Sermon Summary: Genesis 41 – God’s Work in Hard Times

Chris began his sermon by focusing on Genesis 41, highlighting the phrase “after two whole years.” He reminded the congregation of the previous chapter, Genesis 40, where Joseph interpreted the dreams of Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker while in prison. Joseph had asked the cupbearer to remember him and mention him to Pharaoh, hoping for release. However, two years passed, and Joseph remained imprisoned. Chris emphasized the emotional weight of this delay, likening it to waiting at a bus stop without knowing when or if the bus would arrive.

Chris then moved to Pharaoh’s dreams: seven healthy cows and seven healthy heads of grain, followed by seven thin, scrawny cows and heads of grain. These thin cows ate the healthy ones, deeply disturbing Pharaoh. When none of his magicians or wise men could interpret the dreams, the cupbearer finally remembered Joseph and told Pharaoh of his ability to interpret dreams.

Pharaoh summoned Joseph, who, after shaving and changing his clothes (a cultural nod to Egyptian customs), stood before Pharaoh. Chris noted the risks Joseph took, as Pharaoh’s favor was unpredictable, and Joseph had witnessed the fates of the cupbearer and baker. He compared this to a modern analogy of meeting with a powerful but unpredictable leader.

Joseph, however, immediately gave credit to God, stating that God, not himself, could interpret the dreams. He interpreted the dreams as seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine, a message from God to Pharaoh. Unlike some prophetic messages that are conditional, this was a definite prediction.

Joseph then advised Pharaoh to appoint a wise man to manage the surplus during the years of abundance to prepare for the famine. Pharaoh and his officials were impressed, recognizing that Joseph was filled with the Spirit of God. Pharaoh appointed Joseph as second-in-command, giving him his signet ring, fine linen clothing, a gold chain, and a chariot. Chris highlighted the cultural details, noting Egyptian words and customs mentioned in the text, reinforcing the authenticity of the story.

Pharaoh also gave Joseph an Egyptian name, Zaphanath-Paneah, and a wife, Asenath, the daughter of Potipherah, a priest of On (Heliopolis). Chris emphasized that Joseph, despite living in a pagan culture, remained true to his faith, evident in his choice of Hebrew names for his sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. Manasseh’s name reflected Joseph’s ability to forget his past troubles, and Ephraim’s name acknowledged God’s fruitfulness in his time of grief.

Chris then outlined five key takeaways from the story:

1. God can use hard times for good: Chris referenced Genesis 50:20, where Joseph tells his brothers that though they meant to harm him, God intended it for good. He acknowledged that hard times are not automatically beneficial and require conscious effort to turn to God.
2. God is at work in history and in individuals: God’s rescue mission, evident throughout the Bible, is both grand and personal. Chris contrasted God’s approach with human leaders, emphasizing that God does not sacrifice individuals for a larger plan.
3. God specializes in transformation: From Joseph’s sudden elevation to his character development, God’s transformative power is evident. Chris also mentioned the dying thief on the cross and Paul’s description of believers in Colossians as examples of this transformation.
4. Cultivate confidence in God: Joseph’s unwavering trust in God, even before Pharaoh, is a model for believers. Chris encouraged the congregation to place all their trust in God, likening it to placing all their chips on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
5. God wants you to be fruitful in your place: Regardless of their circumstances, God desires believers to be fruitful, reflecting the fruit of the Spirit.

Chris concluded with a prayer, thanking God for his goodness and transformative power, and asking for transformation in their lives and in the nation.

Bible References:

• Genesis 40
• Genesis 41
• Genesis 50:20
• Colossians (general reference)
• Acts (general reference)
• Genesis 15

