From Prison To Palace

Good morning. Happy Memorial Day weekend. So in the world that we live in,

we have these ideas or these concepts that we call universal languages.

These are ideas or ways that we can communicate with each other without actually

using our language, without actually using our words.

We can connect with other people without actually using our words.

When I was in college, I did a mission trip to China. And while we were there,

we visited a small village.

And I was told when we went in that they had never seen a white person before.

Like we were the first white people they had ever seen.

And judging by the stares that we got as we walked through the village, I kind of believe that.

I mean, we were like aliens walking around in there. And we had a couple of

translators with us, but they weren't with us all the time.

And so there are times where we're going into these people's houses and we're

helping them out and we're serving them.

And we'd smile at them. At times we'd laugh with them.

But I mean, we never learned each other's names. We couldn't communicate with

each other. We just couldn't do it.

And yet, when our time came to leave, we hugged them.

And we smiled again. We left.

We had made a bond with these people without ever speaking a word of their language.

We had these universal languages that transcend our words that we can connect

with other people through.

There's other universal languages like music. Music's actually been called like

the universal language before.

Food. We connect with people through food. We don't necessarily need our words.

I have a client right now. They only speak Spanish.

And I was over at their house last week and they speak the universal language of cafe con leche.

And that is a fantastic universal language.

I mean, that is the universal language of, oh yeah, it's good. It's good.

And I love them, and they love me, and we have a great time when we're together.

Because we have these universal languages that transcends our words and helps

us to connect with other humans in that way.

And I think that the Joseph story has a universal language in it that helps

us to connect with him and his story.

It's interesting, as I've talked to people even just this past week,

talking with people, and really just throughout the years, when we talk about

the Joseph story, I hear a lot of times people will say, gosh,

that's one of my favorite stories in the Bible. And I don't hear that about all the other stories.

I mean, people like the other stories, but there's something specific about

the Joseph story that I hear all the time.

That's one of my favorite stories.

And I think it's because we connect with something in Joseph.

We connect with this universal language of pain and suffering that he has in his life.

It's a story that has a good ending to it, the Joseph story does. We like the ending of it.

But I think more than that, every human being has encountered with pain in their

lives, and not a little bit of it.

We experience pain in this world. It seems to be part of our human story that we live out.

We experience the story of Joseph as we're betrayed.

As we experience the betrayal of sometimes family, through loss and grief,

being forgotten and unheard.

Even in disease, we feel like, why do I have this, but other people don't?

We feel forgotten. We're offended.

Injustice in our lives. We know there's pain.

It's part of all of our stories. And the Bible tells us many stories of other

people who lived out lives with pain in them.

C.S. Lewis said in his book, The Problem of Pain, try to

exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of

nature and the existence of free wills involve and you

find that you have excluded life itself in other words try and remove the pain

from the world and what you end up doing is just removing life itself from the

world because pain seems to be a central part of our humanity and oftentimes

humanity seems to be the source a lot of the pain that exists.

As we've been studying since last year, there is a moment in the Bible,

the beginning of the Bible, where we as humans lose everything,

and pain enters the world.

We had it all. We had everything that we could ever want, perfect satisfaction

in the world around us, and then sin enters the world.

This idea that we don't need God, and we can do this life on our own,

that we can be like God in a way, and when we embrace that life,

we lose everything that we have, and instead we get pain.

Instead of pleasures forevermore, we're immediately confronted by the pain and

anguish of childbirth and work becoming by the sweat of our brows, Genesis tells us.

The sin and brokenness of this world only seems to bring about more sin and

brokenness and pain and suffering.

We've known this pain ever since. And as humans, we've probably inflicted this pain ever since.

And that's what makes pain so hard. is that we know it's not supposed to be this way.

It's not supposed to be this way. We're not supposed to experience this amount of pain in our lives.

And so Joseph welcomes us this morning to his story.

A story that is riddled with pain and suffering and injustice.

And if you've been part of Christianity

for a little while, I grew up in Christianity. I grew up in a church.

And I have heard this story I don't know how many times.

