GOD IN THE MESS | WHEN MY TRIAL IS OVER III (April 23 2017) - Mike Armstrong

All right, well, you ready to get into God's word?

Why don't you go ahead and turn in your Bibles right now to uh Genesis chapter 48?

Genesis 48 · chapter mention

Genesis chapter 48, back into God in the mess, uh, the life of Joseph.

Genesis 48 · chapter mention

Now, question for you.

Uh, when you think about what your future holds, uh, what kinds, you know, what what what's like the predominant thought or feeling or emotions uh that come to mind for you when you think about your future?

Or what do you think through?

Are you are you the kind of person that, you know, just just thinking about the future gets you all kinds of stressed?

Right?

You get you get rattled about all of that.

You're it's it's fear, it's it's dread.

I I don't know what's gonna happen, and you know, it's a lot of a lot of hand-wringing and sleepless nights, and you know, you just carry that that stress at a high level constantly as you just I don't know what's gonna happen, I don't know what's gonna what the Lord is gonna do in my life or what I'm gonna do.

Maybe it's kind of it has to do with like finding a job or you know, finding a spouse or something like that.

Maybe for you it's it's the fear or dread, or or maybe for others, and maybe this is where many of us live, you kind of live in that, it's it's not the extreme fear and the extreme dread, but it's that that low level, that low grade anxiety.

Right?

That's just kind of always there to the point where you hardly even notice it anymore.

And you're used to kind of just being anxious all the time, to the point where that just seems normal.

And you're again, you're not panicking, but at the same time, you don't have peace either.

Okay, maybe that's you when you think about your future.

Okay, maybe for you, okay, you have more of a sense of complacency and and and laziness when it comes to thinking about and and planning your future.

And you could use maybe a stronger dose of urgency when it comes to sort of figuring some things out.

And you need to you need to not be so loosey-goosey and laissez faire and all that type of thing about it.

You you need to think, you need to plan.

Maybe you're the kind of person who you know, you think you've got it all figured out, right?

I've got my future dialed, and I know exactly where I'm gonna be and where I'm gonna live, and the type of person that I'm gonna spend my life with, and the job that I have and my career, and I'm gonna have 2.5 kids, and you know, all of that.

You're organized, you've considered all of the possible outcomes, you've got the plan in place for every single possibility, or so you think.

Right?

Maybe that's you.

Okay, but regardless of where you would fall into that category, or maybe kind of a blend of some of those, you know, what do you what do you think about when it comes to your future?

Okay, well, today, again, like I said, we're gonna be closing out our series, God in the Mess, where we've been looking at the life of Joseph and how God rushes to our aid in the middle of our life's craziest problems, right?

Our biggest difficulties and trials, the discipline that we sometimes, you know, find ourselves in with the Lord, right?

And how he actually uses the mess that we're in to accomplish his will.

But he accomplishes his will in us and then through us, and that's what he uses trials and difficulties and challenges uh for.

Okay, so we need to learn to understand that our life's troubles are not random.

Right?

Sometimes we kind of have that approach.

We're like, why is this why is this happening?

This is the most random thing in the world, and it makes no sense, it's not tied to any purpose or anything like that.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, it is.

The Lord wants to use it.

Okay, it's not random at all.

Okay, it's also not pointless.

Sometimes we're like, again, like another trial.

This is so pointless, and why do I go through all of this and never accomplishes anything and never never does anything?

Okay, it's also not not God's version of some kind of sick joke.

Right?

Sometimes we look at it like that and we're like, God is just messing with me, and he loves to just kind of dangle the carrot and then yank it away and mess with my life.

No, it's not any of that.

It's it's uh our our messes, our troubles, they're they're tools of our for our spiritual growth.

Right?

That's what the Lord does.

Why?

So he can get glory.

So he can get glory, and that should be.

That's what we're aiming toward.

That's our chief life aim, that God would get all of the glory through us.

All right, we sing about that.

We've been singing about it already this morning, and uh, that's what we're gonna be going for with our life.

All right, well, this morning it's when my trial is over, part three.

Okay, when my trial is over, part three.

And we've been looking at how to move forward after the chaos, after the difficulty of the trouble itself has is now over, right?

And what do we do?

How do we approach life?

And you know, as we've seen from the life of Joseph, when his troubles passed, when you know he had you know been released from prison and given the awesome job and all the great responsibility and the power and the influence and all of that, what did we see?

We saw that Joseph still had a lot to learn, didn't he?

He had a lot to learn, and so do we.