Transcription

Thank you, let’s have the slide up.
We’re continuing with our story of Joseph this morning.
We’ve reached Genesis chapter 41.
And what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna walk through the story
commenting here and there.
And then after that I’ve got kind of five points
which I think we can take away from it.
Let’s have the next slide.
So Genesis 41 opens with the word after two whole years.
And there’s a bit of an emphasis on the word whole.
In fact, I think literally it says
after two years full of days.
And I guess to understand that we need to dip back
to last week’s chapter that Andy spoke about
and remember what happened two years before this.
So let’s again have the next slide.
And so this is Joseph speaking in chapter 40.
And he’s talking to one of his cellmates in prison
who was the cupbearer to Pharaoh.
And Joseph has just told this fortunate man
that because of God’s action he’s gonna be restored
to his old job and he will be back
within Pharaoh’s inner circle again.
So it’s fantastic news for that cupbearer.
And so Joseph says, and please remember me
and do me a favor when things go well for you.
Mention me to Pharaoh so he might let me out of this place
for I was kidnapped from my homeland,
the land of the Hebrews and now I’m here in prison
but I did nothing to deserve it.
And everything that Joseph says
that is entirely fair and reasonable
and he’s asking his cellmate to remember him
when he’s restored to Pharaoh’s inner circle.
But two years later, Joseph is still in prison.
And I think to imagine what that’s like
we need to kind of put ourselves in Joseph’s feet
in his shoes for a bit, don’t we?
I wonder whether the first few nights
kind of Joseph went to sleep in the prison
thinking well I wonder if tomorrow will be the day.
Tomorrow will be the day that the cupbearer will remember
how I was involved in having him restored to his old job.
There will be a knock on the cell and I will be released.
And then the days turn to weeks
and the weeks turn to months.
And slowly the realization must have dawned on Joseph
that the cupbearer had forgotten him.
But the man who significantly owed Joseph his freedom
had overlooked him.
That somebody he had hoped would be involved in his rescue
had forgotten him.
And that sense of being abandoned
and overlooked by somebody we put our trust in
is really painful.
And of course we know and we know from chapter 41
that it lasted two full years.
But think about this.
Joseph didn’t know it was gonna last two years.
At the beginning probably hoped it would be much less.
But he had no assurance that it was going to come to an end.
I’m not a very patient person
when it comes to travel arrangements.
To put me in a queue at an airport or a bus stop
and I’m not good at that.
But of course sometimes you have these modern bus stops
don’t they and they’ve got this kind of sign up
and it says there’s a number 76 bus coming in 10 minutes
and you kind of wait for that to happen.
But this is more like an old fashioned one.
Joseph has stood at the bus stop
and he doesn’t know if the bus is ever gonna come.
So he’s having to experience the weight
with nothing but God to rely on
and knowing that somebody who deeply owed him
has forgotten him.
So that must have been very painful and difficult.
But let’s continue with chapter 41.
So after two full years something happens.
God is at work and he’s sending a message to Pharaoh.
And Pharaoh dreamed that he was standing
on the bank of the Nile River.
In his dream he saw seven fat healthy cows
come out of the river and begin grazing in the marsh grass.
And he saw seven more cows come up behind them
from the Nile.
These were scrawny and thin.
These cows stood beside the fat cows on the river bank
and then the strawny thin cows
ate the seven healthy fat cows.
I think this is a bit like dreams.
Sometimes a dream starts with or has bits in it
that seem entirely normal.
And then somehow in our dream something very weird happens.
And that’s what this dream like.
The first bit, seven healthy cows grazing
in the kind of best grass,
which is the grass growing next to the Nile,
are kind of having a perfectly normal time that cows have.
And then seven other cows,
strawny and mean looking cows appear
and they eat the first lot.
Well, cows are not carnivores.
That’s not meant to happen.
This is something weird.
But nevertheless, it deeply disturbs Pharaoh.
Let’s have the next slide.
And so the next morning Pharaoh was very disturbed
by the dream.
So he scrawled for all the magicians
and the wise men of Egypt.
When Pharaoh told them his dreams,
not one of them could tell them what they meant.
And that in itself is interesting because, you know,
magic, what we would call the occult,
is a big part of the religion of Egypt.
And the magicians and the wise men felt very connected