And so it's easy when you hear the story to kind of lose track of like how much

pain there actually was in the story.

Because we look at it, we kind of know what's happening. We know what's going

to happen. He's going to basically become the prime minister of the land.

Like, that's not too bad. That's a pretty good thing, right?

Like, so, you know, he suffered. but look where he got to, you know,

and look how many lives he saved. I mean, like, dude's a hero.

Like, that's amazing. So he suffered, but look at all the lives that he saved through all of this.

But I want to take a look at the end of our passage before we jump back in the

beginning of our passage. We're in Genesis 40 and 41 today.

And at the very end of our passage, towards the end of our passage,

this is what it says here.

Joseph, he's already become like the second highest ruler in the land of Egypt,

and he's married, and now he has two sons. And it says.

Forgotten it. It's still part of who he is, even in this elevated status that he has.

Pain is still very much a part of him in his story. So quick review.

How do we get to this point where we are? So if you've been here in previous

weeks, you've seen the earlier years of Joseph.

He has dreams, basically saying that his father and his mother and his brothers

are going to bow down to him.

His brothers clearly then aren't really fond of him a whole lot.

And as he goes to check on his brothers, they're out in the fields working.

They see him coming and they plot against him.

He gets out there and they basically jump him. And when they take his robe that

his father had given to him and they toss him in a pit.

They take that robe and they rip it apart. They put blood on it,

making it look like a wild animal had gotten him and they send it back to their father.

Meanwhile, they see a caravan coming and they sell Joseph into slavery.

From there, he's taken to Egypt and he's sold there and becomes a slave or a

servant in the house of Potiphar.

But God gives favor to Joseph and he rises to the top of all the other servants

and slaves that are there and he ends up being put in charge of Potiphar's house.

However, he is young and handsome, and Potiphar's wife is trying to get him to sleep with her.

He refuses and is eventually falsely accused of sexual assault and is thrown into prison.

But just like in Potiphar's house, God gives Joseph favor, he rises to the top

again and is basically put in charge of the prison.

And that is where we left off last week, as Joseph is there in prison,

but he has favor in prison.

And so that brings us to chapters 40 and 41 today. And this is a lot to cover today.

I mean, these are two really big chapters. There's a lot to cover.

So I'm going to summarize part of it, and then we'll jump into the scriptures

for some of the final details.

So if you want to follow along with the story, you can open your Bibles to chapters 40 and 41 of Genesis.

And so we join Joseph in prison here, and we're told that the chief cupbearer

and the chief baker are thrown into prison, and Joseph has made their personal attendant.

They've done something to wrong Pharaoh in some way. We don't know what it was,

but they've wronged Pharaoh in some way, and so they're thrown into prison.

But apparently they still have status in prison. There's some royal status that

they still have because Joseph has made their attendant. They're not just another prisoner in there.

And he apparently gets to know them well enough because during this time,

He comes to them one morning and he looks at them and he says,

hey, what's troubling you guys? To which we would be like, well, they're in prison.

Of course, they're troubled. Why do we need to even ask about this?

But Joseph apparently had gotten to know them well enough that he can see,

oh, something is really bothering them.

Something beyond this whole being in prison thing, something is really bothering

them. What he finds is they've had dreams.

On the same night, they both had dreams. And it tells us that they had different

dreams, but in different meanings to their dreams.

And so they're troubled by this. And we have to understand about this is we

don't really understand in our American culture because we have a dream and

we wake up like, whoa, that was a weird dream. It was probably the pizza that I ate last night.

They have dreams and they go, oh, this actually meant something to me.

This probably has some significance for my life in some way.

And we know that within the Egyptian context, they actually had books that were

written about dream interpretation.

And so they had businesses there. If you had a dream, you could You go pay somebody,

and they would interpret your dream for you.

This is going to play out with Pharaoh in just a few minutes here.

So they're not just troubled by the fact they've had a dream and that it kind

of troubled them a little bit.

They're troubled because they're like, oh, if I wasn't here,

I could have this interpreted for me, and I would know what this dream meant.

