need more, these other gods, if you will, then we have strayed into what the Bible calls idolatry. We are seeking to worship something and depend on something other than God. Now I make this mistake frequently, assuming that I need something else for God's purposes in my life or for this church community. It's very easy to sit down in a meeting and imagine we need these resources and we need these people and we need these things. Or God's kingdom can't come. But all of that, thankfully, when I let the Lord work gets stripped away. And I sometimes pay the price for those things being stripped away, but it helps me to see that I didn't actually need those things to depend on God. Now that may seem a little harsh to some of you, or all of you. That might seem kind of cruel. It may even seem just like kind of intense. But to see it from that perspective, I would suggest, is to see with our sinful human eyes, which is really easy for all of us to do. In reality, though, when we become freed, we become freed in those moments, when we become stripped of some of these material possessions and goods and blessings, we become freed to be able to depend fully on God instead of our own material things that we assume bring the blessing, like Joseph assumed the coat brought to him. This is part of how God actually prepares us to receive true blessing by stripping the illusions of false blessing. So that leads us to the second moment in the story when Joseph is thrown into a cistern or a pit, as it's sometimes translated. Now, in the ancient world, a cistern is a giant hole dug in the ground, and it was lined with a sort of plaster so it could hold water and the water wouldn't seep down into the ground. And they're often found scattered about in places where there are no other wells around or fresh springs, so they can catch rainwater and they would keep it there. When their flocks are passing through that area. But the text kind of goes out of its way to tell us that not only was Joseph thrown into one of these pits or cisterns, but then it says, noticeably, that the pit was empty. There was no water in it. This is a really significant moment for us to consider here because Joseph was thrown into this pit that was without water, even though it was meant to have water in it. Not to spoil the story for you if you've never read the whole story of Joseph before, but later Joseph would eventually be helping to run the kingdom of Egypt, and he would be preparing Egypt to endure and withstand a massive several-year famine that was going to even affect his homeland of Canaan, where his family lived. And as we'll see in a couple weeks, his own brothers, without knowing it, would come to him asking for food and for help because they were experiencing the dryness. Of famine in their own land. There would be no rain and for their crops or for their animals. It was gonna be massively disastrous for that whole part of the world. But Joseph would be positioned to bless not only Egypt and his family, but the entire world. And we can't miss the significance of this little event here of him being thrown into a dry, empty cistern with no water. Many readers have seen this as kind of foreshadowing what would happen next. There's a sense in which Joseph, in the dry and empty pit, is being prepared for a season later, when he would help others through a far worse dry and empty pit. What I'm trying to say here is Jesus, the Lord, will lead us sometimes and allow us to enter a pit so that we can be prepared to bless others in the future. If you're familiar with the excellent sitcom, Parks and Recreation, we're introduced to a character called Andy. In the first season, and he's probably the most annoying, irresponsible adult. he's incredibly dysfunctional. He's got a terribly dysfunctional relationship with a very sharp, put-together woman named Anne Perkins. And at one point early in the first season, Andy breaks both of his legs in this giant pit that's next door to where they are living. And and Anne is now waiting on him hand and foot, as if he wasn't annoying enough. He's now laid up with his legs like this. And she's waiting on him for weeks, and I think it's several episodes of this of the TV arc. He's like in just sitting on the cast on the couch with these two leg casts on, doing all this, right? But Anne soon discovers, after a huge amount of time has gone by, that both of Andy's legs had healed, and he was just trying to milk this as long as possible. And obviously she'd already been getting sick of him, but she reached her breaking point, kicked him out of her house. And he had no place to go because he's really irresponsible and kind of a bum, and he's not doing anything at all. And so Andy goes from this kind of fake pit when he was really okay to it literally he moves down into the pit next door because he doesn't have anywhere else to go, and he's living in a little tent there. And it's in this moment of being down in the pit and finally willing to face the discomforts of his life that he starts to slowly get things together in his life. He gets a really menial job shining shoes at Town Hall. He starts taking his band and his songwriting more seriously. And he eventually, at some point along the way, is able to have this wonderful TV show for kids. He goes from this guy who's completely like not doing anything other than thinking about himself to going through this season in a pit, literally, and finding himself finally able to consider what others are going through. There's something about finally being willing to go down into the pits, about being willing to face the discomfort, the dryness that is down there, that prepares us for future seasons to help others who are in dry and empty pits. Perhaps you've experienced horrible losses or disappointments that have come upon you. I want you to be encouraged that the dryness at the bottom of the pit that you are now experiencing can become a blessing to someone in a future season who is in a dry and empty pit. God wants to prepare you for true blessing as you spend time in the pit. Which brings us to the third moment in Joseph's story. Some of us often pray for deliverance from the pit. How many of you have been in a pit and you're like, Lord, just get me out of this? Get me out of this, Lord Jesus. I perhaps would like to suggest. That we not be too hasty because of what happens to