to the kind of the world of spirits.
And Pharaoh himself was believed to be the son of Ra,
the sun god.
But with all their connections,
they are deeply disturbed and out of their depth
because the one true God is now at work.
And finally, the cupbearer says,
today I’ve been reminded of my failure, he told Pharaoh.
Well, not before time we might think
because his failure had been significant.
But God is at work and he remembers
and so he mentions Pharaoh.
And so he mentions Joseph.
Next slide, please.
And Pharaoh sent for Joseph at once
and he was quickly brought from the prison.
And after he shaved and changed his clothes,
he went in and stood before Pharaoh.
And there’s a few interesting things in here.
One is this reference to shaving and changing his clothes.
Because you see, most of the peoples of the Near East
at the time, the men didn’t shave.
So beards were in for men.
But the Egyptians shaved.
And so to appear before Pharaoh, Joseph shaved.
And that’s just, actually this whole chapter
is full of little references to Egypt
which I’ll come back to.
And then he gets, obviously he gets fresh clothes.
Even that’s a kind of sign that something is happening
because both the catastrophes that happened to Joseph
up to now had involved him losing clothes.
So if you bear in mind, when he’s first,
his brothers turn and they beat him up
and they throw him into that water system
that they of course, they take away from him
the special coat of many colors.
And then later when he’s experiencing some success
and he’s working for Potiphar,
and he has that issue with Potiphar’s wife,
she’s grabbed his kind of outer garment
and he’s run out in just his underwear effectively.
So there’s something here about him being restored
and going in to stand before Pharaoh.
Nevertheless, I think if I was Joseph,
I would be, have mixed feelings
about appearing before Pharaoh.
After all, what did he most recently know about Pharaoh?
Well, he’s two cellmates.
One of them had been the cupbearer
and the other was a baker.
Both of them had been kind of part of Pharaoh’s inner circle
and one of them got his old job back
and it turned out really well for him.
And the other one was beheaded.
So, and we’re not told the reason.
Maybe there were no reasons.
Maybe that Pharaoh was just the kind of guy
who was exercising his power
and I will restore one guy
and have the other one’s head cut off
to show everybody how powerful I am.
And in funny ways, I think,
well, appearing before Pharaoh was obviously good
but it definitely carried its risks.
I kind of think making this very contemporary.
It’s a bit like having a meeting with Donald Trump.
And it might go well, but you can’t be sure.
So, let’s have the next slide.
And Pharaoh said to Joseph,
I had a dream last night
and nobody here can tell me what it means
but have I heard that when you hear about a dream,
you can interpret it.
And Joseph said, it’s beyond my power to do this
but God can tell you what it means
and set you at ease.
And you know, Joseph’s big moment has come
and he deals with that by doing two risky things.
First of all, he starts by contradicting Pharaoh.
In fact, some of the translations
that makes that even more apparent.
You know, Pharaoh just said,
I can hear that you can interpret dreams.
And Joseph said, well, no, I can’t do it, but God can.
And the second thing he does that’s really risky
is of course, he brings God into the conversation
with somebody who had no reason to feel
would be open and sympathetic to that.
You know, as I said, the Egyptians didn’t worship
the God of the Hebrews.
They had their own kind of collection of gods
and with the sun god at the center of that
and Pharaoh was supposed to be the son of the sun god.
And here’s Joseph bringing God into the conversation.
So he’s doing something risky,
but I think it speaks to what God has been doing
in Joseph’s heart during all that time in prison.
And also, it reminds me of something that Jesus says
in the New Testament.
He says, when you’re kind of dragged before court
because you’re being persecuted for my name,
he said, don’t prepare an elaborate defense in advance.
The Holy Spirit will give you the words to say.
And there are plenty of examples of that in New Testament.
You know, Peter and John before the Sanhedrin in Acts.
But, you know, the Holy Spirit is giving Joseph
the words to say.
And he’s absolutely nailing his colors to the mass.
This is God that will be the answer to your problem.
My God, the one true God.
Next slide.
And Joseph responded, both of Pharaoh’s dreams
being the same thing.
God is telling Pharaoh in advance what he’s about to do.
The seven healthy cows and the seven healthy heads of grain
both represent seven years of prosperity.
And the seven thin scrawny cows that came up later
and the seven thin heads of grain,
