Lemon Squeezy

I want to say hello to everybody joining us online.

Just honored to be here, excited about today, and uh starting a new series, Lemonade.

I'm gonna open this up uh actually by reading Genesis 37, 3 and 4.

So if you have your Bible, you can turn there.

If not, don't worry about it, it'll be up on the screen.

And then I'm gonna pray and then we'll get into it.

Alright, here we go.

Genesis 37, 3 and 4.

It says, Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other children because Joseph had been born to him in his old age.

So one day, Jacob had a special gift made for Joseph, a beautiful robe.

But his brothers hated Joseph because their father loved him more than the rest of them.

They couldn't say a kind word about him.

Let's pray.

Lord, I come to you in Jesus' name.

I thank you for the opportunity to be here.

Thank you for the breath that we have in our lungs.

Thank you for the ability to perceive.

Lord, as we read your word, to not only look at the words on the page, but to perceive what the Holy Spirit is saying to us in specific custom application in each of our lives.

Lord, do what only you can do, which is to speak both collective and custom.

And we will open up our ears to hear.

Lord, I pray on a personal level you would give me the ability to transfer your heart, to accurately communicate your word.

Without you, Lord, I can do nothing.

But with you, all things are possible.

We thank you in Jesus' name.

All God's people said, Amen.

Amen.

So uh lemonade, what's up with that?

What is this series?

We're taking that sort of um uh famous axiom when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade.

And uh we decided, you know, it's it's July.

What's better than a little bit of lemonade in July?

Um so we got some lemonade out there.

I think they got some new shirts out there.

Uh, we're talking about this.

Uh, I think I want to be clear up front uh that although it's July and we're we got lemonade in the lobby, this is not a light-hearted subject that we're taking on.

We're talking about our lives and the things that you're carrying and the things you've been given.

And for some of you, there are things you didn't ask for yet.

You're being asked to do something with it and figure it out, and and what do I do with all of this?

And so we're gonna take a few weeks and do it.

Uh, from time to time, people ask me, dude, how do you figure out what you're gonna talk about?

You know, how do you come up with these series?

Where does it come from?

And and it comes all different ways.

Um sometimes I'll see or I'll listen to things.

I try to listen a lot and hear what people are thinking about or what they're wrestling with, and I'll pray, Lord, what do you want me to say and do?

This particular one actually, uh, the idea came at Christmas time last year.

We were in the book of Matthew, and we were looking at the genealogy of Jesus.

And in Matthew's telling of the genealogy of Jesus, he mentions four women.

And uh the reason he put the four women in there was because he wanted you to Google them.

He wanted you to find out who they were.

What's up with who's Ruth?

Okay, who's Tamar?

What are these stories?

And to actually go back and read the stories and find out the fact that these women, with their really, frankly, complex situation, some of them came in very dysfunctional, painful environments, and then to connect the dot that actually Jesus was born from that, which should it raise your hope and your expectation and your optimism around what God can do with your life.

Okay, if he can take that sort of crazy pass that Jesus, you know, from his downline, what can he do with you and your life and what's still possible for you?

And so I thought, you know what, let's do this thing in the summer, let's talk more about it.

And I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do.

I I was thinking maybe each week I'll look at a different character, but as I was studying for it, I found myself grounded in the story of Joseph in the Old Testament.

So that's where we're gonna spend the next four uh few weeks in the story of Joseph.

Um let me give you a little background on Joseph, because what I want to focus on this week, we're gonna look at the depth of his story, but I want to I want to look at Joseph in terms of sort of the bowl of lemons that was handed to him based on things that happened before he was ever born.

So we have in the book of Genesis, we have the telling of Joseph's great-grandfather, his grandfather and his father.

His great-grandfather was a man by the name of Abraham, uh, who God makes a covenant with his great-grandfather and says, I'll make a great nation out of you, I'll bless those who bless you, I'll curse those who curse you.

And yet we see that Abraham in many ways was the patriarch, he was a good man, but he had he made some complicated decisions, and those decisions have their way of cascading down generationally.

Um, they they end up affecting the decisions of the grandfather, right?

