The Blessing Of Both

bit of a dilemma. I have two different scriptures. One is from the Old Testament and one is from the New Testament, and I kind of can't decide which one I want to give you. So I thought we put it up for a vote. Huh. She said both. Well, it's a good thing because my message to is the blessing of both. Let's do it. Let's do it. You may be seated. God bless you, God bless you, Choir, God bless you, Anna, God bless you, Matt, God bless you. Pastor Shawn see in the house from Athens Church. Let's

thank God for this great Man of God. Thanks for stopping by. It's good to have my brother, Pastor Mike Todd on the second row representing the Oakland Athletics. You're not a fan at all, are you? Oh man, that's terrible. You just watch Moneyball and bought in Oakland A's had Is that what happened? Oh man? This feels good. So if I'm not preaching good I can throw the mic on the first row the second row and somebody else

can pick it up. So good to be here and just touch somebody and say I. If Pastor had time, he would say thank God for you and mentioned your name too. Let me do that if they had time. Many wonderful things to share from the Word of God. Hey, thank you for serving this love week, whatever you did, if you did something this week, or really what I like to thank God for is consistency, because it's not just one week out of the year that builds a

great church. And so while this week there are many people we could highlight and thank for their contribution, I want to say thank you to those of you who never make a lot of noise, but you just contribute in meaningful ways prayer giving service. It's a big deal and you lead an e group, whether it's a spectacular thing, whether it's forty people or four people, you just do it. That's really how you can know that you're doing it for God and not for the approval of others or

the praises of people. It's just really beautiful and I appreciate you. I don't know how to say it any more than that, but I appreciate you, and I hope you can feel that that's sincere from my heart. Thank you to those of you. You don't blow a trumpet or anything like that. You don't announce it, just do it, and that means a lot. It's not just a Nike slogan. It's the way that a great local church is built when people are just willing to do it and not

necessarily have to be known for it. But I thank God for each and every one of you on every location. I just wanted to say that, and in the spirit of love, I wore pink. Now let's get into the Bible. Let me read you this from Ecclesiastes, chapter eleven, verses five and six. Now I'm gonna take my time because I've been waiting to preach these passages since the beginning of June, and I couldn't figure out how God wanted

me to preach them. But today I saw it. And I've just been pacing all day waiting for you to put on your makeup and get here so we could talk about it together. And now I can't find Ecclesiastes in the Bible. Everything's falling apart. Here it is, it's right there, I said. Verse five is you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child. So you do

not know the work of God who makes everything. In the morning, So your seat and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper this or that, or whether both alike will be good. There's our word both. Go over to Matthew chapter thirteen, verse twenty four for my second scripture. You told me

you wanted both, so I'm fulfilling your request. He put another parable before them, verse twenty four, saying, the Kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the weed and went away so when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared. Also. By the way, by the time something destructive appears in your life has been planted

for a little while. There's a difference between the time when it was deposited in the soil and the time it showed up in your life. So when they woke up to the weeds, he said, the servant said, Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? I thought you raised your kids right, you know things like that. I thought you went to church. I thought you prayed. But he said, if you sowed good seeds, how then does it have weeds in the field? And he said

to them an enemy has done this. So the servants said to him, then do you want us to go and gather them? Take care of it, sort it out. He's like, no, you got to You got to be careful because less gathering the weeds, you root up the wheat along with them. Let both, everybody say both. Let both grow together interesting until the harvest. And at harvest time, I will tell the reapers gather the weeds first, bind them in bundles to be burned, But gather the wheat

into my barn. When Jesus was teaching about the Kingdom of God, it was a new phrase and an entirely new concept for his hearers. It had never been said that way before the Kingdom of God. Now, Israel thought of themselves as a kingdom in a military and nationalistic sense. But to think of the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God in an invisible realm required Jesus to not only explain it, but to demonstrate it, and both are always necessary. Everybody say both. That's why Love Week

was so important in our church. Those one hundred thousand hours that we served validated the message that we preach. It is one thing to explain love, but it's another thing to hand somebody some warm food or a blanket, or to be with somebody in their time of need.

