Shaped at Home

Well, I have to tell you that I am fired up about the series we're kicking off today.

You can tell it's called Shaped at Home, and we're going to understand better what scripture has to say about our childhoods and how our upbringing impacts who we are today.

And that means if you had a childhood, this series applies to you.

But also, if you've been around for the last few weeks, you know that I'm praying specifically that God would touch the hearts of our men through this series and do a work in us as we understand our role in the church and the culture and the family and everything else, because we're living in a time where there's a crisis of manhood, I believe.

But if you're not a man, that doesn't mean this series is not for you.

And there's nothing we're going to look at in the Word of God today or over the next six weeks that won't have a profound impact in what you've walked through as well.

So I hope that you won't tune me out because of that.

And uh, we're gonna be looking in the book of Genesis at the life of Joseph and understanding that better.

In fact, I want you to turn right now to the beginning of that account in Genesis chapter 37.

Genesis 37 · chapter mention

Genesis 37.

Would you turn there in your Bibles?

If you don't have a Bible, they're available all over the room in the seats in front of you and in the courts, the same thing.

You can grab one in the back.

And if you're you're not you don't have a Bible in front of you, you can just look on it, the person next to you.

And if they won't let you look, then just take it from them.

Just say, I'll take that.

I want to remind you that this uh series involves more than the message on Sunday morning.

We're gonna actually look at the study of Joseph in the book of Genesis in our community groups as well.

So if you're not a part of a community group, this is a great time to dive in.

You can stop by the Connection Center after the service, and they'll point you to one of the many groups that meet here on Sunday mornings or that gather in homes all around the area.

And I know you'll be blessed by being a part of that.

And as I mentioned, we have a special emphasis for men.

It's happening on Wednesday evenings and mornings.

This last Wednesday, we kicked it off with an incredible time with guys here in the worship center, and that will continue.

And men, if you missed last Wednesday, you can still be a part of this study.

And so just show up either 6 a.m.

or 6.15 p.m.

this coming Wednesday.

It actually will be on both campuses, 6 a.m.

and 6.15 p.m.

So even if you regularly attend worship at Central on Sunday mornings, but you work closer or live closer to North Katie, you can drop in there.

It'll be the same materials.

Um I was saying earlier this morning that you can stop by the connection center.

We'll give you a workbook so you can get started.

But um people were apparently grabbing these by the pile.

I don't know if you're selling on eBay or what you're doing, but hundreds of those went out the door.

And so I'm just gonna say this now that if you're interested, come on Wednesday morning or Wednesday night, we'll give you a workbook and you'll pick up right where we got started this last Wednesday.

And so you'll want to be a part of that, guys.

So this is the account of Joseph, and we're gonna look today at the first 11 verses of Genesis 37 together as we get started.

Here's what it says you look on as I read.

Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan.

These are the family records of Jacob.

At 17 years of age, Joseph tended sheep with his brothers.

The young man was working with the sons of Bilah and Zilpah, his father's wives, and he brought a bad report about them to their father.

Now, Israel loved Joseph more than his other sons because Joseph was born to him in his old age, and he made a long-sleeved robe for him.

Now, let's just push pause, put a pen in this for just a moment.

Two things you need to understand.

First of all, when we talk about Jacob, we're talking about Israel.

It's the same person.

God changed his name, and so Jacob, Israel are the same person.

But something else we probably just read may have blown a little over your minds, because if you're like me, you grew up with a different translation that said coat of many colors.

The CSV translation here is a very accurate translation in looking true to form at the Hebrew word that could simply mean a long-sleeved robe.

But I don't I don't want that to mess you up because the meaning, whether it's a coat of many colors or a long-sleeve robe, it the implication is the same.

So in my mind, I kind of imagine a long-sleeve robe that has lots of colors, okay?

That's what I see in my mind.

I don't want to ruin future Broadway musicals for you, okay?

So this is the other.

But here's what it meant.

Imagine a robe in that culture that was long-sleeved, ornamental, went down to the ankles, and what you were basically saying when you gave someone that is you're not gonna do any hard labor.