If you want to know a little bit about the mistakes of your father, you've got to know a little bit about your grandfather.

If you'd like to know about his mistakes, you'd like to look a generation above, because these things have a way of being passed down.

So by the time Joseph shows up, who's kind of the person we're gonna really look at, you'll see uh he had ideologies and attitudes and habits and patterns and behaviors and things that happened before he was even conscious of the world and could think for himself.

And I'm gonna give you sort of a quick cliff note of this, okay?

Back in Genesis 12, you have Abraham.

He's been given this great promise and covenant with God, and at one point there's a famine in the land, so they have to go into Egypt to get food.

They go into Egypt to get food, and his wife, Sarah, who the Bible says was a beautiful woman, he's freaked out that his wife is so bad that when he goes into Egypt, they're going to kill him to get it her.

And so he says to Sarah, listen, I don't want to die because you're because you're so fine.

So he said, I tell you what, pretend to be my sister, pretend to be my sister so they'll leave me alone.

I gotta survive this.

Instead of, you know, trusting God who made a covenant with him, he's just freaking out, getting caught up in the moment.

So he does that and it goes in and it gets gets kind of weird in chapter 12.

It doesn't work out too good.

So you'd have thought he'd have learned his lesson, but he does it again in Genesis 20, which little side note says something about Sarah.

This was one bad chick, because she was in in chapter 12, she was 60 years old.

And in chapter 20, she was 90.

This woman must have been finer than frog hair, split about four ways.

All right, a bad mammajama, just as foxy as can be.

At 90, he's still worried about getting killed over.

Okay.

So that's chapter 12, chapter 20, and you would think that that sort of would have been isolated to Abraham, except it's not.

His son Isaac does the same thing.

I believe it's Genesis 27, 26, one of those.

Isaac marries Rebekah.

Rebecca also is beautiful, and and and Isaac, faced in the same situation in a foreign place, he feels a threat because his wife's beautiful, they may kill me to get to her.

So he goes to Rebecca, pretend to be my sister.

Which then begs the question, dude, did Abraham and Isaac talk about this?

Was this like Abraham's like, look, man, if you marry a beautiful woman and you end up in a scary place, just say she's your sister.

Did he tell him to do that?

Or is it one of those weird sort of things that sort of gets passed down, like without being told, you just kind of take on the same mentality and do the same thing.

And we look like there are patterns that just sort of happen generationally.

They get passed down.

Attitudes, anger, uh ways of thinking, paradigms, they get handed down, and it's just sort of human nature to sort of take it and go with it.

Um, we it gets worse, actually.

Um, Isaac, Isaac, who uh is Joseph's grandfather.

Isaac has two boys, Jacob and Esau.

And when you read in Genesis 25, it says that um that Isaac loved Esau more than Jacob.

Why?

Well, Esau was an alpha male.

He was, in fact, the Bible says when he was born, he was born with a bunch of body hair.

He had he had body hairs.

Actually, Esau means like Harry.

So they were like, yeah, they name him Harry, and then Jacob comes out, he's got no body hair.

And he doesn't like to be outside.

And Esau's a hunter, and and and he comes home with the wild game, and his dad's like, yeah, that's my boy right there.

That's what a man, a real man is right there.

And and Jacob was kind of a mama's boy, and he liked to be in the home, and he liked to cook, and all this, and it didn't meet dad's expectations.

And it says uh explicitly in chapter 25 of Genesis that that Isaac preferred Esau.

He was his favorite, which created some issues for Jacob.

It made him insecure.

Come on, you you gotta know when when your dad doesn't approve of you in who you are, um that that hits you at a core level.

Who I really am isn't good enough.

And so we see it creates complication in his life.

At a certain point, he wants um, you know, the approval of his father, and he wants the blessing of his father.

So what does he do?

He waits till his brother is in a moment of weakness, and now this hairy man's man is now in a weak place, and so he he deceives him and he pulls one over on him and and he steals his birthright, and then he goes to his father and and he pretends to be his brother.

His father is getting old and he can't see anymore, and so so what does Jacob do?

But he he puts animal skins on his arms, there's hair, and then and then he he he makes himself smell like the outside, and he goes to his dad and he pretends, and his dad's confused.

