Joseph

One Final CAFO Takeaway

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I was able to attend the final session of the CAFO (Christian Alliance for Orphans) 2024 conference for which I was a volunteer. It was an incredible experience hearing from MaryBeth Chapman about the journey of adoption through grief and healing and beyond. Then I heard an amazing sermon that I’m still processing. I don’t remember the name of the preacher, but the message hit home.

Basically, Caesar issued a dirty decree that made all the inhabitants of the Roman world go back to their ancestral hometown to be registered (so that he could later raise their taxes significantly). It was a hardship for many, especially Joseph and Mary, who was with child at the time.

But God used that dirty decree to accomplish His own divine decree, born before the foundation of the world and prophesied 700 years before Caesar made his decree. Caesar was the instrument God used to accomplish the purpose of bringing Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy that the Messiah would arise from that little town.

I know that in the world of adoption and fostering and raising children, there are so many trials and tribulations of adoptions falling through and tragic losses and raising children that have come out of horrific abuse situations that so many must navigate with heavy hearts. But I see more and more that God is working behind it all to accomplish something bigger than any of us can yet comprehend that would blow our mind if we could see the way God sees.

I look back and see that me being out of a job enabled me to participate in this conference as a volunteer where I would normally have not been able. I could not have foreseen this back in February, but God already knew. God’s plan means there is a purpose for my pain and a special joy for me if I will step out in faith and join Him in the journey He has for me.

God is not surprised by my setbacks or my (occasional) stupidity. He’s factored those into His plan. In fact, Romans 8:28-30 says, “We know that God makes all things work together for the good of those who love Him and are chosen to be a part of His plan. God knew from the beginning who would put their trust in Him. So He chose them and made them to be like His Son. Christ was first and all those who belong to God are His brothers. He called to Himself also those He chose. Those He called, He made right with Himself. Then He shared His shining-greatness with those He made right with Himself” (Romans 8:28-30, NLV).

Ultimately, the goal is to be like Jesus and to know that He is coming back. We will see the grand purpose in God’s plan, knowing that behind every dirty decree is a divine decree of God directing us toward His perfect will for us.

For All the Josephs

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“While he was trying to figure a way out, he had a dream. God’s angel spoke in the dream: ‘Joseph, son of David, don’t hesitate to get married. Mary’s pregnancy is Spirit-conceived. God’s Holy Spirit has made her pregnant. She will bring a son to birth, and when she does, you, Joseph, will name him Jesus—‘God saves’—because he will save his people from their sins.’ This would bring the prophet’s embryonic sermon to full term: Watch for this—a virgin will get pregnant and bear a son; They will name him Immanuel (Hebrew for ‘God is with us’)” (Matthew 1:20-21 MSG).

Not everybody gets to be in the spotlight. Not everybody wants to be.

Some of us will be thrust into the spotlight where our faith will shine brightly, as Mary’s did through her faithful obedience to God’s command– though at times it must have seemed overwhelming and impossible.

Some of us will play the part of Joseph, who was just as faithful and obedient in the shadows and behind the scenes. His part was no less important though he has fewer verses dedicated to his story.

No matter how great or small your part seems in the story of God, your faithfulness and obedience matter. You may feel unimportant- and sometimes ignored– but you never know who is watching you to see if this God of yours is real or not.

You may never know the far-reaching impact caused by the ripples of casting your small stone into that great ocean. And it may not be you but the child you raise or the spouse you support who makes the greatest impact. Even then your own steps of faith still count.

At the end of the day, it’s God who sees your good deeds and rewards your long-suffering faith. That’s the audience that really matters.

 

 

I Think It’s About Forgiveness

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I’ve been thinking about forgiveness quite a bit lately, particularly in the context of the story of Joseph and his brothers.

I imagine most of you are probably familiar with the story, but I’ll give a brief summary. Joseph has dreams as a teenager and (unwisely) decides to tell them to his family. That and being the favorite son doesn’t do him any favors.