And of course, we looked at part one and part two already, how the Lord wants to use us more powerfully than ever before.

That's what God wants to do with us when our trials are over.

We also looked at how he wants to heal us.

Sometimes we think we've arrived and we've made it, and there's no more healing that take that needs to take place in my heart.

Wrong.

Right?

We're always gonna have some measure of brokenness in this life that the Lord loves to and wants to uh heal in us.

Well, today it's all about how when my trial is over, I will completely trust God with my future.

I will completely trust Him.

No more hand-wringing, right?

No more crazy stress, no more low-grade anxiety, no more godlike controlling grip over my future and where I think that should go.

No, I'm gonna trust the Lord with all of it, every single aspect, no matter what happens next.

All right, you good with that?

That's where we're going here today.

So let's pray, let's seek the Lord in this.

Let's ask Him uh to really help us, as it is so easy for us to struggle in this area, amen?

It's tough.

Let's pray.

God, we do pray now, Lord, that you would work powerfully in our hearts, Lord.

First of all, we just want to praise you, praise you, praise you, Lord.

Thank you that you are a God who loves us.

Lord, you love us so passionately, Lord.

You could leave us to just sputter and fizzle out and be useless and hurting and in pain all the time.

But God, by your grace, you desire desire to heal us, use us, and give us confidence that our future is secure in your hands.

And so, God, I pray that as each person who is here today, as we go through your word, Lord, I pray that you would illuminate it in our hearts, Lord, and give us confidence in you, Lord, that you indeed hold our future, every single aspect of it.

Lord, to the glory of your name, we pray these things.

Amen.

Amen.

So again, we're talking about how we can completely trust the Lord with our future as we emerge from the emotional war zone, all right, that uh that the mess that God has brought us through can be.

Right?

You know what I'm talking about.

Now, many of us here as Christians, you kind of we kind of grow up and and sort of learn how to play the game a little bit, don't we?

Right?

We know all the words to say, we know the Christian knees, and and words like what a blessing, and you know, God's in control, and he's got this, and you know, to the glory of his name, you know, we say all of those things really easily, and we we kind of know how to behave and put on the masks, and you know, we kind of hide where we're really at, right?

And we know that we should be trusting the Lord and that he's got our future and we need to cling to him and all of that.

But here's the question for us you know, do we actually trust him?

Right?

Do we actually trust him?

It's a good question for you to ask yourself this morning.

Do I actually, actually, functionally, practically, practically speaking, trust the Lord with my future?

Or again, uh maybe not so much, right?

And you might be thinking, well, how exactly do we do we do that?

How do we actually get to the place where we can trust him?

Well, here's the first thing here.

You got your notes there.

Okay, it's first of all knowing that he's always faithful, always faithful, regardless of how things may appear.

Regardless.

All right, so let's take a look at this then.

We're in uh uh Genesis chapter 48.

Genesis 48 · chapter mention

We're gonna cruise through uh uh three chapters here and close down uh the book of Genesis, but let's look a look at the first few verses here.

Verse 1.

He says, after this, okay, what's that mean?

What's it referring to?

Again, it's been a couple of weeks since we were in the series here.

Well, basically, what had happened is is uh Joseph and his father Jacob had been reunited in Egypt.

You remember that?

And Jacob actually come to Joseph and said, Hey, I might my time is is coming, I'm about to die.

And I uh request that you would not bury me here in Egypt, but you would bury me uh in the land of my fathers.

And so Joseph agrees to all of that.

And so and then it says, after this, okay, Joseph was told, Okay, he says, Behold, your father was is ill.

And so he, that's Joseph, took with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim.

And it was told to Jacob, Your son Joseph has come to you.

Then Israel summoned his strength and sat up in bed.

And Jacob said to Joseph, God Almighty appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan and blessed me, and said to me, Behold, I will make you a fruitful, I will make you fruitful and multiply you, and I will make you make of you a company of peoples, and will give this land to your offsprings after you for an everlasting possession.

All right, and so what is what is Jacob doing here?

Well, he's he's reminding Joseph, his son, of God's promise.

Right?

He's going back to the whole, to the covenant that that God agreed to carry out now with Jacob.

And he said, I will be your God, you will be my people, I will bless you, you will inherit the land here.

And so uh Jacob is basically uh re-explaining this to Joseph at the end of his life and reminding him uh of God's faithfulness.

All right, now take a look at this now, verse five.

Jacob continues.