And so Joseph comes along, this dreamer who's had experiences with dreams before,

and he kind of challenges them a bit.

And he says, don't interpretations belong to God? Tell me your dreams.

This is bigger. You don't need all those books. You don't need all this Egyptian

cultural stuff about dreams. They belong to God.

Tell them to me and I will tell them to you. I'll interpret it for you.

So in Genesis 49, the cupbearer begins. He tells his dream to Joseph.

In my dream, there was a vine in front of me. On the vine were three branches.

As soon as it budded, its blossoms came out and its clusters ripened into grapes.

Pharaoh's cup was in my hand and I took the grapes, squeezed them into Pharaoh's

cup and placed the cup in Pharaoh's hand.

This is his interpretation, Joseph said to him. The three branches are three

days. In just three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your position.

You'll put Pharaoh's cup in his hand the way you used to when you were his cupbearer.

And we see Joseph's confidence in this as he gives this interpretation,

because look at what he says next.

But when all goes well for you, remember that I was with you.

Please show kindness to me by mentioning me to Pharaoh and get me out of this prison.

For I was kidnapped in the land of the Hebrews. And even here,

I have done nothing that they should put me in the dungeon.

Joseph is looking for justice in his life. And he's remembering all of the injustice

that has happened to him, not once, not twice, but probably more than that in his life.

He's referencing back more than just the prison stage of his life.

Because he says, I was kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews.

And while we would look at that and be like, well, you're really kidnapped?

We can interchange that word with the word trafficked. He was trafficked by

his family, betrayed by his family.

And in fact, we even know this even further because this word dungeon that is

here, they should put me in the dungeon.

If we translate that literally into Hebrew, he's saying, Joseph says,

I have done nothing that they should put me in this pit.

It's the same word for where his brothers threw him all those years earlier. He's remembering.

It's still a pain that he hasn't forgotten. He's wanting justice in his life.

But the baker, he hears this favorable interpretation, and he is like,

ooh, do me next. Like, let's do this. Like, I want to hear mine now. Let's go.

And so he says, I also had a dream. Three baskets of white bread were on my head.

In the top basket were all sorts of baked goods for Pharaoh.

But the birds were eating them out of the basket on my head.

Now, if we saw the previous dream where the cup was put into Pharaoh's hands,

this bread is not put into Pharaoh's hands.

This might not be so good of an omen for him. And Joseph confirms this.

This is the interpretation, Joseph replied.

The three baskets are three days. In just three days, Pharaoh will lift up your

head from off you and hang you on a tree.

Then the birds will eat the flesh from your body.

Not so good of an interpretation for the baker.

And all of this happens three days later on Pharaoh's birthday, just like Joseph said.

And then the chapter ends in this way.

Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph. He forgot him.

More pain, more abandonment, more injustice.

And again, if we know the stories, we can just gloss right over these next three

words that are used here in Genesis 41.1.

It says two years later.

That's a long time.

And I can't imagine what Joseph is thinking in this moment. Forgotten again.

Is this my life? Is this what it's about?

Just being forgotten over and over and over again? Just languishing here in

this pit? Is this what it's about, God? What are we doing?

What he doesn't know is that the story's about to shift. Because Pharaoh has had two dreams.

And it's important to know about Pharaoh that it's not, he is a king,

but he's also like the spiritual head of Egypt, which we don't really correlate with in our culture.

He's a spiritual head of this. So when he has a dream, it's not like,

hey, I'm troubled by this dream. Let me figure out what it means for myself.

There are potential national implications to his dream from his perspective.

And he's not wrong. And so he has these two dreams, and these two dreams are

repeated three times in various ways in this chapter.

And in the first dream, Pharaoh sees seven cows coming up from the Nile.

And these cows are what cows should look like. They're beautiful,

they're well-fed, they're healthy.

And it's good to remember about the Egyptian culture that while it is a modern

society, it's also an agrarian society.

They are wholly dependent on the agriculture of their time.

And so it's good to remember that with these dreams and as they're dreaming them.