He's like, wait a second, you you feel like Esau, you you smell like Esau, but you sound like Jacob.

And and so so from there he deceives his father and he complicates his relationship to his brother and he fragments his family.

And all of this comes from a deep pain of his father loving his brother more than him and making it very clear.

Which you would think, you would think you'd have the presence of mind to go, man, I will not do that to my kids.

But Jacob goes and has 12 sons by four different women, which creates a bit of a dysfunction internally.

They're fighting for one another.

It was, you know, the the sons of this woman didn't like the sons of this woman, and then he makes it so plain to all of them, my favorite one is Joseph.

He does the very thing to Joseph that his father did to him that caused the greatest pain and the greatest spider web of dysfunction in his own life.

Somehow, somehow, inexplicably, he goes and does it to his own.

How do you do that?

And now you have Joseph who is now asked to deal with all this.

Um Joseph's an interesting character because he's a guy who has some unusually high highs and some unusually low lows.

Uh he has uh a massive amount of both prosperity and hardship.

And the prosperity does not ruin him, and his adversity does not harden him, but he's able to take whatever is given to him, whether he deserved it or not, and to give it to God and to see how good can come from whatever comes your way.

So we're gonna get into the meat of the story, but I'm gonna give you the cliff note.

So his brothers are so jealous of him after this text, they said they couldn't say anything nice about him, but it gets worse than that.

They decide they want to kill him.

We're gonna kill him.

Okay, we're gonna kill him, and we're gonna put animal blood on him and see, hey, wild animal got him, Dad.

Oh man, we didn't know.

Oh, terrible.

Ooh.

But but they decide, you know what, we got a better idea.

Let's get some money for him.

So they sell him, they human trafficking.

So they sell him into slavery, and then they pull the same move.

Oh, he's dead.

Daddy's dead.

Uh, animal must have got him.

And and yet now here, Joseph goes into slavery, but he decides to thrive.

He decides, you know, I mean he's a sharp guy, he's a talented guy, and he gets sold into the home of a man with a huge estate, and the guy quickly has an eye for talent.

He's like, this Joseph guy's something else, and he puts Joseph in charge of the whole house.

So Joseph is now, he's running the show, he's the VP, and yet somebody lies on him in the house on something he didn't do, and he ends up in prison.

While he's in prison, he thrives in prison.

Fine, bring it on.

What what do you got?

Give me another lemon.

And he goes in prison and he starts to earn favor in prison.

And it's while he's in prison, by the way, 14 total years of his hardship from when he uh, you know, he's he first kind of has grand dreams to actually the fulfillment of his dreams.

While he's in prison, he actually solves a problem for Pharaoh that no one else could solve, and he earns Pharaoh's favor, and he ends up, he ends up now the prime minister of Egypt.

And God uses him powerfully to save a nation.

We'll get into this more in a few weeks in the next few weeks.

But what's interesting in chapter 41 is now he has his own two kids, two boys.

And Joseph is in a place where he now has to process everything that's come his way, and he has to decide what am I gonna do?

What am I gonna do?

I know what great-grandpa did, I know what grandpa did, I know what my dad did, what am I going to do here?

And it takes tremendous discipline to step back and to analyze and to see everything.

I I read a book when I was in college, and it had such a profound impact on me that I asked my wife, before she was my wife and we were dating, to read it so we could talk about it together.

The book was called Love is a Choice, and it's basically about codependent relationships.

And one of the concepts in the book is it said that when you grow up, whatever family you grew up in, to you is normal.

So you don't go, like let's say you grew up in a dysfunctional family, you don't go, hey, we're weird, and everybody else, these healthy people are normal, we're weird.

When you grow up in dysfunction, the dysfunction is normal to you.

And and actually, healthy people are weird.

Like, what's up with that?

Um, which is becomes an obstacle often to you getting to a healthy place because when health is introduced in your life, you push it away because it's weird.

Let me let me give you an example.

Um uh I grew up in a home, actually, my parents were incredibly loving.

My dad, anybody that knows my dad, my dad's here, he's over pastoral care.