You can't do labor in a long-sleeve robe.

So what he's saying is, Joseph, you are now in upper management, you're in leadership, and what he's really saying to the brothers is, you're gonna serve him.

How do you think that went?

Well, let's find out.

When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not bring themselves to speak peaceably to him.

Then Joseph had a dream.

When he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more.

He said to them, Listen to this dream I had.

There we were, binding sheaves of grain in the field.

Suddenly my sheaf stood up, and your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.

Are you really going to reign over us?

His brothers asked him.

Are you really going to rule us?

So they hated him even more because of his dream and what he had said.

And then he had another dream and told it to his brothers.

Look, he said, I had another dream.

And this time the sun, moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to him, to me.

He told his father and his brothers, and his father rebuked him.

What kind of dream is this that you have had?

He said.

Am I and your mother and your brothers really going to come and bow down to the ground before you?

His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.

So I hope that you can already see before we get into the heart, the meat of Joseph's life, that this is more than a little family dispute going on.

This is the unfolding of a whole bunch of family baggage from their past that's showing up at one time.

And that's really the big idea that we're going to study over the next few weeks is that we're all shaped at home.

Now, moms and dads, a special word to you.

You need to understand the implications that are involved in the way you raise your children and why we talk so much about being intentional as the primary disciplers of our kids is because the habits that we form and everyday life is taking place, that's that's teaching subtly, subtle lessons to our kids that they'll remember for the rest of our lives, their lives, and you remember of yours.

And so we see it here that no matter who you are, of any stage or age in life, if you'll understand something about your past, believe it or not, good or bad, it's gonna bless you.

Now, let me say a word to this one group of people that might be here.

I don't want, I don't want to say it, like I don't want to just talk to the old people.

So let's just say those in the fourth quarter of life.

Does that sound good?

Because I think that you might have the greatest risk of thinking about the passage we're gonna read and saying, this is gonna be so good for the 20-somethings, but it's really not for me.

I mean, I'm not going back to look at my childhood at this point, and I want you to know that this will bless you if you'll do it, because Jacob, one of the key figures, Joseph's dad, was in the latter part of his life, and we're gonna see over the next few chapters that God did a great work in him, maybe the greatest work of redemption toward the very end of his life.

And so don't let whatever you're thinking right now rob you of the blessing of understanding the significance of this whole concept that we're shaped at home.

Can I share with you today three incredible principles just from the passage we read and kind of set the foundation for what it means that we're shaped at home?

Here's the first implication I want us to see.

Your story is older than you are.

That kind of sounds kind of strange, right?

But if you've ever read a biography or an autobiography, the really good ones don't start with so-and-so was born.

It starts with the heritage that they had, what happened that kind of set the tone, the context in which they were born, the lineage that they experienced and came into.

And that's what we see here.

Your story's older than you are.

We get a clue about this in verse 1 and 2, like right away.

Look what it says.

Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan.

These are the family records of Jacob.

Do you know what I find fascinating about those two verses?

Clearly, Moses is making a transition here for the next few chapters, beginning here of telling the account of Joseph's life.

But he begins the account of Joseph's life, not talking about Joseph.

He embeds the story in the story of his father Jacob.

Joseph's story doesn't begin with Joseph, it begins with his heritage, it begins with his upbringing.

It's a pattern that's true of all of us.

All our lives are wrapped up in the homes of our past.

And it doesn't mean you're enslaved to bad memories at all.

It does mean you've been impacted by your heritage.

Now, if you are an adult, there's a good chance that you've experienced what it's like that day where you left home.

Now you may have gone back and forth a little bit, but there was a time when you probably had that meaningful moment where you knew you were moving out and you loaded up the car with some clothes, maybe some posters or pictures, and you probably had a box there with some keepsakes that you took.

It's just some treasured memories of home, maybe some pictures of the family or something that meant a lot to you growing up, and you took it with you.

That's that special box.

We all had that box, right?

But there was probably another box that didn't take up space in the car, but it's a it's an invisible box that you took with you as well.