His brothers end up selling him into slavery (making Joseph the first recorded victim of human trafficking). He winds up in Egypt, where he goes from a slave in Potiphar’s court to wrongful imprisonment to a high-ranking position in the government (thanks in large part to his God-given ability to interpret dreams.

One of the dreams he interprets predicts a coming famine to all the known world. He’s able to prepare by storing up large amounts of grain during a time of plenty, so that Egypt not only has enough to survive but also to sell to neighboring countries.

Some of the people who show up to buy food happen to be those very brothers who sold him in the first place. Joseph is able to see how God used their evil act for good to save a multitude of people, including his own family.

Joseph could have chosen bitterness. Or revenge. He was well within his rights to seek retribution against his brothers. He probably could have even had them killed if he wanted.

People will say that forgiveness is a cop out for the weak. I say forgiveness takes great strength. I will go so far as to say that true forgiveness is impossible without God’s help. As my pastor said recently, forgiveness is releasing the expectation that the other person or persons can fix what they did. That’s hard.

Joseph was able to forgive because of his perspective. He saw how God had been with him time and time again though every stage of his journey from home to Egypt, from son to slave to ruler. Joseph was able to see the bigger picture.

Forgiveness ultimately sees that there is nothing that you’ve done or that has been done to you that God can’t work for good and His glory.

Who do you need to forgive (including yourself)? Who do you need to seek forgiveness from?

I love the image that forgiveness is opening the door to a prison cell to release the prisoner only to discover that that prisoner was you all along.

Forgiveness is a beautiful thing.

 

Regret

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Since this morning’s sermon at The Church at Avenue South from Aaron Bryant, I’ve been thinking about the story of Joseph in the Old Testament a lot today. More specifically, my thoughts have been centered on Joseph’s brothers.

I’ve always wondered why it was that when his brothers came to Egypt to buy food during the famine that Joseph recognized them but none of them knew who he was.

I realize that he was probably dressed in Egyptian garb and would  have had his hair and beard styled in the Egyptian fashions of that time.

I wonder if one of the reasons he was able to spot them was that they were still stuck in that moment when they made the horrible decision to sell him into slavery over 13 years ago.

Some of you reading this are still stuck in the past. You’re frozen in time in the moment when a relative hurt you or a friend betrayed you or a spouse deserted you. You haven’t been able to move past that moment in time.

Joseph had moved on, both literally and figuratively. By the time his brothers showed up, he had been though slavery, false accusations, imprisonment, and later exaltation. He had seen how God was with him through it all.

He was able to see at the end how God used what his brothers had meant for evil and turned it into something good. In fact, God used what was done to Joseph to set up the salvation of an entire nation in the making.

You come to the place where you release the hurt and pain done to you when you realize how God has redeemed it. When you’re able to forgive those who wounded you, you open the door to the prison and find out that it’s you that you’re setting free.

God still works all things together for good– even the bad and hard things– and that includes your story. That doesn’t excuse what people have done to you and it doesn’t lessen the pain, but it does mean that your wounds and scars are not the end of the story. God has a way of redeeming and restoring what was taken from you and giving you something so much better in return.

 

 

More Thoughts About Joseph

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I do love the story of Joseph. It’s a beautiful tale of God using one man’s misfortune to bring about the salvation of a nation. It’s God taking what was meant for evil and turning it into the ultimate good.

I noticed a few things about Joseph recently (thanks in part to a sermon series at The Church at Avenue South and the rest of the Brentwood Baptist Church campuses).

Joseph didn’t wait until God placed him in favorable circumstances to be faithful. He trusted God in the pit, in Potiphar’s house, and in prison. He was faithful where he was.

Something I heard today has been resonating with me all day– sometimes when God calls you, you won’t have time to get ready; you will have to be ready.

I think that starts in being faithful and available where you are. It’s called blooming where you’re planted.

Too many of us will miss opportunities to serve and hear God speaking because we’re too focused on looking ahead to what’s next or looking behind to what might have been.