My dad is the most encouraging, affirming dude.

He I was affirmed all my life.

I was told I was loved, I was given specific affirmations.

In fact, my dad, at dinner time, we'd be sitting around the table at dinner, and if if if the conversation had any lull to it at all, he'd go, okay, guys, here's what we're gonna do.

We're all gonna go around the table, and we're gonna say one thing we love, admire, and appreciate about the person on our left.

Like, man, you know, I just want to eat these mashed potatoes, dude.

You know, he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, Greg, you kick us off, Greg, you kick us off.

So I'd have to affirm my sister, and then my sister would affirm my mom, and then my and we just go around the table.

And and I mean, this happened all the time, okay?

So I have people that to this day go, Greg, you're such an encourager.

And I'm like, it's it's nurture, not nature.

I'll tell you, because my my dad, I mean, he just made you do it.

Like, I just got good at it.

And and um, in fact, he would do this when I'd have friends spend the night at the house for dinner, okay?

I'm 16 years old.

I got my the homies come over.

We're all sitting around the table, and my dad's like, all right, hey, glad you all are here.

You've really honored the house tonight.

Here's what we're gonna do.

And and and he wouldn't even necessarily everyone on the left, he'd single one out.

John, thank you for being here tonight, man.

We are so glad.

I'll tell you what, we're all gonna go around and we're gonna say one thing we love, admire, and respect about John.

And John's like, no, you don't have to do that.

He's like, no, no, no, no, no.

We're gonna do it, John.

All right, this is a safe place, brother.

We're here to fill your love tanks.

God forbid, my friend Tim didn't adequately affirm John.

My dad would say, Jana, why don't you take Tim's plate for a minute?

He needs to think.

All right, go ahead, why don't you?

And he'd sit there until he goes, Oh, you know, he's a man of character.

Okay, all right, and so until it met my dad's expectations of proper affirmation.

And my friends would go, Greg, your dad is weird, dude.

Your dad is weird.

And the reality is they grew up in environments where they weren't they weren't getting affirmed.

Okay, the men or the women or whoever, no, nobody was affirming anybody.

So when they got, now is affirmation weird?

No, it's a love language.

Affirmation's not weird, but when you don't ever get it, and then somebody gives it to you, it feels kind of good, but it makes you feel a little funny, and you go, no, I don't want that.

And so so even health can become weird to you, and so so uh, but you don't sit there and go, well, they're they're normal.

It keeps you stuck.

This, by the way, explains why sometimes people who grow up in uh dysfunctional environments perpetuate it or they keep it going.

For example, people uh statistically who were abused often, not every time, but sometimes grow up to become abusive.

Why?

You would think you'd go, man, that was so terrible.

I hated it so bad, I would never want to do it.

And some people do that, but that takes unbelievable intentionality.

You gotta be purposeful about it, you gotta root it out.

But for people that don't, they find themselves doing the very thing they hated.

They find themselves abusing.

Why?

Because in some way it's a right to be able to do it.

It's some kind of normal.

Some of you, maybe it wasn't full-blown abuse, but yet you grew up in an environment you didn't like being yelled at, but now you find yourself yelling.

Uh, you didn't like that your parent was a workaholic, but you find yourself doing the workaholic day.

You didn't like something about your environment, yet you're perpetuating it because it takes a tremendous amount of discipline and courage and willingness to dig into the lemons, squeeze those things, and find the lemonade, right?

To find something about it.

By the way, I got some lemons today.

Uh I'm gonna make a little we're gonna start some lemonade.

I did this last night and I cut myself, okay?

And I learned you gotta tuck your fingers.

Okay, and they asked me, they're like, Do you want us to just cut the lemons for you?

I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

And then I and then I cut, you know.

No applause or anything.

I mean, I didn't, no, I didn't.

Thank you for the affirmation.

Um it's kind of funny because um last night I did cut myself and I and I was I was trying to, you know, but I kept bleeding and I was and I'm bleeding in the lemonade, which is gross.

But I kind of like it for the sermon, honestly.

I kind of like it for the sermon for this reason.