withered by the east wind, represent seven years of famine.
Don’t think I mentioned the secondary.
There was a secondary, but the point was the same.
And Joseph’s saying, God is telling you in advance
about what he’s going to do.
Now sometimes, maybe even quite often in scripture,
when God tells people in advance what he’s going to do,
it is conditional.
So God says, you know, I’m going to do this
unless you do something else.
So probably the classic example of that
would be the story of Jonah.
You know, when Jonah’s sent
and he proclaims of the city of Nineveh,
he said, God is coming to judge you unless you repent.
So sometimes God’s word is conditional
on us having to do something.
But this is not like that.
And that’s not a word of judgment.
But it is God saying,
this is what’s definitely going to happen.
And there’s still something you need to do about it.
So there’s still work to be done,
even though God has said what will happen next.
Next slide.
Therefore, Pharaoh should find an intelligent and wise man
and put him in charge of the entire land of Egypt.
And Pharaoh should appoint supervisors of the land
and let them collect one fifth of all the crops
during the seven good years.
Yeah, I’m not sure that’d be popular today, wouldn’t it?
A new tax of 20%.
But that’s effectively what Joseph is proposing.
Some Christians, I think, feel that the kind of planning
isn’t really spiritual.
And you should just kind of rely on your instincts
and leading of the Holy Spirit moment by moment.
Here, however, we see Joseph is being
very definitely led by the Holy Spirit.
And his answer to that is to make a plan
that’s going to last for 14 years.
Next slide.
Joseph’s suggestions were well received
by Pharaoh and his officials.
So Pharaoh asked his officials,
can we find anyone else like this man
so obviously filled with the Spirit of God?
Then Pharaoh said to Joseph,
since God has revealed the meaning of the dreams to you,
clearly no one else is as intelligent or wise as you are.
This is an extraordinary turn of events.
I get, you know, even Joseph must have been
fairly stunned by what’s happening at this point.
Because God’s favor is very clearly in this situation.
Let’s actually remind me of a verse about Jesus
as a teenager really, certainly age 12 and onwards.
It said, and he grew in wisdom and in stature
and in favor with God and man.
And this is a moment of great favor to the kingdom of God.
And Pharaoh is, Pharaoh and all the officials think
this is fantastic, this is the man we need,
this is what we need.
And I think sometimes that prayer for God’s favor
is something I think we should be praying for
for our country, that God will give favor to the gospel.
That people who we might expect to be close to the gospel
will in fact receive it with great enthusiasm.
So we should pray for that.
Next slide.
And Pharaoh removed his signet ring from his hand
and placed it on Joseph’s finger.
He dressed him in fine linen clothing
and hung a gold chain around his neck.
Then he had Joseph ride in the chariot reserve
for a second in command.
And whenever Joseph went,
the command was shouted, kneeled down.
I’ve got some friends who, some of you know them,
I probably recognize them from the story,
who kind of grew up in Yorkshire but in adult life,
moved to Scotland and lived in Scotland
for a considerable period of time.
And as kind of good Yorkshire people,
they didn’t lose their accents.
But I did notice that over the years,
they gradually acquired some Scottish words.
So it crept into the vocabulary.
And so they would say things like I for yes,
and we for small.
Still with a Yorkshire accent,
but some of the vocabulary crept in.
And that’s completely understandable.
And that’s something, and it’s not kind of visible for it,
but that’s something that’s happening in this chapter.
There’s quite a lot of words here
that are actually Egyptian words.
So the word for ring is an Egyptian word.
The word Nile that we heard on it is an Egyptian word.
The fine linen clothing, that was something
that was kind of favored by another Egyptian word.
And the reference to kneeling down,
the translation is slightly disagree
on what exactly was said,
but whether it was something like that,
that’s another Egyptian word borrowed.
And of course, none of that should surprise us
if this story is actually Joseph’s story retold.
I think as I said when I spoke previously,
I think we can kind of hear Joseph’s voice in all this.
And in fact, Egyptian archeology
has confirmed some of these details.
So there are wall paintings that show Pharaoh
anointing some favored servant
by putting a gold chain around the neck
and helping them into the chariot and stuff like that.
So that there are kind of details here
that feel very authentic to the situation
as we understand it in Egypt.
Next slide.