And that box included all sorts of memories, uh, a sense of culture and belief system and hopes and fears and dreams that you inherited from your parents and their parents that you took with you in that car.

And actually, that's the case for Joseph as well.

Joseph had a box, too.

Here's a little bit of his box.

He'd grown up as the 11th of 12 children.

All but he and Benjamin were half siblings, and so their upbringings were slightly different from Joseph's, but they had these common threads, and in Joseph's life there were good times and bad times, just like most of us.

His mother treasured him, but his mama died when he was young and Benjamin was born.

His father saw him as the favorite, but that really strained his relationships with his siblings, as you can imagine.

Joseph witnessed horrible pain in his childhood from a sister who had been assaulted, to a brother caught in adultery, to another brother who had an inappropriate relationship with one of his stepmothers.

You think you had a weird upbringing.

I think Joseph beats most of us, right?

And all through this, Joseph was exposed also to the incredible working of God around him.

And somehow, through all the pain and strangeness, he realized God was working and God had a plan for his life, and he trusted the Lord, and it caused him to grow in his faith.

That's a lot of stuff crammed in one box of one childhood.

That's that's all taking place before we even get to Genesis chapter 37.

Genesis 37 · chapter mention

And some of what Joseph's box had in it didn't even originate with his father, Jacob.

Look back at the verse, it says in verse 1, Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, talking about Jacob's father.

And so this passage about Joseph talks about Joseph's grandparents.

He was living under the influence of previous generations.

Jacob brought things from Isaac's home.

Isaac brought things from Abraham's home.

And your grandparents, including those you might not have even known or barely known, had a profound impact on your parents, and they were shaped at home, and that shaped you.

Hey, some inherited things are harmless, but they're still real.

I sneeze exactly like my father sneezes.

And my girls will tell you it's less of a sneeze and more like an event, you know, more like an eruption.

I'm telling them, it's not my fault.

It's my dad's fault.

I inherit, it's just a part of who I am.

And so we inherit an identity.

We inherit a way to see the world.

Your story is older than you are.

But here's where this gets really important.

You see, the things you carried out of your childhood did not stay in that box.

Here's the second principle we find in the passage.

Your past shapes your presence.

When Lana and I were called to Kingsland and we first moved to Katie 12 years ago, uh, we're just getting acclimated.

We came from Austin and we took the girls on a road trip.

We went up by the spring area, and uh, Lana grew up.

A lot of her childhood was around Willis and uh and Conroe, that area.

And so we're having a burger at this place, and these this group of ladies sat down at this table next to us, and they're just chatting it up.

And Lana leans into us and whispers, dead serious.

She says, Hey, listen to them.

I said, Yeah.

She said, We only moved like two and a half hours, you know, east, but listen how different those accents are, how deep those southern accents are.

And all of us just looked at her, and our girl said, Mom, you don't even realize, do you?

She said, What?

They sound exactly like you.

She said, Y'all making fun of me, you know.

It was true.

I asked permission to tell that story.

I didn't ask permission to make to imitate you, and it didn't really sound like that.

So I apologize in front of everybody.

She didn't even realize how her own heritage was impacting her accent.

And you can hear when you talk to some people, I love it, because you can hear their heritage and how they talk, but there are other accents that we bring from home that aren't as audible.

We have emotional accents, we have relational accents, ways we learn to respond to anger or affection or disappointment or conflict or rejection.

Those are part of how we're wired that impact even now.

And this passage goes backward, not only to set a context, but to help us understand what's really happening beneath the surface right in this moment.

When you look back at the text, in fact, the brothers' response to Joseph doesn't even really make sense until you understand the past.

Look back at verse 4.

When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not bring themselves to speak peaceably to him.

Not only are they angry at him, they can't even have a conversation because they're so bitter.

Now remember, this is before he told the dream that kind of made things worse.

Then they hated him even worse.

It just kept getting worse.

But even before that, they're having this seething anger, and here's why that's so interesting to me.

The brothers saw that their father loved Joseph more.