Some of you, the lemons you've been given, in the process of you being willing to cut into it, you're gonna bleed in the lemonade.

You gotta be willing to bleed in the lemonade.

By the way, it was crazy because last night I cut the lemons and I'm squeezing them and I'm getting lemon juice.

You've been there?

I'm getting lemon juice.

I'm up here trying to preach the word, okay, and I got lemon juice going in my cut, and the whole time I'm sitting there and I'm doing this, I'm going, man, but this is where the sermon isn't cute.

Because for some of you to go take really what's been handed to you in terms of great grandparents, grandparent, what the things you've been given, and to go back in to have the courage to cut open, you you you gotta be willing to have some pain, you gotta be willing to have some bloody lemonade, you gotta be willing to go in and do this and to trust that whatever comes out of this that God's going to use.

Um here's the fear in squeezing, squeezing is what comes out of this is both truth and lies.

So when I squeeze, both truth and lies come out.

And sometimes we're afraid of the lies, but sometimes we're afraid of the truth.

What's true?

Um one of the issues that we all kind of have to deal with is before you had the ability to really rationally think things through, you believed things.

And anything you believed before you could actually think it through is a tough one to uproot.

So be because it's hit you at a visceral level, it is a deep truth.

And even to re-examine it or to reopen the case or to dig into it feels wrong to do.

Because you believe it so deeply.

I'll give you an example.

There there are some, I've seen this many times, people who grew up in an environment that either directly or indirectly told them they weren't that valuable.

So maybe somebody was verbally abusive.

They they tried to beat you down, they told you you weren't valuable.

Horrible stuff.

I I have a uh there was a woman that uh I shared this not too long ago, but a woman that sent me a message and and uh she said that her dad told her after her mom died, her dad told her the only reason you're even here is because the contraceptives failed.

Okay, that's an assault.

And so some people you you know, when you when you hear That before you can even, when you're a child, okay, and you don't even really have the ability to really rationally, you know, until you're like an adolescent, you're still kind of in concrete mode.

You can't think abstract, you can't work your way through it.

You've been given beliefs, theology, beliefs about God, beliefs about culture, beliefs about social, beliefs about government, beliefs about self.

All of that stuff is given so you believe it, then you get to where you can think about it for yourself, and there's still an obstacle because even if I go think about it with my own grown mind, my adult mind, there's still something at a visceral level that feels wrong to go back and do it, or or I just can't believe it.

And this is where I've seen people who had beliefs of value about themselves.

You're not valuable.

Either you were attacked at that level, or you were just neglected so much, you didn't matter in the world.

You're just like, man, I'm one of eight billion people.

If I if I'm not here, I'm not here.

So you think you have no value, then you become an adult and you start hearing some preacher preaching to you sweaty about if it was just you, Jesus would have died for you.

And you hear some preacher telling you, no, you're fearfully and wonderfully made.

Oh, no, no, you're made in the image of God.

Oh, you're loved unconditionally.

You can't outsend the great.

And they're telling you this, and you're believing you you kind of understand it here.

It's not that you can't rationally understand it, but you don't believe it here.

And it gets so weird.

I've seen people, I've seen people who had no problem believing it for other people because they could understand it here, but something, there was an obstacle to them receiving it for themselves.

I've seen people preach it to other people.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made.

They will stand there and tell somebody else how valuable they are, how much God loves them, how important they are, and they believe it for others, and they believe it for virtually everybody except themselves.

Why?

Because before I could even think rationally, I had these messages, these things I believed that were sort of cascaded down, and I end up with these lemons.

And to even go in there and try to believe it, I keep coming up against an impediment because that thing was in, it's in there so deep, I couldn't even, before I could even think it, and then now to try to undo it, it's really, really difficult to do.

And this is why, you know, this is why it takes tremendous courage to come in here and keep digging, because there's more juice in this thing.

You know what I mean?

Now, here's what you gotta do is you if you're gonna use this, you know, God made these these things, you know, helpers.

But you gotta cut off to do this, and I learned all this yesterday.

You gotta cut off the butt, which is you know the butt of the lemon.