And so Jesus had to do both. And he had quite a challenge on his hands because he would demonstrate something by working a miracle, but then he would have to explain it because the people who saw the miracle would miss the point I told you about one last week when he took the happy meal and fed everybody, and they thought that the point of the miracle was that their stomachs were full, and because they wanted him to be their burger king, he had to shut that

whole thing down and say, eat my flesh, drink my blood. You've missed the entire point. So he's always having to explain it. He was always having to demonstrate so they could see it, and then explain it so they could understand it. He said, if you see it but don't understand it, it'll be like a seed that was sown, but the bird snatches it up before it has the opportunity to hit the soil. And so if you don't get the lesson in your heart through the power of demonstration,

then you will miss the intention of the message. But if you only see the demonstration and don't hear the explanation, then you'll understand the miracle on the wrong level, and you'll always live your life thinking that the physical thing is the real thing, and you'll not understand what's really pointing to. So you'll engage in behavior modification to try to fix your life, not understanding that every habit in

your life started with something in your heart. And until God turns the soil of your heart and weeds out the stuff that is choking the seed of his word. Like I said, it's a lot in the text. And Jesus must have felt overwhelmed because in the crowd he had his disciples and he needed them to take the message after he left. And then there were the people who were just coming just to see the show and just to eat the fries. And he had to separate

the two out. And he would often have to pull the disciples aside and say, now, when I said this, this is what I meant. He had to not only teach to the crowds, but he had to teach his disciples too. He had to do both. I relate to that challenge because some of you in this church know so much of the Bible. You know, I'm like, you know, Matthew thirteen twenty four wait in the tears, Wow. And then others are like Matthew, who is at his brother's name?

What are we doing? And it's like all over the place in terms of knowledge and just frame of reference, right. But Jesus was always able to speak to both, unless they thought he could only do one or the other. He'd do stuff like this, He'd say to a paralytic sins, your friend, your sins are forgiven, and then when the people doubted if he had the power to forgive sins, he would tell him, now get up and take up

your bed and walk. The reason that he told him to get up and take up his bed and walk was to give them a physical demonstration of his spiritual authority. So it's demonstration and explanation, and Jesus is doing both.

In the context of the Kingdom of God. He would often have to teach this principle of the already and not yet eschatological twenty dollars word, the eschatological tension of the Kingdom of God, And so it simply means that some things have already come, the Kingdom of God is here, and then some things are still coming. Isn't it that way in our life to know that if we have trusted in Christ, we are saved, We have been saved, and yet we are being saved and we will be saved.

Because there are certain things in my life right now that God has already done. I can see the fruit of it, but there are other changes that are still taking root in my life. And what I've noticed about this is that as my devotion to Christ grows, so do the things that distract me, to try to pull me away from that pure devotion and simple childlike faith in the grace of God. And Jesus is using a parable so he can use an earthly symbol to convey a spiritual truth. He said, it's like if a man

was planting weed, weeds with the plural. Uh. Yeah, it might be legal, but it isn't always just the best thing to do. But that's a different sermon. But he said, it's like if he was planning wheat and then somebody else planted weeds. He said, I want you to know that both grow together, which is symbolic of how as the ministry of Jesus increased, so did the opposition. The more that his popularity grew, the more vocal his opponents became,

because both grow together. In the church I grew up in Monk's Corny United Methodist Church, we used to go upstairs to the youth room. Rick Burnett would lead us in praise and worship songs like it only takes a spark to get a fire going. Shine, Jesus, Shine. What was the other one he used to love so much? Oh? I remember the other one. I'm not gonna tell you what it was I'll tell you know how James Taylor

sang the Carol King song You've Got a Friend. He would do, You've got a friend, but then he would go into what a friend we have in Jesus, and it was like a medley, and then he would stop after he played the songs. And it was only about ten of us in the youth group, but he would always say, and now it's time for praise reports and

prayer requests. So it's a bunch of teenagers, right, So what you would usually happen is everybody that would raise their hand would raise their hand and say, I have an unspoken, unspoken his code for is probably about a girl, or it's about a guy. I have an unspoken But you know, maybe every once in a while, somebody will raise their hand and give a praise report about a test that they pass, or a prayer request about a

test that they were taking. Here's us weird, And I wonder if you've experienced this in your life, is that in our lives we will often see the cycle that what will be our prayer request in one season of our life will become our praise report in the next season,

only to become our prayer request. Again, there's probably a couple in here who right now is pregnant with child, and you probably prayed that God would enable you to have a child, and maybe in like five months, three months, seven months, you will give birth to your prayer request. You had your friends praying, probably even in a crowd this size, somebody who had trouble conceiving, and maybe even

through the course of many different miscarriages. This may be the third or fourth or fifth time you tried, and now you're on the way to giving birth to what you prayed about. Others are still waiting for that, and we're all at different places. But let me tell what's going to happen. Because I've had She's had three babies, and you pray for it, and then you have it, and you praise God for it, and then you start praying about it all over again. So watch this, y'all. Pray.