And Pharaoh gave Joseph a new Egyptian name, Zaphanath-Paniya
and he also gave him a wife whose name was Atharath
and she was the daughter of Potipharah, the priest of On.
You can see why they call the musical Joseph,
didn’t they, and not Zaphanath-Paniya
because it doesn’t really trip off the tongue, does it?
But actually, it means something like God lives, he speaks.
It’s a beautiful title.
And again, in fact, what I said about God’s favor, actually,
that Egyptians, profoundly pagan people,
top dogs in the ancient world,
are suddenly finding this God of Joseph deeply attractive.
But he’s got a wife and she’s the daughter of Potipharah,
the priest of On.
Now, On is not some Egyptian god.
On is a place that was later renamed
by the Greek Heliopolis that got that name
because it was the center for the worship of the sun god
and in fact, I think there’s not much left of it
but there was a huge temple in On to the god Ra,
the sun god of the Egyptians.
So when it said she was the daughter of Potipharah,
it’s a bit like the priest of On, it’s a bit like saying
she was the daughter of the archbishop of Canterbury.
So Joseph has been married into high society
and the grandfather to his children
is going to be the archbishop of the sun god.
And I just mention that because
from pretty much all of Joseph’s adult life,
he has to discover what it is to be a believer
in the one true God in the context of a culture
that’s got a completely different set of values and ideas.
And some of you may be in that situation,
maybe in that situation in your workplace, in your family
and in Christians today in this country,
you know, the culture is not a culture
that is that similar very often
to the values that we hold there.
But Joseph, and there are plenty more examples in the Bible,
Daniel would be another obvious one,
people who show what it means to live faithfully
in the context of a culture that is completely different
from your values and your belief system.
Next slide.
Yes, so he was 30 years old when he began serving
in the court of Pharaoh.
And when Joseph left Pharaoh’s presence,
he inspected the entire land of Egypt.
As predicted for seven years, the land produced bumper crops
and during those years,
Joseph gathered all the crops grown in Egypt
and stored the grain from the surrounding fields in the city.
So one of the picture, not just in these few verses,
but in this whole section of the charity
is how energetic and hardworking Joseph is.
He’s deeply involved, you know, God has a plan,
but that plan involves Joseph
in a great deal of work and effort.
Because he’s not in, you know,
what these days we might call full-time Christian work.
It’s an entirely secular job.
He’s, you know, depending how you look at it,
he’s either in government or he’s in famine relief,
but that’s his job.
But he is demonstrating something
that Paul said in Colossians,
whatever we do, we should work hard
as though working for Christ.
And Joseph is energetic in his job.
Next slide.
During this time, before the first of the famine years,
two sons were born to Joseph and his wife,
Asenath, the daughter of Potipharah, the priest of On.
And Joseph named his eldest son Manasseh,
but he said, God has made me forget all my troubles
and everyone in my father’s family.
And it’s an interesting thing to hear.
First of all, that Joseph has chosen a Hebrew name
for his first son, Manasseh, the Hebrew name.
That kind of suggests really that, you know,
what I said, he might be living in the midst
of a culture that is hostile,
but his key decisions are deeply influenced
by his religion and his belief.
So he’s chosen a Hebrew name for his son.
And he says, God has made me forget all my troubles
and everyone in my father’s family.
Now, this of course doesn’t mean
that God has erased his memory.
That’s not what this means.
But it does mean that Joseph is not defined
by the difficulties that have gone before.
You know, Joseph has definitely been a victim.
He has been kidnapped, he’s been enslaved,
he’s been held in prison entirely unjustifiably.
So he is a victim, but a victim is not who he is.
There’s a line in a Robert Burns poem,
I do rather like the line, I will admit,
but it’s of, it describes a woman waiting at home
for her husband to return from the pub,
knowing that he will have had too much to drink.
And the line says, she’s nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
And Joseph doesn’t do that.
You know, he had, you know, humanly speaking,
he had a lot of reasons to bear a grudge
against his brothers and against the cupbearer,
against Potiphar’s wife,
against the way he’s been treated.
But he doesn’t do that.
God has set him free from things
that might otherwise have been a deep bondage to him.
He has been set free from all of that.
God has made him forget his troubles
and everyone in my father’s family.