But it when I'm talking about, I'm not talking about the butt, I'm talking about the, yeah, but yeah, but you gotta you gotta cut off the the butt and you gotta get some help because there's more juice in there.

Sometimes it's it's literally the courage to go, you know what, I'm gonna talk, I'm I'm gonna start thinking about this more.

I'm gonna start talking to somebody, I'm gonna get some help to really start thinking about this because the tendency is to go, the truth and lies come out together.

And of course, we we've talked about this before, but it bears repeating that what the enemy loves to do to keep people bound is to take a micro truth and turn it into a macro lie.

That's how he gets you to believe it.

The micro truth is didn't do good in school.

What's the macro lie?

You're stupid.

Well, did you is it true you didn't do good in school?

Yeah, you did terrible in school.

Does it mean you're dumb?

No, you're not dumb.

You just didn't do good in school.

That doesn't mean you're stupid.

Um, the micro truth, hey, every romantic relationship you've been in, you got cheated on.

Is that true?

Might be.

It's a micro truth.

What's a macro lie?

You're not worthy or worth being faithful to.

Micro truth might be nobody in this world loves me unconditionally.

Is that true?

That might be true.

That might be true that there's no human being in this world that loves you unconditionally.

Everybody might have a boundary that they go, you know what, uh, now is when it dries up.

That might be true.

What's the macro lie?

That you're unlovable.

And so the enemy keeps the keeps us connected to these things, and we're afraid of the truth and the lies coming out together instead of trusting God enough to go, you know what, I'm gonna squeeze within this because whatever comes out, the combination of both truth and lies, as they come out, I begin to sort them out.

I give them to God, and he helps to heal the things that need healed, and he helps to put truth on the lies that are in there.

And then it leads to important conversation, important thoughts, and the Holy Spirit starts to now uh, you know, show up in our lives.

Like, again, there's some things that I can't even squeeze out of this, okay, by my hand.

It's the Holy Spirit doing work, okay, that I'm not even able to do for myself.

To go, am I willing to go in here, have these thoughts, think these thoughts, have this focus, because I don't want to stay stuck in something I'm supposed to move past.

Um, my my wife did a message last year when I tore my Achilles and uh she was up here and she preached on um digging for gold and mining, and she told her story about, you know, she said when she was a little girl, um well, actually, my wife was an unwanted pregnancy.

So my my father-in-law was an 80s rocker, okay?

That's how he made his living traveling and you know, uh the band was called Roulette.

Tell me, tell me that doesn't sound like an 80s rock band.

Roulette.

So he was an 80s rocker, and my my mother-in-law was uh groupie.

So she shows up to the show, and in the back of a pickup truck, my wife was conceived, and my mother-in-law, no, I'm just telling you the truth.

Um comes the show six weeks later, and she's like, Hey, I'm pregnant with your baby.

You don't, I don't need anything from you.

Okay, I can do this myself.

And he's like, No, I want to I want to help.

He's like, You can you think you could stand me for the rest of your life?

That was his proposal.

Do you think you could stand me for the rest of your life?

She's like, Oh, yeah, maybe.

And and so then they go to the mall and they buy a ring and they get married and then they have three more kids and all this.

He quits his music career and he gets a job working um as a manager of an apartment complex.

And um uh my wife was raised from there.

Now, she um when she was growing up, they thought she had leukemia when she was like seven years old.

And she tells this story that she thought she had leukemia, but it was actually hypothyroidism.

She had lost a friend of leukemia, and uh so she thought she was gonna die.

In fact, she she tells a story where she she said her last Christmas she spent all the all of her money uh on her family.

She's like, What why would I keep any?

I'm I'm not gonna be here next year.

So she spent all of her money on Christmas presents and she said she you know told me she'd stare at snowflakes, try to look at them as close as she can.

This is the last time I'm gonna see a snowflake.

It's the last time I'm gonna see the the leaves fall, and she thought she was gonna die.

Well, praise God it turned out it wasn't hypothyroid, or it was hypothyroidism, which is treatable.

But during that time when she had thought she had leukemia, her mom gets pregnant with her bru uh one of her brothers.

And in her mind, the lie that jumped into her mind was this oh, they're just replacing you.