We're trying to have a baby. Y'all pray. We haven't slept in thirty four days, y'all pray. Our toddler is now showing some developmental delays. Y'all pray. We're trying to get him into this school, but we can't get him with the right teacher. Y'all pray he's got his driver's license. Y'all better pray for yourselves. As a matter of fact, y'all might want to stay off the road for the next few years. Y'all pray. It was your prayer request that became your praise report that turned back into your

prayer request. So here's what I'm trying to say. You prayed for your problems, Yes you did. You prayed for the promotion on the job, and the promotion came with people, and people are stupid and lazy and late and tardy. You prayed for that. Touch somebody say you prayed for it. You asked for it. Don't get mad about it now. You prayed for it. You prayed for a man. I heard one girl praying for a husband one time. She was praying for a future husband. She had a whole

list about it. She was praying. She was like, God, I pray that he would be godly, and I pray that he would be tall. But God, I'd rather than be godly than tall. But God, if he could be both, if he could be both, if he could be Oh, it's both, you need both. You need both. It's in marriage. Like, you know, don't marry somebody you're attracted to. Marry somebody that you know loves the Lord. You better be attracted to him too. It better be both, now, for real

about this. Most preachers won't say these things because they sound carnal and unspiritual, but it needs to be both. You need to like to look at each other. You're gonna be looking at each other all the time in this thing. Y'all gonna be prayer partners. Don't have to get married. You gotta have some chemistry and christ. So it goes back to the idea that humans are always wanting to categorize, and we always want to divide things. You want us to get the you want us to

get the wheat, Separate from the weeds. That's what we always want to do. We always want to separate the good from the bad. You know, we want to talk about I'm in a season of blessing right now, or I'm going through a really hard season right now. Let me tell you the truth, all of us are going through a season of blessing right now, and all of us are going through a really hard season right now.

It just depends on which angle that you catch me from as to what season I look like I'm going through. If you see me from one side, from my good side, I might look like the most blessed man in the United States of America, in the continental United States of America. But on the other side, I yelled at one of my kids, who shall remain nameless, right before I came to preach to you. But you didn't have to see that. So now I'm a man full of the spirit and

wisdom up here. Give him a praise. Let it be done, receive your reign. We're like a flood. I was coming through like a flood, but a different kind of flood. Just a few minutes before I out on the stage. Just both I could preach the Bible and I want to beat your behind, both in the same two hour period, in the same one hundred and twenty minutes. Because I'm a pastor, but I'm also a daddy. And if you disrespect my wife, I will turn into something else. Because

I'm a transformer, I'm a go by. I'm both. You didn't know how to be both. WHOA wasn't in my notes? But he kept trying to describe the kingdom. He said, it's like the seed was good and the weeds were bad. But they both grow together. And that's so true. They both grow together. The opportunities grow, and so do the responsibilities. God take me deeper in my walk with you. Okay, as you go deeper, you're gonna gain intimacy with Christ.

And then you are gonna also gain awareness of your ignorance, because the closer to Him you get, the more you're gonna realize how much you don't know. So it's like, I want to know you more, but the more you come to know Christ, the more you're going to know that you didn't know him at all. That's why I liked the Ecclesiastes eleven. I was reading that how Solomon

had chased things that he called vanity or meaningless. It was like the sense that, in the context of having success and fulfillment, if you have one without the other as problematic, what you really want is both. See like, if you have success but not fulfillment or wholeness, that will feel to you like the ultimate failure because to chase what you thought you wanted and to get it and it didn't do what you needed done makes you

feel like, well, what do I do now? That's the point that he was writing from where he said that there are certain things that you just don't know, and he mentions two things an Ecclesiastes eleven. Because all of us struggle from time to time when we are sowing, when we are investing, when we are living our lives and doing the things that we believe that God has called us to do, without knowing whether it's making a

difference at all. There's so much you don't know. Solomon says, if you watch the wind to see if it's blowing right, you will never sow. And if you watch the clouds to see if it's dry enough, you will never read. Your mind will always find an excuse for you. We'll always find a reason, will always find an indication that this is not the right time. And so Solomon is giving advice. He's saying, just like you don't know how

the breath enters the bones of a woman in the womb. Now, granted we have ultrasounds now, but it's still is still true to be said today that there is a part of the process of human life that we can't put on a sonogram. There's a part of it, he says, there's the bones, and then there's the spirit or the breath Hebrew word rua. It's the same way that God breathed. It's the spirit of God, the ruh of God. In the Old Testament, he said, there's the bones, and there's