He says, And now your two sons who were born to you in the land of Egypt before I came to you in Egypt are mine.

Now I'm sure if you're a parent in the room and you're reading that, you're like, hold on a second, what?

Like he's just like taking their kid, his kids?

Like that's that's interesting.

Okay, but keep going.

He says, Ephraim and Manasseh shall be mine, as Reuben and Simeon are.

Okay, he says, and the children that you fathered after them shall be yours, and they shall be called by the name of their brothers in their inheritance.

Okay, and he says, and that for me, when I came from Padon to my sorrow, Rachel, that was his beloved wife, died in the land of Canaan on the way, uh, when there was still some distance to go to Ephrath, and I buried her there on the way to Ephrath, that is Bethlehem.

So again, what's happening here?

Well, essentially what's taking place is that Jacob has now adopted Joseph's oldest two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim.

And again, for us, we're like, that's interesting.

He didn't like ask permission, he just kind of did it.

Well, you need to understand that, you know, back in ancient Jewish culture, uh, this kind of thing, uh, it wasn't unheard of.

You might be like, well, why?

Why would he do it?

Well, what he was doing is he was actually, uh, by doing this, giving the uh firstborn rites of inheritance to Joseph.

Now we know that that goes to, again, the the oldest son, the firstborn son, which was not Joseph.

Joseph was like the second youngest, right?

So Reuben was the guy who was supposed to have the firstborn rites as son, but but Jacob kind of strips him from that and gives it to Joseph by adopting his two sons and essentially giving him the double portion.

So now uh Ephraim and Manasseh, Manasseh was the oldest, right?

They would now be treated as Jacob's sons.

They would both get a blessing, and then Joseph would get that uh as a result.

All right, and so we find out, actually, if you uh jump it, you don't need to, but if you were to jump into chapter 49, we see here that that uh the reason that he he takes it away from Reuben is because Reuben had acted wickedly and he had slept with one of his father's concubines.

And you can read all about that uh earlier in Genesis.

And so, because of the wicked deeds of Reuben, he gets stripped of all this and it gets passed on, now the firstborn, um, and the blessing of all of that to Joseph.

Okay, to Joseph.

And so then what happens is kind of this interesting um little exchange where where basically Joseph he brings his two sons now, Ephraim and Manasseh, to Jacob for a blessing.

Now, Jacob, his eyes had grown really dim, he couldn't really see very well.

And so Joseph, he like leads his two sons, okay, to his father, one in each hand.

Okay, he's got Manasseh, the oldest, in his left hand and Ephraim in his right hand, thinking that Jacob on this side is gonna reach with his right hand and bless who, the oldest?

Manasseh.

But what actually happens is Jacob, he crosses it up, and he then gives the blessing of the firstborn to now Ephraim, the youngest.

How do you think Joseph handles all of this?

Well, keep going there, jump down to verse 17.

Okay, so he's already blessed Ephraim, he's blessed Joseph, okay, through Ephraim.

Verse 17 says, When Joseph saw that his father had laid his right hand on the head of Ephraim, the youngest, it displeased him.

And he took his father's hand to move it from Ephraim's head to Manasseh's head.

And Joseph said to his father, Not this way, my father, since this one is the firstborn, put your right hand on his head.

But his father refused and said, I know, my son, I know.

He shall he shall also, oh, he also shall become a people, and he shall also be great.

Nevertheless, his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his offspring shall become a multitude of nations.

So he blessed them that day, saying, By you, Israel, we're will pronounce blessings, saying, God make you as Ephraim and as Manasseh.

Thus he put Ephraim before Manasseh.

Okay, now the big question comes up is why?

Right?

Why would he do this?

Well, interestingly enough, the text actually never tells us why.

It never gives us the real reason, other than we can trust that the Lord was in it.

Right?

Is the Lord not faithful?

Is the Lord not uh to guide and to direct the blessing of the father to the sons as he sees fit?

And so again, we don't know why, but we can you know imagine and think back to when uh Jacob himself received the blessing from his father uh Isaac.

Right?

It was uh it was Jacob's brother Esau, who was the oldest, who was supposed to get the blessing of firstborn.

But Jacob, of course, kind of underhandedly, sneakily with his mother, tricked his father into getting the blessing of himself.

So it's interesting to kind of think through, like, you know, what was going through his head as he did this.

Well, obviously the Lord was in it.

We don't have all of the reasons for all of this, but hey, listen to this.

Listen, this chapter is just such a great reminder of God's faithfulness, right?