And so he sees these seven healthy cows, but then up from the Nile comes seven

absolutely horrific-looking cows.

They're translated to us as ugly and sickly and thin, but we can also translate

them as evil, sickly, and thin cows.

We look back at the Garden of Eden, you have the tree of the knowledge of good

and evil, that is the tree of the knowledge of tov and ra, ra being evil,

and that's how it describes these cows, as ra.

These are evil cows that come up out of the Nile, and we see that they're evil because what do they do?

They're cannibalistic. And they're carnivorous.

We live in an agrarian kind of culture here in some ways.

The cows that I have seen don't eat other cows like that. They don't have like

fangs and stuff like dripping them off.

And Pharaoh kind of even describes it that way a little bit.

I'm going to call them demon cows from now on because I think that's a better description for them.

And so these demon cows, they come along and Pharaoh even says,

when they had devoured them, you could not tell that they had devoured them.

Their appearance was as bad as it had been before.

These demon cows, they eat, and it's like they never even ate.

They consume, but it seems to only destroy what they consume.

And then Pharaoh has a second dream, and it's similar to the first dream.

You have seven nice, healthy heads of grain, and they get swallowed up by seven

withered and dying heads of grain.

And so Pharaoh gets up in the morning, and he's troubled by these dreams,

and he calls all of his Egyptian wise men and magicians to him,

and he says, hey, interpret the dream for me. He tells them the dream,

and it says that they can't do it.

And it doesn't mean that they're just stumped, and they don't talk about it.

They don't try to interpret it. They're probably using their books or whatever,

but for some reason, they're not able to do it. Maybe it was not to Pharaoh's satisfaction.

We don't really know what that means. They weren't able to interpret it other

than they didn't have it. They didn't get the dream.

And that's when the chief gut bearer finally remembers Joseph.

And so he tells Pharaoh about Joseph that interpreting their dreams and exactly

what Joseph said would happen, happened.

And so Pharaoh calls Joseph from the prison. And it says that he's quickly brought

to him. In the Egyptian culture, they were clean-shaven.

They were clean-shaven cultures, so they shave him, they give him new clothes

so he can be presentable before Pharaoh.

And they bring him before Pharaoh, and Pharaoh says to Joseph,

no one can interpret my dream, but I hear that you can.

And what might be my favorite line in the whole Joseph story right here,

Genesis 41, 16, I am not able to.

I'm not able to. Can you imagine the reaction in Pharaoh's court at that moment? What?

Why did we bring this guy here?

I mean, what are we doing? He's making a fool out of Pharaoh right now.

And think about the chief cupbearer who's standing there who recommended that Joseph be brought.

And he's probably standing there like, oh, it might be actually my head this

time. It might be lifted off me.

But Joseph continues, I'm not able to. It is God who will give Pharaoh a favorable answer.

And so Joseph interprets the dream. He tells him that two of the dreams are

one in the same, two dreams are one in the same, and the seven healthy cows

and seven healthy heads of grain are seven years, and the seven demon cows and

the seven withered heads of grain are also seven years.

It is just as I told Pharaoh. God has shown Pharaoh what he's about to do.

Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt.

After them, seven years of famine will take place and all the abundance in the

land of Egypt will be forgotten.

The famine will devastate the land. The abundance in the land will not be remembered

because of the famine that follows it. For the famine will be very severe.

Since the dream was given twice to Pharaoh, it means that the matter has been

determined by God, and he will carry it out soon.

Basically, this is happening now, Pharaoh, get ready.

And what we see here is that Joseph has basically given the Egyptians a death sentence.

They may have seven years of abundance,

that's great. But seven years of famine, you don't survive that.

You don't survive that. And that's where the emphasis of the story is as well.

The abundance gets one short phrase.

The famine is repeated several times. This famine is going to be severe.

It's gonna be so severe that you don't even remember the abundance that was

given to you. It's gonna be really bad.

You're gonna forget everything good that happened because this is going to be

so bad. It's repeated several times. That's the emphasis here.

He's basically prophesying the end of Egypt to Pharaoh.