the breath. There's the structure, and there's the spirit. And if you have structure but not spirit, you don't have life. If you have spirit but you don't have structure, you don't have life. In a few weeks, I'm going to be teaching our staff on our annual staff Advance, and I'm doing a whole session just around this verse for leadership, because in church you can pray for the spirit of God to come. But if you don't have structure, if you don't have any capacity to manage what God brings you,

it will simply be irresponsibility and wishful thinking. On the other hand, you can have organizational charts and resources and all of the things that would tend to make people think you are successful, but without the spirit, just without that thing that only God can do. Can I tell

you something? I can get up here with an outline and an outfit and think that I have something to say, but there's a part of me that knows because I've been doing this for fourteen years now on this stage, well not this when we had different buildings, but at this church as the pastor, and there is a certain thing that God has to do that I can't do, and I don't always know what He's going to do. So there's a part of me that came in today excited to preach to you because I had a structure,

I have some scriptures. But there's a part of me that knows that God, if you don't blow on this, if you don't breathe on this, if you don't do that thing that you do that I can't do, if you don't tear open somebody's facade and speak down deep in the places of their heart, then I'll just be a clanging symbol. I'll just lose my voice, but I won't say anything. God. I need you to breathe on

my life. I need you to breathe peace. I need you to breathe joy, because God, I can get a big house, a nice car, the right clothes, and a lot of people. But if you don't breathe, I won't be fulfilled. If you don't do it, it won't be done. I need bone I need the bones and the breath. I need the structure and the spirit I need Here's what I love about it. I need the friends and the enemies. I need both. I was amazed how Jesus, when he was putting together his Kingdom dream team, knew

that one of them was a devil and kept him anyway. John, I understand the disciple that Jesus loved, at least that's what he put in his own bio. Of course you chose John. He's going to take care of your mama when you're gone. And of course he chose Judas because Judas was the one who got him to the cross where he paid the price that he came to pay. You need both. You need wheat and weeds, and if you try to pull them up. He tried to get the stuff out of your life that you don't like.

You'll tear out the wheat, the substance. You'll tear out the thing that God is growing. Because see what would happen if you planted this particular type of weed, or some versions call it the tears. The wheat and the tears. It looked the same on the surface, but where it was really difficult was underground. Where the tears would intermingle with the wheat and the root systems would get intertwined. And sometimes what God is doing in your life beneath

the surface, the pain is intertwined with the purpose. You hear me. The thing that you don't like about yourself is sometimes the thing that God is using. And we ask God to use us, and we ask God to do as will in our lives unless we don't like it, and then we want to root that out. And so then it's like, well, God, I want you to do this, but not that. And what Solomon said is what Jesus said, you don't know which one is which, And so we have to be very careful when we are trying to

do our own gardening. Because I don't know about you, but I am not a horticulturist. I don't have a lot of agriculture experience. I was preparing this message and I had this weird memory of being a little boy and my mom had this little flower bed outside our house. And one day I decided to be helpful and I came back to the door and I was so proud. I was like mom, and I had my hands full, and I said, I got all the weeds out of your flower bed. And she looked like she wanted to

slap me, but she restrained herself. She said, those were the flowers. But I didn't know the difference because I was too immature to know the difference. And sometimes we are spiritually immature, and we are running from things and removing things and resisting things. And in the process of trying to pluck out the weeds, you're removing the wheat. If God answered every prayer your brain right now, I'm sorry, Bruce. Almighty was a pretty good movie. It would screw up

the universe. It would ruin your training. Look, can I teach you a little bit? All right? So I used to not be able to do a pull up. I'm not gonna lie to you. I was twenty two years old and I had never done a pull up in my life. So I start training to do pull ups, and I could do some pulloups. One day, this guy told me that I had to do not only pull ups,

which was a feat of accomplishment for me. I work my whole life tour to this point, a culmination of my entire life's effort in the rum of X. He's like, now I need you to do a negative. I said, what's a negative? He said, well, there's two parts to every rep. There's when you're going up and there's when you're coming down. But there's just as much benefit in

coming down as there is in coming up. I'm gonna give you seven seconds, because if that hits you right, you will start to see that the things in your life right now that you perceive as negative might be a crucial function in building your strength and your stamina and your hope. There are some things about God that you can only learn going down. Ask Peter beginning to sink when he felt the grip of the grace of God through the hand of Jesus of Nazareth, and he said,

now I know that, your Lord. It's the blessing of both. And you don't know touch Somebody say you don't know. You don't know the difference between wheat and wheat. You can't do the angel's job. Let God sort that out. I heard the Lord say, keep sewing and stop sorting. Sr T I n G. Keep sewing and stop sorting. Stop judging the experience the moment it happens, Give it some time to see what it is. As a matter