God's God's faithfulness, he's always faithful despite how things kind of go, right?

Despite how things sort of, you know, work themselves out.

Right?

Jacob reminds Joseph that that God is faithful, he's got the covenant, he's he's establishing the covenant.

And I want to remind you of the covenant that he will be with you at all times.

And then he continues that covenant through Joseph's two sons, and also ultimately that's to the benefit of Joseph's legacy.

Right?

It was, of course, all of it was kind of unclear to Joseph at first, like, why this son, you know, why why Ephraim instead of Manasseh?

And at first he thought, uh oh, this isn't really working out properly at all.

Okay, but again, it's how the Lord chose to work.

It's how he chose to work, it's how he chose to reveal his faithfulness to this family.

Now, sometimes we kind of do the same thing, right?

We look at how the Lord is working and we see him working in a certain way, and we're like, no, no, no, no, Lord, not like that.

Like this, right?

And we want to do it our own way, don't we?

And in this we kind of we kind of doubt his faithfulness, don't we?

And we think that it needs to happen the way that we want to see it happen.

And you know, and I think what ends up happening kind of in our thoughts or in our in our heart is we tend to think, well, you know, well, God was faithful to me last time, you know, but will he be faithful now?

Or will he be faithful in the future?

Right?

And we do and we and we doubt that.

And I think what that kind of reveals in our hearts sometime is that we may be, you know, we may be thankful that the chaos of our of our problem, of our mess, of our troubles, we may be thankful that all that's kind of over and and done with, but we don't quite trust the Lord deeply yet.

And we don't.

And and and we, you know, the depth of intimacy, it's it's really not maybe where it should be.

And you know, we don't fully take God at his word yet, and we don't trust him in the unseen, and and and our confidence hasn't quite built up yet and translated into this, you know, deep trust that whatever the Lord says goes, and that is what's best.

And so how we end up kind of operating and and functioning on a on a heart level and practically speaking, is you know, we kind of think like, Lord, Lord, bless me again, then I'll trust you.

Right?

Bless me my way, then I'll trust you.

Prove that you're faithful again, then I'll believe.

Right?

Is that not the approach we have sometimes?

You know, even though we have often seen the Lord come through again and again and again, over and over and over, you know, often countless times.

Now, listen, I'm not talking to like the brand new believer here, right?

The new believer who's still trying to like figure out what it means to be a Christian, and you know, they're still learning like the foundational principles of what it means to follow Christ, and you know, can God be trusted?

And you're maybe walking through your very first trial ever, and the Lord is teaching you these things.

I'm not even talking to you.

We'll give you a pass on all of that.

If you're struggling with all of that and you're dealing with that, that's not who I'm talking to.

No, I'm talking, I'm talking to the to the experienced believers.

Right?

I'm talking again to those who have seen God's faithfulness and oftentimes over and over again, yet you still question it.

You still question it.

You know, maybe for you, for example, you know, you've been praying through some kind of challenge and difficulty in your life.

Maybe it's a relationship that was once really strong, but it's kind of falling apart.

And you're like, Lord, would you restore this?

Lord, would you heal this relationship?

God, would you strengthen it and you're you're stressed about it, and you're you're you know, you're you're asking for people uh for people to pray, and you know you're crying out to the Lord and there's anxiety, and you know you're you're doubting that he's gonna do it, but then what happens?

He ends up uh coming through.

He ends up showing his faithfulness to you, and maybe that relationship heals.

But sometimes what we do is rather than like basking in the awesomeness of that, and Lord, thank you for how you are faithful, and and Lord, I pray that I would be able to grow in my in my confidence in you in this.

What we sometimes do is we kind of forget about the faithfulness of the Lord, and instead we transfer that anxiety to the next problem.

And it's like finances are stressful, and then boom, we're like we're we're we're freaked out about that, and we're hand-wringing, and it's the anxiety, and it's the stress, and all of it.

Right?

We we should know better.

We've been living for the Lord for a long time.

Anxiety is not acceptable, not for a follower of Jesus Christ.

Okay, no wonder you lack joy and you know an intimacy, and no wonder your your maturity in Christ has stalled out.

Because what you're actually doing is you're refusing to trust that God is faithful.

You're refusing to do it.

Listen, I love Psalm 27.

You don't need to flip there, but maybe jot it down in the margin there or in your notes.

Psalm 27 is amazing because in that we preach, I actually preached it last summer here, and I don't expect you to all remember that.

But he in Psalm 27, right?