But he doesn't stop there. He continues now beyond just the dream interpretation.

So now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and set him over the land of Egypt.

Let Pharaoh do this. Let him appoint overseers over the land and take a fifth

of the harvest of the land of Egypt during the seven years of abundance.

Let them gather all the excess food during these good years that are coming.

Under Pharaoh's authority, store the grain in the cities so they may preserve it as food.

The food will be a reserve for the land during the seven years of famine that

will take place in the land of Egypt.

Then the country will not be wiped out by the famine.

So Joseph, who has managed Potiphar's house through God's favor and brought

blessing on it, who through God's favor has been promoted to basically running

the prison, this Joseph has now a solution to preserve the entire country of Egypt's.

And notice it's not the dream interpretation that pleases Pharaoh, it's the proposal.

The proposal pleased Pharaoh and all of his servants.

Then Pharaoh said to his servants, can we find anyone like this,

a man who has God's spirit in him?

So Pharaoh said to Joseph, since God has made all this known to you,

there is no one as intelligent and wise as you are.

And Joseph is promoted. It's basically the prime minister of Egypt.

He's given authority over the land of Egypt from Pharaoh.

Puts a ring on his finger, kind of signifying that authority.

He puts a gold chain around his neck, which we know from the Egyptian documents

that we have. This is a status symbol that's conferred through ceremony.

And then also he clothes him in fine linen garments.

Have you noticed that in the greatest moments of injustice in Joseph's life,

he's been stripped of his garments?

His brothers take his coat from him.

Potiphar's wife takes his garment from him but now a reversal is taking place,

rather than being stripped of his clothes he's clothed in what might be the

finest clothes he's ever worn in his life and just like with potiphar and the

prison warden he's given authority basically to be a pharaoh's hand in the kingdom.

From there, he begins to carry out these plans, and it all comes to pass, as Joseph said.

As the abundance of the land is in full swing, they stow away the excess to

the point that it can't even be measured, it's so much.

And Joseph is also married, has two sons, as I mentioned earlier.

And then the famine begins.

Extreme hunger came to all the land of Egypt, and the people cried out to Pharaoh for food.

Pharaoh told all Egypt, go to Joseph and do whatever he tells you.

Because the famine had spread across the whole country, Joseph opened up all

the storehouses and sold grain to the Egyptians. For the famine was severe in the land of Egypt.

Every nation came to Joseph in Egypt to buy grain, for the famine was severe.

Every nation, which reminds us of something that was said to Abraham,

that every nation will be blessed by your descendants.

We start to see that happening here with his great-grandson and all of this

sets us up for the passage that will come next week in the joseph story as well

but as we look at this story,

they said in the beginning even once promoted the pain of joseph's life doesn't seem to go away,

it's still there and i want to point out we could have many observations from

this passage but i want to point out two observations that i think we can take

away from this story as we look at our own lives and the pain that we experience,

or maybe it's the pain around us that we know about, that other people are experiencing.

How do we live our lives as followers of Jesus in a world that is filled with pain?

How do we follow Jesus and live our lives with our own pain and the pain that's around us?

So first, we have to trust in God's sovereign plan.

We have to trust in God's sovereign plan. And I know we've talked about God's

sovereignty for the past two messages as well.

In fact, Mario stood here last week and was like, I don't want to preach this again a second time.

Third time today. Yeah, we're going to talk about it again.

And I think it's hard to trust in God's sovereign plan in the midst of pain and suffering.

Because in the midst of pain and suffering, that's when we want to take control.

That's when we want to grasp our lives and hold onto it. That's when we don't

really want God's sovereignty in our lives.

Because we want to control it, because we want to end the pain and the suffering.

And we think that we know what the greatest path to do that is.

And so we grasp a hold of our lives and we say, no, I'm going to take control. I'm going to do this.

You know, you guys can trust in God's sovereignty, but I know the right answer

for this because I want it to stop.

I just want the pain to stop. But as we see in the Joseph story and really every

other story in the Bible, God has a different perspective than us.