Like you're dying, they're just making another kid.

And then the lie that was embedded in her little seven-year-old heart was that she was replaceable.

Like you're just totally replaceable, man.

Something happens to you, somebody, you're just not that big a deal.

And and she carried that with her into her late 30s, never actually squeezing hard enough to see but feeling it.

And when she finally got that clear from enough squeezing and enough and talking to a counselor and going back into some painful memories and actually putting language on it, when she finally told me it made sense, I was like, man, I have felt that from you.

I have felt that almost like you expect me uh to replace yourself.

But but then I would, I look back and I realize I did dumb stuff along the way that kind of, you know, that it made sense.

Like, for example, when she went shark diving, I was like, I don't think you ought to go shark diving.

You know, those are they have huge teeth, and you know, I don't think you should do it.

She's like, Oh, I'm going.

I'm like, if you, if they eat you, if you get eaten out there, I'll be remarried within a week.

She's like, What?

I'm like, no, it won't be for love.

I'll never love anybody like I love you.

I but I'm not raising these kids by myself.

So it'll be within seven days.

I mean, you know.

And she she didn't think it was funny, you know, she didn't laugh.

And I was like, come on, lighten up.

That's a good joke.

You know, I don't mean it.

I don't mean it, you know.

And she, but but it was funny because I could tell she kind of ha ha, but it was like it hit her in the spot.

What was it doing?

It was lemon in the cut.

It was like, well, I'm replaceable, and you just confirmed it, even though you made a joke.

So when she's telling me this stuff, I'm like, man, that makes sense.

So she told in that message when she was telling that story, she she looked at the camera and looked at the church and said, You gotta keep digging for gold, man.

You know, because if Jesus is really full of grace and truth, then whatever truth you find is covered in grace.

And if the truth really sets you free, then it's covered in grace and it'll lead to more freedom.

And she's like, You gotta keep digging.

So she told me us all to dig, but then I got the chance to have a front row seat to watch her keep digging.

I asked, with her permission, I'll share what happened after that.

She goes back, gets some help, the Holy Spirit, a counselor, she's talking, going man, I just there's there's more truth in there.

I gotta find some more truth.

I gotta dig back into what I've been given.

And she she realized this when she was a young girl in their church, there was a young woman who gets pregnant out of wedlock.

They had a little church, and their little church girl gets pregnant out of wedlock, and the parents took it as an opportunity to gather all the little girls and go, listen now, this is what can happen if you don't do it God's way.

Okay?

See this girl over here?

She messed around, sinned, and now this she's pregnant as a consequence of her sin.

And y'all don't want that for your lives.

The whole room of girls were all born in families of married people, and yet my wife walked away and went, I was conceived in the back of a truck.

Nobody was saved, nobody was married.

I'm a consequence, and that embedded in her belief that she was a consequence.

So now when her parents got divorced years later, she said they never would have got together if not for the consequence.

When one of her siblings struggled with depression and suicide, she went, they wouldn't even be in this pain if it wasn't for this consequence.

When another sibling battled addiction, she said they wouldn't even be in this battle for their life and bound in this addiction if not for this consequence.

When her own sons were diagnosed with autism, she said they wouldn't even have this if not for the consequence.

And so she realized that some of these things that were embedded that she believed there was micro truths and macro lies.

And if all I do is sit here and I hold these lemons and I let them keep all their juice, I lose an opportunity to give it to God and to let him heal it, to let him put truth on it.

And so she starts to squeeze and she says she fell in that process.

She's like, you know, I'm gonna call my dad, I'm gonna call my dad.

It took all her courage to just admit to me that.

He's very quiet, very smart, good at everything he does, but he's just very quiet.

And so my wife calls him and she calls him, she says, I want to apologize to you.

She said, for what?

She said, for ruining your life.

She said, You had to give up music for me.

So instead of continuing in a music career, you know, you had to do a job that was nine to five.

And I want to say, I'm sorry for ruining your life because you ended up in a marriage that didn't work out.

And I want to say, I want to apologize for all the pain I put you through and my siblings, and dah da.