It's David writing it, and in that he's just like crying out to the Lord, like, How long, oh Lord?

How long?

Will you forget me forever?

And he had like enemies coming at him, trying to kill him, and and he's just bringing this concern.

It's so great that he's doing this.

He's bringing it to the Lord, and he's crying out, he's being real and honest and gritty in his prayers.

Lord, when are you gonna come through?

But I love the very end of that.

It's only six verses in this psalm.

In verse five and six, he says, This, but I have trusted in your steadfast love.

Right?

He doesn't have the answer to his prayer request yet, as far as we can tell.

But he's like, I have trusted in your steadfast love.

And he says, I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me.

Right?

As David is crying out to the Lord and it's an intense situation, what is he doing?

Right?

He's he's waiting for the Lord to come through, and he's he's he's drawing back from past experiences with the Lord, and he's resting in the fact he knows, right, because of the experience, that God is faithful.

God's not gonna hang him out to dry, God's gonna come through.

You know, as you begin to you know see God's faithfulness in your life and you see those answered prayers and you see God be good to you, listen, you need to learn to file.

Those memories away in your heart and in your mind.

Because when the next situation comes up and it's going to be stressful and scary and bleak and unclear and all of that, you're going to be able to look back and say, no, you know what?

The Lord came through for me.

He did.

And he actually has time and time again.

And listen, if God came through for you yesterday and he is faithful today, then guess what?

Tomorrow he's going to be faithful too.

We need to trust the Lord in that.

Don't doubt it.

Don't doubt it.

Know it.

Okay, regardless of how things may appear.

Alright, when my trial is over, I will completely trust God for my future.

Okay, accepting both the blessings and the challenges that'll come my way.

Listen, we've got to accept these things as coming here.

Alright, so jump over to uh chapter 49 here.

And as this is kind of rolling out what Jacob does, is he actually gathers the rest of his sons now, right?

The rest of the 12.

And he says, you know, come, come, guys.

Again, my life is about over here, and I want to, I want to bless you.

And so what he does is he actually really, in many ways, he prophesies over them.

And so this is so far from like just kind of uh, you know, well wishes.

Where he's like, hey, I kind of hope that it works out really well for you guys in life.

You know, back in this day, this was like ultra serious.

This was like a huge deal.

There, there were that there's a lot of weight tied to this.

This was, in many ways, like I said, it was it was a prophecy.

It was from the Lord, and the Lord had used that through the patriarch of the family to explain how the future was gonna go for this family.

And so what he does is he kind of roll this, rolls all of this out.

He starts with the oldest, uh Reuben, and he works his way all the way down through the brothers, down to Benjamin, the youngest.

And so let's just look at a couple of them here, all right?

We don't need to go through uh all of he all of these, but look at uh look at Simeon and Levi.

Jump down to verse five.

Okay, so um take a look at this.

He says, Simeon and Levi are brothers.

Weapons of violence are their swords.

Let my soul come not to their counsel, oh my glory, be not joined to their company.

For in their anger they killed men, and in their willfulness they hamstrung oxen.

Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce, and their wrath, for it is cruel.

I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel.

So, does that sound like good news?

Or does it sound like bad news?

Right?

Probably not the not the blessing you're looking for.

And and this is what would happen.

It wouldn't all just be good news.

Sometimes it would be blessing and joy and good things that would happen, and sometimes it would sound very much like a curse.

It would be the negative, and this is how it's gonna go because of the negative choices that you have made uh in your life.

Right?

And so, because of Simeon and Levi's cruelty and their violence, both to people and to animals, it describes there, right?

It tells us that they're gonna be scattered among Israel.

They're gonna be scattered.

Now, the again, the interesting thing is that all of this actually happens.

Right?

It all actually happens in Numbers chapter 26, you want to jot that down.

Numbers 26 · chapter mention

Okay, we see that at that point they're already the two smallest tribes.

The two smallest tribes.

And then if you were to kind of jump into Joshua chapter 19, what we see there is that the tribe of Simeon had actually been absorbed by the tribe of Judah.

Joshua 19 · chapter mention

And so the tribe of Simeon no longer even exists.

The tribe of Levi, Levi, had been scattered throughout the for uh 48 cities uh of Israel, and they end up becoming actually the Levitical priests.

All right.

But it goes to show us that what?

The blessings, the even the curses, and the you know, all the prophecy and all this, these were not to be taken lightly.

Right?

These came true.

Okay, how about let's do another one here?

How about uh Judah?

Okay, our old buddy Judah.