The key to staying faithful for Joseph was the knowledge that God was with him. Over and over throughout the story, the account relates that God was with Joseph. That’s where Joseph found his strength and courage to continue.

When God does call on some of us, it will be those who have surrendered their schedules and made themselves completely and unconditionally available to God and His purposes who will be used. It will be those who have already been faithful in the small details who will find themselves entrusted with much larger plans.

I doubt very seriously that when he was a teenager Joseph ever imagined he’d be second in command over an entire nation. He probably couldn’t see any farther than his own family and their troubles.

But God saw that a people who would be come His own nation would  need saving and chose Joseph as the means of saving them. It all started with being faithful in the small stuff.

 

Forgotten

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I love the story of Joseph. It helps that I know the ending where Joseph becomes one of the most powerful men in Egypt and sets in motion a plan to rescue many people from surrounding nations, including his own family who had previously sold him into slavery.

But there were some bumps in the road.

After he was sold into slavery, he ended up in prison, falsely arrested for raping Potiphar’s wife. While he was incarcerated, he met two men from Pharaohs’ court, both of who had displeased their master.

Joseph interpreted both their dreams. One would be restored and one would be hanged. He asked one favor in return from the one who would live– that when he returned to freedom, he would mention the name of Joseph to Pharaoh. As is human nature, when he got out, he forgot all about the person who helped him get there.

Joseph was forgotten.

Have you ever felt forgotten? Have there been times in your life when you feel no one notices you or anything you do?

Many of us have gone through times when we felt invisible and unloved. We felt that for all the good it did, we might not as well have even bothered.

The good news is that God notices. God sees you. No matter if those around us take us for granted, God does not. God is aware of the tiniest of sparrows. He sees you.

Also, that feeling of being forgotten is more often than not a lie. I’ve found out in my own experience that there is usually someone watching you and that someone is often a person you would least expect to notice you or what you do.

You are not forgotten and you are never alone. Remember that the next time your feelings lie to you.

 

 

Thinking About Joseph

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My church, The Church at Avenue South, started a new series on the character Joseph from the book of Genesis (along with all the other campuses of Brentwood Baptist Church).

It’s a very familiar story that I’ve heard literally all my life, yet there are new lessons I can learn from the story about how God redeemed one man’s misfortune to bless and save an entire nation.

Joseph didn’t start out so well. He had dreams about being in power over his father and brothers. His decision to tell his father and brothers about these particular dreams was not a wise one. He choose rather poorly.

Can anyone else relate? I know I can. There have been seasons in my life where I’ve been poor decision-prone and where I kept sticking my foot in my mouth in conversations.

The good news is that God is for all the Josephs of the world, even during those seasons of poor decision making. There’s not a mistake or even a fiasco that God can’t redeem and turn into good in the grander scheme of His unfolding story.

Like I said before, God took every negative from Joseph’s life and used it toward His purpose of saving a family and a nation through which would later come a Savior who would save people from every ethnic group and nation.

Did that excuse Joseph’s initial arrogance? No. Will it excuse mine? No. Will it defeat God’s purposes for me and for the world around me in which I live, work, and play? No.

I am never given an excuse for disobedience, but at the same time, God can take my bad decisions and weave even those into His overall redemptive plan. While my sin will still have consequences, it doesn’t have to mean the end of my story or God’s plans for me.

God is stronger than my weaknesses and my fears. I don’t have to be perfect to be useable. I just have to be available and willing.

 

 

Who’s Who, Kairos-Style

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Mike Glenn made an interesting point tonight at Kairos.

When you think of the great heroes of the faith in the Old Testament, your mind immediately goes to Noah, Abraham, and David among others.

But who were these people before God called them? Would anybody have ever heard of them if God hadn’t chosen them?

Noah might have lived out his life in anonymity. Abraham might have stayed in his parents’ basement and never left his hometown. David? His own father forgot that he was one of his sons, so that probably wouldn’t have amounted to much.