Joseph next. It was sort of an out of the frying pan, into the fire kind of situation. Joseph would now experience the ultimate, most disorienting betrayal of his life. He was lifted out of the pit. Maybe he was hoping, they've changed their mind. I'm so relieved. And now he was going to be sold by his brothers into slavery. Now, this was, you need to know how heinous and kind of repulsive this would have been to the original audience. Because not only was this not okay for the Hebrew people to do in this small society that God was starting to lead, but this was just generally reprehensible in the broader culture. Because the Ishmaelites would have been distant relatives, and you do not sell your relatives to other relatives. No matter what ancient Near East culture you were in. So what they did was just so horrific and repulsive that this is almost the ultimate blow to Joseph and is the biggest kind of mark on the early Hebrew Israelite people here at this time. What a mess that God now is going to try and work through. I say try, but it's not really a problem for him, is it? So, all that to say, be careful when you pray for God to take you out of the pit. This moment, I believe, is the moment that truly shattered Joseph and humbled him. Psalm 105, describing this instance, says that his neck was clad in irons and his feet were clad in chains. He was completely humbled. No coat. To give him some illusion of status. Had been in a pit, and now he was completely betrayed and broken off from those who were supposed to be his people. But this humbling, though it was evil, it made a way for God to teach him how to begin to welcome any person into his life, no matter who they were. You see, as will happen later in prison, Joseph would begin to care for and look after the prisoners. In fact, the head of the prison would put Joseph in charge of all of the other prisoners. And what would happen there is Joseph would just begin to take care of them, no matter who they were. And now you've got to think about this: there's probably a lot of really dangerous and evil sinister people that are in this prison with Joseph. Maybe some were there unjustly and some weren't. But you got this whole range of characters, and Joseph cares for all of them. Something happens to us when we get broken and strained and we experience human betrayal. Something can happen to us if we stay open to God, where we begin to open our lives and are thankful for any human relationship that comes near us. We begin to not get picky or clicky. And we begin to recognize the gift of another human, as we talked about in the very first week, we begin to recognize the image of God in people's lives, and we begin to care and minister to whoever God brings around us and not be like, I'm I'm not gonna help you. Often strained and broken relationships or betrayals could make us suspicious of others and close us off. But if we can allow ourselves to be humbled by God in the midst of those broken and strained relationships, the Lord begins to teach us how to receive other people, to be grateful for the friendships of any human being that the Lord brings into our lives. And we begin to see the people that God brings into our lives as actual gifts from God. In my own ministry journey, I started early on with this kind of imagination of what it would look like to be successful and accomplished and respected by my peers in ministry. What kind of things would I do so that I could be respected, or what would success look like? And it actually took several moments of life of betrayal, of strained relationships, of kind of being disillusioned by people not being who they said they were. In order for me to begin to be Humbled enough and broken enough to begin to receive everyone as they were. Not perfect at it. But it did such a work in my life, and it's prepared me to be able to receive God's true blessing through very unexpected people. And I wonder if God is working to prepare you and use broken and painfully strained relationships in your life. In a way that he wants to humble you to a place where you can begin to receive other people maybe you wouldn't even expect into your life and see them as gifts from God. The stripping away of our material status and comfort, ending up in life's pits and experiencing relational pain, all of that prepared Joseph to enter into true blessing. And I pray for us as well that it will help us receive the Lord Jesus' true blessing for us as his church. So, a few questions to reflect before we close. What material comfort has been taken away? clawing to get it back? Or are you living with open hands and allowing God to work and ask God what He is doing in that moment and season in your life? Or perhaps you could ask, what pit are you in? What might be the Lord preparing you for? Usually actually you can't really discern in advance what God's preparing you for. You have no idea. Joseph could not have possibly imagined what God was preparing him for. Only God knew. But can you trust God when you are in the dry pit? And ask him again what he's doing. Finally, what relationships are broken? How does God want to humble you? Perhaps, like Joseph, there was some arrogance on your part in those relationships that needs to be dealt with. Sins that need to be confessed on your part. Perhaps through these things that are happening in your lives, God wants to work in and through all of those circumstances to prepare you for his true blessing. To be able to not be under the illusion of material things as a sign of God's work in your life. To Recognize that when you enter seasons of of pits, of lowness, that that God can still be preparing you in that place and to see that God could be humbling you and that could be good. These are all real blessings from God. And I just want to be clear before we close to say here, it is not God causing all of these things to happen. But God, who is constantly working out his blessing in humanity, will always use the circumstances we find ourselves in to bring about the real blessing. The question for you and I is will we recognize that God is trying to prepare us for true blessing? And will we surrender to his work in our lives through the Spirit? May the Lord find you faithful and all of us faithful to him. As we trust him to prepare us for true blessing. Would you stand with me as we close?

Genesis 37 · chapter mention