Remember him?

This guy was, you know, complicated character.

Right?

He had he had all kinds of struggles, and and you remember the Judah and Tamar thing?

We worked through all of that, but he repented and he came back to the Lord and assumed leadership.

We saw the growth in his life.

Well, you know, what does Jacob have to say to him?

We'll take a look at verse 8.

He says, Judah, your brothers shall praise you.

Okay, so off to a good start.

That's good.

Your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies, your father's sons shall bow down before you.

Judah is a lion's cub.

From the prey, my son, you have gone uh gone up, he stooped down, he crouched as a lion, and as a lioness, who dares rouse him?

The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples, binding his foal to the vine, and his donkey's colt to the choice vine.

He has washed his garments in wine, and his venture is the in the blood of the grapes, his eyes are darker than wine, and his teeth are whiter than milk.

Alright, so what we see here, not gonna go into all the details of all of that, but we see here is that, you know, bottom line, blessings coming to Judah.

Right, blessings coming to that guy.

You know, just as the birthright had been transferred from the oldest Reuben to Joseph, right?

So the mantle of family leadership also gets transferred from Reuben to Judah now.

And so Reuben, you're seeing, kind of gets a raw deal here.

Everything sort of gets stripped from him.

Now, again, we won't go through all of the brothers here, but on and on down the line it goes.

You know, the prophecies, you know, show some kind of curse or some kind of blessing on that, on their on all the sons.

You know, and it was all based on kind of how they had lived their lives.

Did they make good choices or did they make bad choices?

And listen, as you follow these in the line of all this throughout the Old Testament, you're gonna see that all these things, in fact, came true.

Now, what does any of this have to do with us?

Right?

What does it have to do with us?

Well, the principle, I think, that we need to need to glean from this is that is that there will be rewards and consequences.

There will be blessings and challenges that we will receive in this life that we'll both get to enjoy, that's the blessing part, and then we'll need to learn to live with.

That's the challenge, that's the the consequence part.

And this is all based on kind of how we how we live.

There's reward for that.

Okay, so part of learning to completely trust the Lord with how your future unfolds is learning to accept whatever that future may be.

However, the Lord chooses to roll it out.

Say it so again, we we receive both blessing and challenges in this life.

Right?

We've all made mistakes.

I mean, I'm sure we can all think back to our life, various mistakes and sinful choices and all of that, wrong decisions that we've made that have produced consequences, that have translated into challenges that we've sort of just got to learn to live with.

Right?

Like, for example, if you if you've given years of your life to alcohol abuse, you shouldn't be too surprised if that's gonna affect your body physically.

Right?

It's gonna happen.

You know, an addiction to pornography throughout your younger years.

Listen, that's gonna affect your marriage.

It's going to.

You know, a lack of godly priorities in your home when your kids are young.

Listen, that's that's gonna affect your kids' zeal when they get older.

Right?

It really will.

Don't be shocked when your parents or when your kids don't care about the Lord because you didn't really, and they saw right through it.

Now, Christians, as we deal with these consequences and we we kind of learn to live with them and all that, you know, we pray through it, we're we're wrestling with it, we're asking the Lord to change us, and he is so merciful and gracious, and he'll work us through these things.

But hey, listen, we all have scars, don't we?

We all have scars that they're not gonna go away completely and fully, right?

The cold hard truth is that we carry these things, these these consequences can be long and lasting and awful.

And listen, knowing that and realizing that, it should make us shudder, right?

Because our decisions, the decisions that we're making, matter.

Right?

They're mat they they matter.

Now, the good news, let me get to some of that already, right?

The good news is that, first of all, the presence of consequences and challenges in your life as a Christ follower does not mean an absence of forgiveness.

Do you understand that?

Because sometimes we're like, oh, the consequence is with me, and I'm carrying this, and there's like a you know a trail of broken relationships behind me and bodies all you know laying in the ditch because of horrible decisions that I've made.

Listen, yeah, you're gonna carry that with you, but but the Lord forgives.

The Lord's not holding it against you anymore because he's gracious and he is a loving God, and he has paid for those poor decisions and that sin through Jesus Christ on the cross, right?

That's the good news of Easter.

Right?

So that's the good news.

And and also good news is just like how you know bad decisions and bad choices have negative effects.

So wise living leads to blessing.

Wise living leads to blessing.

So if you invest in, you know, developing a strong uh time with God through his word, right, and you are figuring out how to read it and study it and absorb that and draw near to the Lord and soak it all up and all of that, listen, that's gonna transfer into a close walk with the Lord.