The old saying goes that God doesn’t call the equipped as much as He equips the called.

Look at Zachariah and Elizabeth. They were just another old couple, one who was a priest and another who was a woman who was barren. Probably not too uncommon in those days.

Still, God chose them to bring John the Baptist into the world.

If I had a takeaway from tonight, it’d be this: if God can use Noah, Abraham, and David, then He can use you. He can take your life and use it to make a difference in the lives around you. He can make your life matter.

The best example is a poor carpenter and his teenage wife-to-be. Their names? Mary and Joseph? God chose them and though they may not have understood everything, they said YES to God’s plan for their lives.

The result? A Savior, who is Christ the Lord. Jesus.

Who knows how far God will take your YES to Him? Who knows where the ripples from your small acts of obedience will end? Who knows but that people you’ve never heard of and may never meet in this lifetime may reap the rewards of your faithfulness, even though it seems like nothing to you.

It may take nine months (as in the case of Zachariah and Elizabeth) or nine years or 40 years. Keep moving forward, keep being obedient, and keep being faithful to what you know God is telling you to do and be.

Don’t give up. God is faithful.

 

 

 

That Ol’ I-40 West

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I’ve heard this one illustration from Pastor Mike Glenn quite a few times, but the impact is always the same.

If you get on I-40 West, you’ll end up in Memphis every single time. Unless of course you stop off at Jackson. But the point is that you can’t get on that particular interstate and hope to get to Chicago or New York. You’ll end up in Memphis (or end up passing through Memphis)– eventually. Ok, it’s not a perfect analogy, but here’s the point.

Uncle Mike says that some people will get on I-40 West and wonder how they ended up in Memphis. In much the same way, people will make poor life choices and wonder how their life ended up as such a hot mess.

I’m not here to judge people who are in a rough patch in their lives. I am saying that you can’t continually make bad and ill-informed choices and not have consequences from those choices. You reap what you sow every time. As another pastor said, you can’t sow wild oats from Monday through Saturday and pray for crop failure on Sunday.

The good news is that there is forgiveness from bad decisions. The bad news is that there are also consequences. Some of you (with me included) have found that out the hard way.

But some of you have found out that you don’t have to keep making the same bad decisions. You can choose differently. No matter how much of a train wreck your past has been, your future is still an unwritten page with unlimited possibilities.

And yes, God can take anybody’s mess and turn that into their message. He can take what was meant for evil and turn it into something good (just ask Joseph). He can work all things together for good.

I wanted to end this on a positive note. I echo the words of the old knight in the movie Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade: “You must choose wisely.”

 

Just Call Me Joe

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Tonight at Kairos, Mike Glenn talked about Joseph. Not the one with the coat of many colors. The other one. You know. The one standing next to Mary in your nativity scene? That one.

Basically, most of us don’t know what to do with Joseph in our nativity scenes. He should be near Mary, watching over her and the baby Jesus. But what was his role that night?

Joseph was the one Mary handed her baby to on that night. Joseph was the one who named the child Jesus. Joseph would most likely have been the one who taught the growing Jesus a love for Scripture. Joseph was the one who raised Jesus who “kept increasing in wisdom and stature,  and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52).

Jesus was 100% God, sure enough. But He was also 100% man and the Bible says that He wasn’t born fully grown and knowing everything. He grew and learned the way any human would.

When it comes to the story of Christmas, Mary gets most of the attention. Well, Jesus, then Mary. Then probably the shepherds and the wise men. Joseph doesn’t get much recognition.

But sometimes when God calls us to do the work that nobody notices, that can be the most sacred calling of all. Sometimes, the most faithful men and women of God are the ones nobody knows about who labor faithfully for years without awards or platitudes but with the ultimate reward of heaven’s applause. They’re the ones behind the scenes not in front the camera or front and center on the stage.

If you feel like no one sees what you do for God, God does. If you feel like what you do makes no difference, remember that even the smallest act of kindness done in the name of Christ can make all the difference in the world.

Just ask Joseph.