Joseph can't see while he's languishing in pits that every nation is going to

come to him for their survival.

He can't see until he gets there that his years of pain and slavery and betrayal

and abandonment have put him in places that have repaired his character They

prepared his skills, his strategy, his communication techniques,

so that in this moment, he can lead as God has prepared him to lead.

As sin seems to multiply around us, though, and more and more pain ensues,

how are we supposed to put our faith and trust in God's sovereign plan when we can't see it?

Joseph has had a terrible life. How is he able to point to God over and over

again in the midst of that?

Shouldn't he have rejected God by now?

For this terrible life that he's been given.

What we find though is that Joseph can trust God's sovereign plan because he's

seen God's work in his life.

Look at what the scripture says over and over again. God gave Joseph favor.

The Lord was with Joseph and extended kindness to him.

And we don't see those exact words in the Pharaoh story here,

but what does Pharaoh say? Can we find anyone like this?

A man who has God's spirit in him.

God's been with him this entire time. And Joseph can look back on those stories

and he remembers where he's seen God.

Now, I know there are people, especially those who aren't followers of Jesus

yet, who would say, well, I've never seen God work in my life.

Never seen it. I don't have any of those stories that I can look back on.

He hasn't ever been there for me when I needed him.

And to some extent, what's hard about that is that it does require some amount

of faith if you wanna see God and see his work in our lives.

It's hard to perfectly explain that, but if you've ever read a book or have

ever seen a movie and you get to the end of that book or that movie and there's

a really big reveal that happens and it just changes like your perspective on

like the whole book and the whole movie.

And you're like, whoa, that was amazing. It just changed everything.

But you couldn't see it the first time you watched it.

But then you go back and you watch it or you read it the second time and you

see this reveal happening the whole way through the book or the movie.

It's been there the whole time.

But the first reading, you couldn't see it. You didn't know that it was there.

And I think that's how God works in our lives sometimes.

And once we see him, we can't deny that he's been there the whole time.

There's a scripture in the New Testament from Matthew 5 in which Jesus is teaching

and he's telling his followers that they're to love their enemies.

And right in the middle of that, he says this, Matthew 5, 45,

for he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the

righteous and the unrighteous.

In other words, God's hand of grace is being poured out even on those who have

rejected him as their God.

That also means that as we believe in him, there are blessings that have happened

to us our whole lives that our eyes can finally be opened to.

We can finally see where he's been the whole time. And God's perspective is

just completely different than ours.

His goal doesn't seem to be our happiness.

It seems to be his holiness in us. That's his goal.

And so most commentaries talk about these passages and the growth that we see

in Joseph moving from an immature teenager into this man who through great pain

refuses to take credit upon himself for making it through these hardships.

Isn't God the one who interprets dreams? I can't do that for you.

And even Pharaoh ends up pointing to God over Joseph. Can we find anyone like

this, a man who has God's spirit in him?

Because it's in these painful places that Joseph has lived through that he's

come to know the living God.

Scripture tells us in Romans 8, 28, we know that all things work together for

the good of those who love God, those who are called according to his purpose,

we've probably said it ourselves or we've heard it from somebody that we know

who goes through pain and they might say something like gosh I wouldn't wish

this pain on anybody but I also wouldn't change anything.

And we say that because pain has caused us to grow. Pain has a function in our

lives that only God can do.

And we've heard these stories all over the Bible and it reminds us of this,

that even if it's the next life, we still have a hope beyond this world of pain that we live in.

And if you're a follower of Jesus, you probably have these stories in your own

life of pain in which God worked things out in a way that you couldn't have yourself.

He probably worked them out better.

And these stories are powerful, stories that we need to remind ourselves of,

of how God has worked in our lives.

They help us to walk through pain and suffering.

We also need to not keep them to ourselves, which is my second observation,

is that we get to live as messengers of peace to a broken and pain-filled world.

As Joseph stands before Pharaoh, Pharaoh says to him, I've heard you can interpret

dreams. Joseph says, I am not able to.

It is God who will give Pharaoh a favorable answer.