You know, if if you're trying to develop a strong prayer life and I'm working through this, and prayer is hard and it's awkward, and you know, I don't really know how to do it, but I'm gonna take every opportunity to come to prayer nights and to pray every chance that I get and carve out time in my life to seek the Lord in prayer.

Listen, the Lord's gonna bless that.

He's gonna bless it.

You know, again, you're you're trying to establish godly relationships.

And I don't want to be in relationships that are super toxic and and and drag me down and all of that.

So I need to I need to find friends who love the Lord, who will encourage me and challenge me.

Listen, there's gonna be blessing in that uh as well.

It's gonna be positive payoff down the road for you.

Okay, all of this to say, right, we receive both blessing and challenges in this life.

And learning to accept those things, both things, as they come, regardless of how the Lord kind of again rolls it all out and brings it to you, is evidence of your trust in God.

It's evidence that that you trust him with your future.

Hey Lord, I I know this is not ideal.

I realize that I'm you know carrying these scars and these consequences, but but I trust you.

I trust that that you're gonna work in me, that you're still gonna glorify your son through me, and that you still have a great plan for my life and you're gonna use me powerfully.

Right?

I trust him with my future.

Okay, last thing.

When my trial is over, I will completely trust God with my future, rejecting the fatalistic notion that he's just out to get me.

Right?

You ever struggle with this?

The Lord's just out to get me.

Okay, so so Jacob, he comes to the end of his life, and he actually uh dies, and his family, of course, and and even the land of Egypt, they mourn his loss and they spend 70 days doing that.

They put a lot of time and energy remembering him and mourning him, and so they bury him in the land of Canaan just as he requested.

But then kind of as that um is coming to a close, and a bit of a uh fascinating twist here at the end of this uh the book of Genesis, Joseph's brothers uh they hit the panic button.

And they're like, uh-oh.

Okay, take a look here uh in uh chapter 50, verse 15.

Okay, skip down, skip down to that.

It says this when Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, It may be that Joseph will will hate us and and and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him.

Right?

So they started wringing their hands.

And so they sent a message to Joseph saying, Your Your father gave us this command before he died.

Say to Joseph, please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.

And now please forgive the transgression of the servants of God, your father.

So that's kind of interesting, isn't it?

Now, do you think that that Jacob actually gave this command?

Do you think they were maybe trying to play the situation out?

Again, we don't know.

It's kind of interesting to speculate a little bit there.

But they kind of play the dad card there, don't they?

And they don't don't punish us.

You know, we don't want we don't want to see wrath come our way.

Right?

They're they're terrified again.

Right?

And then verse 18, his brothers also came and fell down before him and said, Behold, we are your servants.

But Joseph, look at his response here.

But he said to them, Do not fear, for am I in the place of God?

As for you, and he says he repeats what he said to them earlier, back in an earlier chapter, as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today.

So do not fear.

I will provide for you and your little ones.

Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.

Now, I mean, you obviously get the sense here, right?

Like they're feeling dread.

The brothers are, and so it's overwhelming them.

And they're like, you know, you just picture them kind of getting together and putting their heads together and coming up with a game plan, and they were probably brought right back to when you know Joseph had sent them back home to you know their father, and they find the cup, they find their money in the sacks of grain, and they're like, here we go again.

And Joseph's just been you know waiting till dad shoved off so that he can, you know, stomp us for good.

You know, they're panicking, for sure.

Now, you could be tempted maybe to give them a bit of a pass again on this, right?

Like they they don't know, they don't need they don't know truly the the the heart of Joseph here, but but isn't this kind of how we tend to approach the Lord?

Especially after we're you know we're coming out of a trial and God has proven his faithfulness faithfulness to us time and time again.

We've we've come out of the difficulties and we're on the other side of it, and and rather than just trusting God wholeheartedly going forward because he's gotten us here to this point, you know, we kind of carry this fatalistic idea that God's looking to smack me.

Right?

He didn't do it last time, but that's because he's really setting the stage to do it in a in a more epic way.

Right?

He wants to he wants to make sure that everyone's watching and and my destruction will be complete.

Right?

That's sometimes our attitude.

And that can be, you know, kind of our our heart.

You know, I'll be honest, I've gone through tough seasons before, you know, and I've come out of it and I've seen, wow, God is so good, but but I'm sort of like bracing myself for the other shoe to drop.

Right?