Who should they have been mad at?

Dad.

Who are they mad at?

Joseph.

Because there's this misplaced emotion that they don't know what to do, that's buried in their hearts and their disappointments from their past, and so they hated Joseph.

Listen, when baggage isn't dealt with, there's lots of misplaced emotions.

And when we see heritage, it makes more sense.

See, you you have this, these emotions.

If you don't deal with them from your past, they're gonna get out somehow.

It's like uh pressure with no valve, eventually you're gonna have an explosion.

Like you have to figure this out and say, how am I gonna deal with this stuff?

And now all of a sudden you look at Genesis 37 in a whole new way.

You say, wait a second, there's more happening here than a dream or a coat.

You see, their dad Jacob had stolen a blessing from his father, their grandfather Isaac, that should have gone to Jacob's brother, and his mama had helped manipulate the whole process to make that happen.

Do you think that might have had a little bit going on in the back of Jacob's mind when he's playing favorites with his kids?

Jacob, his dad, had been tricked into marrying Leah, who was the mother of some of Joseph's brothers.

Do you think they could sense some of the resentment going on between daddy and mama?

And so the reaction makes no sense if you only look at Genesis 37.

It makes a lot of sense when you look at Genesis 27 and 29 and 30 and 34 and 35.

And listen, in your life, if we don't really check under the hood, sometimes the challenges we've faced result in irrational responses.

And that's because of the beliefs that we've internalized, whether they're true or false, about events that we encountered in our past.

Deep disappointments can show up in our lives in strange ways if we're not careful.

Our emotions and our beliefs, even today, are asking three questions that you began asking before you could even understand the process of communication.

Here's the questions everybody's asking, even as a child.

Am I safe here?

Am I loved here?

And do I matter?

Every home answers those questions.

Most, or many, not verbally, but those questions are getting answered through family patterns that have a geography and a history and a weight to them.

And eventually, our childhood strategy becomes an adult reflex.

And it impacts us even today, whether we know it or not.

A few years ago, I had an appointment with our ear, nose, and throat doctor, my friend Joel Anthus.

Dr.

Antus is a member of Kingsland, a good guy.

And I don't even remember why I went in sore throat or something, but he addressed that.

And then he went ahead and just gave me the whole once over with all three letters, ear, nose, throat.

He's just checking things out.

And he says, Hey, how many times did you break your nose?

I said, I don't know that I broke my nose.

He said, I didn't ask you if you broke your nose.

You broke your nose, Ryan.

He said, I just wonder how many times.

I said, I don't remember breaking my nose.

He said, You ever get hit in the face with an elbow or a ball or something?

And I said, Who hasn't done that?

He said, Did blood just come pouring out?

Of course, yeah.

Eyes watered.

Yeah, that happens, I think, to everybody.

Yeah.

Several times.

I mean, I don't know, lots of times.

He said, Well, you broke your nose lots of times, and it's a miracle it's not bent like all the way sideways because you look inside there, man, and your cartilage is all jacked up from getting broken noses.

So I didn't know.

I'd forgotten that I'd broke in my nose, but my nose apparently remembered.

Then he said to me, he looks in my ears and he says, When did you burst your eardrum?

I said, What?

And burst my eardrum.

He said, I didn't ask you if you burst your eardrum.

I asked you when you burst your eardrum.

I said, Joel, I have no idea what you're talking about.

He said, Okay, did you ever have like a really loud noise and it caused you to lose some hearing, maybe even almost like deaf for a day or something?

And then you had some significant pain.

I said, Oh yeah, that was my senior year in high school, and I was with a neighbor and I fired a handgun.

We had no ear protection, and immediately like everything just shut down.

And uh I couldn't hear anything for like a day, and the next day it hurt like crazy for two, three days.

And he goes, Okay, you burst your eardrum.

And he said, That's what happened.

And I said, Wow.

So then I started thinking, how many other things in my childhood happened that I nobody told me to go to the doctor?

I mean, in my childhood, we just rubbed dirt on stuff.

That's what we did.