Some translations say God will give Pharaoh peace of mind.

And the word that's translated here as favorable is this word,

this Hebrew word, shalom.

Which if you've been around Christianity for a bit, you might have heard it.

If you've been around the Jewish culture a bit, you've probably heard this word shalom.

In fact, even today, shalom is written all over the Old Testament.

It is everywhere in the Old Testament.

It's in people's names. It is in places that are referenced in the Old Testament.

And even today, what you find is the Jewish people, they still greet each other with shalom.

In other words, peace to you. And they respond back, to you be peace.

This is a big part of their culture because this word shalom,

while we translate it as peace, and that's a correct translation of it,

it has a far deeper meaning for us to understand.

Because in the Old Testament, we can see it translated a number of different

ways. It can be peace, it can be favor, it can be wholeness.

It can mean a completion or a completeness.

Because it's not just a peace that is merely the absence of conflict in our

lives. I think that's how we oftentimes think of peace is absence of conflict.

But this peace, this shalom that's talked about in the Bible is a peace that

goes deep within our souls.

We can be at peace outwardly because we know we are complete in God.

We know that we are whole in him.

We know who we belong to and we can trust that and we can trust him so that

you can be in the midst of pain and suffering and yet you can still have this shalom in your life.

And if you notice when Joseph says this to Pharaoh, Joseph says,

I'm not able to, it is God who will give Pharaoh a favorable answer.

So in other words, it's God who's gonna give Pharaoh a shalom answer.

But Joseph hasn't even heard the dream yet.

He's not even there. How does he know that this is going to give Pharaoh peace

when he hasn't even heard the dream?

And so maybe you could argue that, well, Pharaoh, well, he did hear the dream

because they had those guys that came and got him to bring him before Pharaoh.

So they're all there cleaning him up.

They're like, hey, let me tell you this dream because he's going to ask you

about it and you're going to need to like interpret it. So I'm just getting

you ready. Let me give it to you.

But the interpretation of the dream is horrible.

It's a terrible interpretation. It's the death of Egypt.

So how does he know this is going to bring Pharaoh peace?

Joseph can say this because Joseph knows the God of Shalom, the God who gives

peace when you're in pits and dungeons, the God who gives peace when you're

sold into slavery and betrayed by your own family, the God who gives peace when you're forgotten.

Pharaoh, I can't give you peace, but God can.

John Mark Comer in his book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry,

says that what the world needs is a people who will be a non-anxious presence.

And I think he's right, but we can only be a non-anxious presence to the world

around us when we're rooted and grounded in the one who is in control in this

crazy pain-filled world that we live in.

Ultimately, what I think we end up longing for in the Joseph story is someone

who won't just give us grain to make bread,

but as John 6 35 says Jesus speaking here I am the bread of life no one who

comes to me will ever be hungry and no one who believes in me will ever be thirsty

again there's a greater hunger that exists in this world than just food.

And that hunger is often revealed to us through our pain. The hunger for one

who will come and rescue us from ourselves and the pain that we endure.

It was Augustine who said, you have made us for yourself, O Lord,

and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

Only in him can we have this true shalom that we need so deeply within our souls,

that we can then give to the world around us.

As I begin to wrap up, I wanted to wrap up with a real-world example of what

this can look like in our world.

Ben Sasse was a United States senator from Nebraska from 2015 to 2023.

He eventually resigned his Senate post to become the president of the University

of Florida right down the street from here.

He was only there for a little over a year when he resigned because of his family

to take care of his wife who had recently received an epilepsy diagnosis.

In December, he received the death sentence from his doctors,

being told that he had pancreatic cancer and he only had three to four months left to live.

There was a new drug that was given to him that's given him a little bit of

extra time and has mitigated his pain a little bit.

He's also a passionate and outspoken follower of Jesus. And he sat down recently

for an interview with 60 Minutes and wanted to take a couple of minutes to listen

to what he says when the interviewer speaks of his faith in his cancer.

And he says to him, I wonder why you think God has put you to this test. Let's listen.