And I'm like, well, life is challenging, and the scriptures talk about that, and so I'm sort of like waiting for God's hand of judgment to bam, like smack me.

Right?

I've been I've been waiting for it, and I've spent far too much of my thinking and and my life, to be quite honest, kind of fearing all of that.

I need to remind myself that God is loving, right?

That God isn't interested in just putting us through the ringer over and over and over and over and over again.

Only, yes, life can be difficult, life can be atrocious at times.

I'm not trying to make light in in any way whatsoever of some of the challenges that people have gone through.

When you think about you know the the horrors that that humanity can go through, it is awful.

And I don't want to make it seem like the Lord won't have hard times through, He will, you know, and our life will have more difficulties.

There will be challenges and and trials, you know, in the future as well.

Right?

There's gonna be dark days, but hey, we shouldn't panic about it.

We shouldn't be fatalistic in our approach about God.

If that is you, right, you need to remind yourself of the love of God.

You need to remind yourself of the cross of Christ.

Right?

Because what ends up happening with this darkened view and this cynical understanding of life, and and and God can't wait to just punch me every time I sin and mess up and all of it.

What happens when we live that way is we just end up robbing ourselves of the joy that's available to us in that moment.

Right?

We we live this joyless experience, and listen, I've seen it lots of times in believers.

Right?

Well, here we go again.

You know, and you carry this kind of dark cloud with us sometimes because we don't appreciate that the Lord loves us.

But listen, I love how the story closes here.

Take a look at verse 24, and this is what Joseph tells his brothers.

He says, This, I'm about to die.

Okay, so we're near the end of Joseph's life now, and he in fact does die at the end of this chapter.

He says, I'm about to die.

But God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

Massive hope in that.

Huge hope.

They would have been like, Wow, the grace of God in our life to do this, right?

And that promise, it translated into the the nation of Israel itself being established, right?

And God would establish them through Jacob's 12 sons, right?

As we read through the Old Testament, we see the 12 tribes of Israel, and they were named after Jacob's 12 sons.

They were the 12 tribes.

And then what happened as you fast forward through that and and and into the New Testament now?

Who ultimately came?

Jesus Christ.

Right?

Jesus came of the line of Judah.

And what did he come to do?

To bring final future hope, final future hope and security for all of us.

Okay, not just the land of Israel, right?

But he came to save us once and for all from the the penalty, the the consequence, the the all of that of our sin.

The sin that that causes life to be a mess in the first place.

Right?

Yeah, we're gonna deal with the mess.

Life gets messy, it gets awful.

Talked about it tons and tons of times over the last month and a half or so.

Right?

But Jesus is coming back.

He's coming back to take us, to take us home.

But we're not gonna have to deal with the mess anymore.

Yeah, you're not gonna have the lingering fear that comes because you know you're not sure what's gonna happen tomorrow.

The lingering fear that sometimes happens when you know we don't know how the situation is gonna play out.

Can you imagine not having that anymore?

How do we know that our future is secure?

Because of what Christ did at Easter.

We just celebrated that last weekend.

And what did we talk about?

Christ came to take away sin.

Christ came to absorb the penalty of our sin on himself.

He came to take the wrath that you and I deserve because of all the foolish decision, all the bad choices, all of the idols that we erect in our hearts, all of the shaking our fists at God, wanting to be in his place, all of that he took on himself in the cross.

So listen, trust him.

Trust him completely.

If you're here today and you don't know Jesus, do it now.

Trust him as your savior, receive the free gift of salvation.

Understand, realize, know that Jesus went to the cross for you, man.

He went there for you.

He didn't just go for some reason.

He went because he loved you, because he wanted to unite you with himself.

Okay, all of your good deeds, all of your you know, proper behavior, none of that is good enough to get you on good terms with God.

Jesus had to do it for you.

He is the bridge, he is the pathway, he is the way, the only way to God.

Would you admit your sin?

Would you admit your brokenness?

And would you lean into, would you trust that Jesus did it all for you?

When you do that, the scriptures say you will be saved.

You will be saved, you will know him, and you will have heaven waiting for you.

Right?

For the rest of us, for the church, for the redeemed, those who have been called into saving faith.

What's the response for us?

Trust him.

It's the same.

Trust him completely.

Know that he holds your future.

Your future could not possibly be in better hands.

Enough of the anxiety that you carry with you, enough of that fear, enough of the negative, pessimistic, fatalistic attitude.

Trust him.

Have joy.

He's got it all figured out.

Our future could not be more secure.