But the weird thing about it is, like, I didn't remember bursting my eardrum, but my ear remembered.

And do you see that's the same way it works in all of our hearts and our lives and our minds?

Things that you have forgotten about are still impacting you in these weird ways, whether you know it or not, whether you bury it or not, whether you deal with it or not, it's still impacting your present.

Our challenges, listen, our challenges are not an excuse.

No one has the right to say, hey, I'm making terrible choices today because of my upbringing or because that person hurt you.

That's not that's not what we're doing is.

We're not looking back so we can say, ain't it awful?

What happened?

No, we're not even doing that.

We're looking back so we can interpret what's happening today a little bit differently and understand what messages need to change because we bring them before the perfect standard of the Word of God and say, What is really true and how have I been lied to?

You need to understand your past helps you know some of your default settings that you've learned that may need to be rearranged.

And your past may help explain the reactions that you have.

It doesn't excuse your choices.

But you have to be honest about those experiences, or you're gonna miss out on what God really has for you.

But listen, when you're honest, you're gonna be ready for God to fill in.

The gaps in a way you never imagined.

A few years ago, I was at a pastor's retreat with some dear friends, and we just gotten away to pray for one another.

And that morning I was asked to give a devotion.

I gave a devotion to these pastors on the power of blessing in the Word of God.

And I said, We have the power of blessing others.

You experienced or didn't experience a blessing when you were grow growing up, and that has an impact on you now, but God can redeem that.

And said, just remember the power of blessing.

And we we stopped to pray, and one of the pastors raised his hand and said, I need to say something.

And he said, Let me just put it in context a little more.

This pastor is one of the greatest leaders I know, one of the most incredible churches that I know, large church.

And he said, I've never been blessed.

He said, I grew up in a household where I felt like I needed to perform in order to get rewarded.

And he said, even in my ministry, if I do good things, good things happen.

If I don't do good things, bad things happen.

I just never experienced anything like that in my life.

And he starts weeping and he says, I just want someone to bless me.

It was a powerful moment.

Five or six of the older pastors there surrounded by my friend put a hand on his shoulders and blessed him.

It was a transformational moment.

And how can it be that a pastor with all that success in his mid-40s can have never experienced that or even need it?

It's because God has shaped us a certain way.

And there's nothing in your past that can keep you from experiencing all that God has for you right now.

And here's what's amazing about the truth in Joseph's story.

What we're not doing is just saying we're going to look back and we're going to pretend like none of that happened.

No, we're going to look back and do something different.

We're going to recognize that God can even take the tough stuff and He can turn it around and use it for your good.

I promise you he can.

See, I say the very best principle for last is in this passage.

You see, what we see in this passage that your story is older than you are.

Your past shapes your present.

But the best news is this God can redeem any story.

There's not a story he cannot redeem.

And if you look at Joseph's life, you'll see a constant theme.

He was constantly under attack, but he was never the victim.

Let me spoil the ending of Joseph's life for just a few moments for you.

We're going to study it for the next few weeks, but here's how it goes.

He goes through a great deal of heartache.

He's going to be sold out by his own brothers, betrayed.

He ends up in a pit.

He's sold into slavery.

He's falsely accused.

He's thrown into prison.

And then he'll be thrust somehow into national leadership.

Not only that, but he's able to confront his own brothers and forgive them, love them, provide for them, redeem them, and end up being a part of redemption for his entire nation back home.

God's going to use him in that way, not despite his pain, but because of it.

And so the theme verse we're going to see over and over over the next six weeks is found in Genesis 50, verse 20.

Genesis 50:20

When Joseph is standing before his brothers and he reveals who he is, and he's saving their lives, and he says these words, You planned evil against me.

God planned it for good to bring about the present result, the survival of many people.

This is not about blaming your past or excavating every wound or building a case against those who hurt you.

It's about understanding your story well enough that God can use it.

When I was doing my doctoral research, I studied pastors to understand how their upbringings impacted how they lead today.

I just wanted to understand, you know, my passion is the family, how our earliest memories of childhood impact how we live as adults.