Next slide.
And Joseph named his second son Ephraim,
but he said, God has made me fruitful
in this land of my grief.
And again, Ephraim, that’s another Hebrew word
chosen for his second son.
And gosh, what a moving line.
God has made me fruitful in this land of my grief.
God has made me fruitful in this land of my grief.
And this brings me on to my five takeaways
or things for us to think about.
Let’s have the next slide.
The first one is God can use the hard times
we experience to do us good.
Andy talked about all this, but this weekend,
and you remember, I think I referred to it,
in Genesis 50 at verse 20,
in conversation with his brothers,
Joseph will said, you intended it to harm me,
but God intended it for good.
And that’s kind of the point that’s being made here.
But I think it’s worth saying
that that doesn’t happen automatically
or it’s by no means guaranteed
because hard times do come with many temptations.
There’s a temptation to unbelief.
There’s a temptation to resentment.
There’s a temptation to anger.
There’s a temptation to holding on to grudges.
There’s a temptation to doubt.
But nevertheless, hard times can be useful to us
if they drive us into the arms of Jesus.
And sometimes we need to do that consciously.
One of my sons is planning to run
some kind of fancy race later this year.
I think it might be an ultra marathon
or something like that.
I don’t know all the details.
But he lives in the Netherlands.
And he said, well, part of my difficulty for that
is that in the Netherlands,
I can really only train on flat ground
because actually that hills is not a big thing where he is.
And he says, in order to kind of run successfully
in this race, which is in this country,
he’ll need to do some exercises
and find some places to do some training
that will involve the stress of running up and down.
And I think hard times can kind of do that for us.
They can train us in things that are hard for us to acquire
when everything is going smoothly.
So hard times can do us good.
And hard times could help us
to put our entire trust into Jesus.
Because when times are really rough,
there is nobody else to look to except Jesus.
And that’s a good message that will do us good
when we’re in good times again.
And sometimes I think we need to deliberately get hold
of those hard times and lay them out before God.
I can remember, I think I was probably in 1920
and I was working in a Christian center in Israel.
And I got a letter, it was the days of letters.
I got a letter from my mother to say that
my father had left home and moved him with somebody else.
And I recognized that that, what had happened,
could be a source of unforgiveness or bitterness
or hurt to me.
And I remember kind of laying this letter out before God
and said, God, will you protect me
from the harm that might otherwise come from me?
And God absolutely answered that prayer.
And it was a long time later,
I had good times with my father
and he died when we were on very good terms.
So God can answer the question,
but I think there is something about,
I will deliberately hand over my hard times to God.
Second one, God is at work in history and in me.
Let me kind of unpack that a bit.
Really the whole story of the Bible,
certainly the whole story from Genesis 3 onwards,
is the story of a gigantic rescue mission.
Since the moment when mankind turned its back on God,
God has been engaged in a rescue mission,
a mission that would last for centuries
and would involve great pain and sacrifice,
particularly with the death of Jesus on the cross.
But now that God is engaged on this huge project,
which is about taking people,
anybody who really wants to,
from every tribe and nation,
and bringing them back into his family again,
that’s the plan that God is involved in.
And God is planning well in advance.
If you can go back to Genesis 15.
Genesis 15 is when God appears to Abraham
and God has a number of things to say to Abraham.
And I think God describes the exodus to Abraham.
Now, even when we are today with Joseph,
the exodus is still 400 plus years ahead.
And where Joseph is now is 230 to 250 years
after God appeared to Abraham.
So God is making plans on that time scale.
So God is engaged in this huge project.
But you know, what I was thinking about,
I’m thinking when human beings,
particularly kind of governments or world leaders,
have a big project on us,
something they’re really trying to achieve,
very often individuals will get sacrificed to that.
You know, there’s a bigger game in town
than your individual needs.
You know, one maybe extreme example,
you know, Putin.
So Putin wants Russia to be bigger.
And in order to achieve that purpose,
he’s happy to sacrifice hundreds of thousands
of young Russians who have died in that war
and countless Ukrainians.
Because for him, making Russia greater than it was