And so she goes point by point by point of everything she could think of that her mind had been going, of what she was a consequence of.

And my father-in-law, she said, Greg, I come home, my wife's in tears.

So what?

She said, My dad talked for 30 minutes without a breath.

So I've never heard him talk that much.

So what'd he say?

She said, he said, ruined my life.

You saved my life.

So you don't understand.

I was in the music scene, I was starting to head into the drug scene, I was starting to go in a direction, and nothing could, nothing could get me out of that.

Nothing could, I needed a bucket of cold water to the face.

And one day a woman showed up and said, You brought a life into the world, and that was the thing that caused me to say, you know what?

I'm going to step away.

He goes, I can't think of another thing in the whole world that would have kept me from the slippery slope I was on, except that created a sobriety in my mind and heart to say, I'm gonna raise this kid.

And so he put his foot in the ground and changed direction.

He goes, I'd probably be strung out, I might be dead, I'd probably be an addict.

I was vulnerable to all these things, and it was you that changed my whole direction.

Now, praise God for my father-in-law and thank God for that conversation.

But I must say, there are some of you that you go, Greg, that's so cool that your father-in-law gave your wife this healing.

But some of you go, let me tell you about a conversation with my dad.

Let me tell you about a conversation with my mom.

Maybe there are some of you who have listened, they go, Yeah, it's nice, her dad was that, but my dad told me I'm only here because the contraceptive didn't work.

I'm only, and what I'm saying is this I'm not saying every conversation is gonna be lemonade.

I'm not saying we're going from from zero to now it's a sugary drink.

I'm saying that you have to trust in the areas you can't trust people and that you're fearful for yourself that you'll trust God that whatever comes out in a mixture of lies and truth that God can take and cause it to work together for good, God can bring healing to the most broken places.

But but but it won't happen if I leave the juice in the lemon.

I gotta be willing to squeeze it, I gotta be willing to go back.

And this is what I love about Joseph.

It says in chapter 41, Joseph has these two sons.

Now he's a dad and he has an opportunity to be a father.

And it says in in verse 51 of chapter 41, Joseph now has two sons.

His older son, he names them Manasseh.

Manasseh, which means forgetfulness.

Why'd he name him forgetfulness?

For he said, God has made me forget all my troubles and everyone in my father's family.

Did it mean he forgot, he lost consciousness of his past?

No, because we know actually in the next chapter, when he finally is sees his brothers again, he's so shook, he begin, he gets emotional, he has to dismiss himself, weeps, regains his composure, and comes back.

It's still hitting him at a deep level, but he's saying essentially, when he's saying to forget that, he's saying, I won't get stuck in it.

The ability to move past it, the ability to move ahead.

So he names his first son forgetfulness, Manasseh, his second son.

Uh it says he names his second son Ephraim, for he says, God has made me fruitful.

Ephraim means fruitful, he's made me fruitful in the land of my grief.

And so you have Joseph, who got some things handed from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob, now coming to him, patterns of dysfunction, paradigms, it's all in his hands.

And he can't go change what anybody else did.

But he stands here in chapter 41 going, what am I gonna do with mine?

Tell you what I'm not gonna do.

I'm not gonna stay stuck in it.

I'm gonna move past it.

And you know what I'm not gonna do is I'm not just going to merely survive.

Once I get this healing, I'm going to thrive in the land of my suffering.

I'm going to be fruitful in the land of my suffering.

I couldn't control what anybody else did, but here I am with my opportunity.

What are you gonna do?

And today I offer, I offer you and I challenge you an opportunity to take all that's been handed down.

There were things that were going on before you ever showed up in the world.

And some of it you're still trying to untangle and squeeze and go, man, I didn't even see that clearly.

But to have the courage, and where does the courage come from?

The courage comes from faith in God.

I trust God.

Whatever comes out of this, whatever comes out of this, whatever truth and lies comes out of this, that God's gonna put truth on it, He's gonna put healing on it, and He's going to use it to help me to thrive and be fruitful and what I have next.

I don't have to stay stuck here.

I'm not leaving the juice in these lemons.

I'm going to allow God to I'm gonna trust Him enough to do what only He can do.