And so I wanted to understand, first of all, as much as they could remember, how they related to their parents at the earliest age.

And then I wanted to understand their leadership style today.

So it didn't surprise me, nor should it surprise you, because we see the truth in the Word of God.

That was actually true.

Those who had more difficult, strained relationships with their children growing up, or with their parents growing up rather, tended to be more transactional leaders.

In other words, they they were give or take leaders, or they'd lead by fear or uh reward rather than really connecting with them.

And those who had a deeper relationship with mom or dad early on tended to be more uh what we call transformational leaders, the highest level of leadership where you inspire people and call them up.

I did something else in the study.

I studied people in leaders and pastors in four continents.

I wanted to understand if it was just a Western thing.

I studied pastors in Cambodia, Uganda, Brazil, and the United States, and I found sure enough, these principles apply no matter where you grew up or where you're doing ministry.

But there was one part of my study that blew my mind.

It had to do with pastors in Cambodia.

Sure enough, just as expected, when you understand the history, you see why.

A significant number of Cambodian pastors came from the most horrific childhood situations you can imagine.

If you studied your history, you know in the late 1970s they suffered something called the Khmer Rouge, where uh a communist dictator, Paul Pot came in and he he uh committed genocide against a whole generation.

And most of these pastors lived right now around Phnom Penh, which was the capital city.

So many of them, statistically, many of them, if not most of them, had either a parent or a dear loved one who was slaughtered in the Khmer Rouge.

Even on top of that, another thing Paul Pod did, it was incredibly evil, is he took the kids out of the homes for a period of time and put them in camps, said the government would raise the children.

And in these camps, he wanted to have no identity except for with the nation.

So they had boys and girls had to dress the same, had the same haircuts, couldn't see their parents for a while, because they wanted their sole influence to be the government.

That'll mess you up, don't you think?

Can you imagine?

So it's no surprise there was a bunch that came out of there with what we call disorganized attachment.

In other words, their their relationships were so strained early in childhood that it has no other way but to have a detriment to the way you relate for the rest of your life.

And yet, some of the most incredible leaders in my study who tested out at the top end of transformational leadership came from Cambodia.

How could that be?

But I think I know why.

It's because almost all of the pastors in Cambodia are first generation Christians.

God's done this incredible work over the last 30 years, 40 years in Cambodia, and they found the Lord.

And so what happened was they had all this horrific stuff in their past.

And then they came to Jesus, and Jesus took their pain and he reversed the curse, and he's done a work of healing in them such that they're demonstrating a grace of Jesus to a whole generation of people.

And God's doing this work where hundreds and hundreds of thousands are coming to faith.

And the same God who brought healing to Cambodian pastors can heal your story as well.

Do you know that?

I have no doubt in my mind that God can bring healing if you're willing to say, God, let's take an honest look back, even at the hard parts.

Take an honest look back at the good parts.

There's some some of you who experienced great blessing and you've forgotten about it.

You've taken it for granted.

You need to bring that to the Lord and invite Him to use it.

But I know that God can bring healing.

So I want to pray for us, and then we're gonna have an opportunity to respond.

Heavenly Father, thank you for the power of your word.

Thank you for Lord speaking to us today.

And I pray, especially for the man or woman who came in this room, carrying some deep hurts that they haven't thought about in a really long time, and they're not really that excited about bringing up again.

And God, I pray that you give us a new way of seeing that past, not so we can just do therapy, although therapy can be good.

That's not what we're doing, God.

I pray, Lord, that we would have the boldness to look back through the gospel lens that you might take those experiences, turn them upside down, and Lord, find good in those that the next generation could be blessed.

We pray these things in Christ's name.

Amen.

Hey, Pastor Ryan Rush here, and I just want to thank you for being with us in Kings of the Line today.

What an honor.

But I'll tell you what'd be even better.

We'd love to see you get connected with the physical church in the days ahead if you haven't already.

And that means maybe if you're local in the West Eastern area, we'd love to see you the kingdom.

We love to help you jumping into the local church video and we can do that.