is worth the cost.
But you know, even if you look at people
who are perhaps, you know, better adjusted than Putin
and more normal and more benevolent,
generally speaking, if there’s a big project on,
the needs of the individual will be overlooked.
You know, sometimes even our politics, you know,
and this happens regularly, doesn’t it?
The tabloids get hold of some story
that’s embarrassing about a government minister.
And the thing goes on for a while.
And it either dies away, but if it doesn’t die away,
it looks like it’s gaining steam.
At some point, somebody in number 10
will make a phone call to that minister
and say, it’s time to resign
because you’re getting in the way
of the message the government wants to project.
And so the individual has to kind of fall on their sword
and be overlooked.
And the truth is, you know,
even in many more mundane things,
if you work for a company
and what that company is trying to achieve
and your personal interests start to not be in alignment,
you can expect to have to be looking for a new job,
don’t you?
That’s just kind of life.
But the only thing about this is,
when we look at God, we see God is at work in history
on a scale far greater than anything else.
But there are no compromises in God.
So he’s able to give significant individual attention
to you and to your needs and to your salvation
whilst advancing the kingdom of God.
And this story exemplifies some of that.
God is building his people
and he’s rescuing people from starvation
and Joseph is serving that.
But God is also at work in Joseph’s character
and looking after and tending for Joseph.
So God is at work in history and in me.
Number three, the others will be shorter.
God specializes in transformation.
Now that’s abundantly true in this story.
One minute, there’s Joseph.
He’s a foreigner, he’s in jail and he’s a slave.
And then moments later, it appears,
he’s the grand vizier of Egypt.
So there’s an abundant, sudden transformation.
You know, when God springs into action,
things can change very suddenly.
But there’s another transformation that’s gone on
that’s taken longer and required perhaps more effort
and that is the transformation in Joseph’s character.
This is this self-absorbed teenager
that we saw at the beginning of the story.
Now, a mature man of God
who is deliberately giving God the credit.
Think, this is actually not about me, it’s about God.
And we see this in the New Testament, don’t we?
And there’s many more examples of transformation.
The dying thief on the cross and Jesus says to him,
today you will be with me in paradise.
How’s that for transformation?
Well, the story that Paul paints
when he summarizes the gospel and the Colossians,
he said, you were enemies of God
because of your evil thoughts and actions.
But now, through the death of Christ,
God has brought you into his own presence
and you are holy and blameless
as you stand before him without a single fault.
Stand before him without a single fault?
How’s that for transformation?
Next.
Cultivate God’s confidence.
I think we see that in what Joseph said to Pharaoh.
You know, he’s putting his entire confidence in God.
He’s trusting in God alone.
One of the prayers I find myself praying a lot is,
you know, God help me to trust you
with all my heart and soul and mind.
And I’ve kind of got,
I mean, it’s not a very Christian image,
but I hope it works for you.
And that’s, you know, imagine you’re in a casino
and there’s the right wheel
and you’ve got this pile of chips
and you put all of your chips on one number
and the wheels spin.
In a sense, as Christians,
we’re called to put all of our chips
on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
All of it.
We’re trusting ourselves entirely to God.
Next one.
And finally, God wants you to be fruitful in this place.
And, you know, Joseph expressed it very movingly
and talking about his own.
He wants me to be fruitful in the land of my grief,
is how he describes it.
But whatever, you know, my place is,
whatever your place is, God wants you to be fruitful.
And you will be fruitful if you give him control.
And of course, what fruitful looks like
will certainly be different for you than it was for Joseph,
and different for you than it is for me.
But there’s a common feature in that
is that we should expect the fruit of the Spirit
of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.
God wants you to be fruitful.
And he will do that.
He will do that if you let him.
Let’s pray.
Father God, we thank you that you are a good
and gracious God.
And Father, we thank you that you are the same God
who is God to Joseph, Lord.
And you can transform our lives.
And Lord, we need transformation.
And Lord, our nation needs transformation.
And so, Lord, we call on your name.
We call on you, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Amen.