Death is wicked. Death is evil. Death is not how it's supposed to be.

And me getting a cancer diagnosis, again, is pretty small on the grand scheme

of things, but it's a touch of grace.

Because it forces me to tell the truth. And the lie I want to tell myself is

that I'm the center of everything.

And I'm going to be around forever.

And I can work harder and store up enough that I can atone for my own brokenness.

I can't. And so I hate cancer, but I'm also grateful for it.

I tell a lot more truth to myself than I used to do it when I thought I was

super omni-competent and interesting.

Tim Keller was a pastor in New York City. He's in my denomination.

And he died of pancreatic cancer a couple years ago. And he had a line.

He said, I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never wish it on anybody.

But I also would never want to go back to a time in life where I didn't know

the prayer of pancreatic cancer. And I feel that to be true.

I started being symptomatic the last couple weeks of October.

I wasn't diagnosed until mid-December.

We had trouble figuring out what was going on because I was training for some

sprint triathlons and I was doing some stupid stuff in my training.

And so I thought I'd pulled a bunch of muscles in my abdomen.

I was in really bad pain for a number of weeks. I'm now on a lot of morphine

and I've also got the benefit of this drug, which is, you know,

scare quotes, but miraculously reduced my tumor volume enough that I have a

lot less tumor pressure on my spine.

So the combination of a great drug and morphine, another useful drug,

I'm in so much less pain now than I was Halloween to Thanksgiving.

But at that point, I was on the floor in the shower, running the water,

trying to remove a valve on my shower to make it hotter.

I'd be five times a night up in the middle of the night in the shower trying

to scald my back to try to make the throbbing of what turned out to be tumors

pushing on my spine cease.

It was horrible.

I'm super grateful that I had that pain.

Cancer has made you closer to God. Definitely because I can acknowledge my dependence in a new way.

That's a peace that is an enigma to the world that we live in.

It's also a peace that we can give to this world around us.

James 1, 2 through 4 says, Consider it a great joy, my brothers,

whenever you experience various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.

But endurance must do its complete work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.

And where does this endurance come from? Hebrews 12, one through three.

Therefore, since we also have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us,

let us lay aside every weight in the sin that so easily ensnares us.

Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us, keeping our eyes on Jesus,

the source and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that lay before him endured

a cross and despised the shame and has sat down at the right hand of God's throne, for consider him...

Who endured such hostility from sinners against himself so that you won't grow weary and lose heart.

It comes from Jesus. There's a world of pain around us that desperately needs him.

That he has the answers in these moments of pain.

Because Jesus is our greatest hope. He's our greatest love. He is our greatest story.

He is our greatest peace and our greatest freedom.

He's our greatest wholeness and he is our greatest completeness. He is our true shalom.

And he calls us to share himself with the world. What an honor and a joy and

a hope that we have that we get to give.

Let's pray. Jesus, we are so grateful to be your followers, Lord Jesus.

Your word says that we plan our ways but you order our steps.

So God, would you help us to trust you?

God, it could be hard to trust you in those painful moments of life, but would you help us?

Would you keep our eyes on you, the author and perfecter of our faith,

knowing that you have gone before us, Lord Jesus, and so that we can be rooted

and grounded in who you are more than who we are, Lord Jesus.

Would you open our eyes to see where you've been working in our lives,

to see what you've been doing, to bring us to this point today.

We thank you for the story of Joseph and the encouragement that he is to us,

as we walk through pain and suffering in this world.

God, you are supreme. You know better than we do what's going on.

So we love you. We thank you. Would you help us to take our own stories and

go out into the world so that other people,

can begin to have new stories for themselves as well of your goodness,

your grace, and your love in their lives.

In the name of Jesus, amen.

Let me close with these words from Philippians chapter two, beginning in verse seven.

Instead, he emptied himself by assuming the form of a slave,

taking on the likeness of men.

And when he had come as a man, in his external form, he humbled himself by becoming

obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross.

For this reason, God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above

every name so that the name of Jesus, every knee will bow,

of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue

confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God, the father. That is good news.