of fact. I don't know if you have experienced this, but some of my successes have been the fruit of my failures. Some of the things that have produced the most in my life were the things that, honestly, at the time I was the most embarrassed about some of the things that have Actually, I know that most of you in this church know the song, Oh, Come to the altar, the song that almost never was. There were twelve versions of that song. All of them sucked. All right,

write this down. You want a deep revelation. Success starts with sucks, he says. Sow it in the morning, sow it in the evening, because you don't know. Seeds can be deceiving. Seeds can look awfully small. Seeds can look impotent, and they may be dormant for a while. And when you sew them, they go away for a little while. But they didn't go to die. They went to multiply. Some of the things in your life that you said goodbye to, you need to say see you later. I'm

expecting you to come back up again. Because I believe in resurrection, the blessing of both both. I need both in my life. Paul needed both. I guess I do too. Paul had this thing. He called it thorn, and he kept trying to weed it out. Ask God three times, take it away. Now, if you've ever asked God to take something away, that's fine. But if he doesn't do it, leave it alone. And here's why you can leave it alone, because the presence of weeds will not cancel out the

power of the week. What is supposed to grow will grow. Leave it alone for a little while and see what it becomes. See if it will be the fruit this failure that you're processing right now. Some of you started the business, you did the thing, you took the step, and you made a mess out of it. See if maybe that might be the seed of something that becomes

something that people will celebrate in the future. And you will know, and God will know that you almost gave up, and the enemy was there telling you stop sewing it. It's not working. But you kept sewing, and you sewed in the morning, and you sewed in the evening, and you loved any way, and you forgave any way, and you showed up anyway, and you did it anyway, and you memorized a scripture and quoted it any way, even

though it wasn't happening in your life. But you kept quoting it, and you kept sewing, and you didn't try to sort it out, and you didn't try to root it up, and you didn't get impatient and immature. But you waited for the will of God to come to pass in your life. Once you ever stopped sewing. Because you don't know. Solomon said, you don't know the way that the breath enters the bones, and you don't know

the way God works either. You don't know. We don't know which sermons God's going to use to touch people. Then you ever preach one you hate it, and then everybody wanted to talk about it for the next year, and you preached one you loved and nobody ever remembered it. It'll make you mad, but that's how the breath operates. So you'll be reminded that you need the spirit of God, not just structure and skill and some things in your life.

It's gonna surprise you because you don't know. He said one might work and one might not, or both might do equally well. In fact, he said in the ESV both may be good. Now that made me think of Joseph Naturally Old Testament Joseph with the coat Joseph, the coat that got him beat up, the coat that got him thrown in a pit, The coat that represented the favor of his father. The coat that was kind of loud and obnoxious, but he wore it anyway. The coat that let him know he was chosen even if people

didn't like him. Remember, you need both. Everybody's not supposed to like you. If everybody likes you, you are doing nothing. If everybody likes you, you stand for nothing. If everybody agrees with you, you are saying nothing. You don't need everybody to like you, and like a true prophet now, because one time I was going through some criticism and I asked God to make it stop. He said, well, if I stop that, then I got to stop the blessing that created the criticism to begin with. Because both

grow together. Both grow together. Oh, I want to be used by God, and I want everybody to agree with all of my decisions and validate my existence. Both grow together. And so when Joseph did get pushed in a pit, it was no surprise to me that the Ishmaelit caravan was the one that picked him up. It didn't surprise me at all. Because that's just like God. He always uses both. Ishmael was the son that Abraham had doing it his own way. Isaac was the one that he

had doing it God's way. But guess which one God used. Guess which one God used both? You mean God will use my mistakes to bring about a deliverance in my future. You mean God will use the dumb thing I did. I'm saying absolutely, if he's sovereign, he will, if it's his field, if it's his harvest, if it's his job to superintend your life. Even the ishmaelite served a purpose. When David slept with Bathsheba after the child died. The next son he had was named Solomon, who was the

wisest man who ever lived, who wrote Ecclesiastes eleven. His dumbest decision led to the world's greatest wisdom. I'm gonna try. I'm gonna try because I saw it in my mind like this. I saw that God is using both in your life right now. He's using both. So when Joseph gets thrown in prison, it's not good. But God uses that to introduce him to somebody who is going to bring him before Pharaoh. When he comes before Pharaoh. Pharaoh was telling him about a dream that means there's going

to be a famine in the land. Well, the femine isn't good, but God is using the famine to create a position of favor for his people. Now, when they finally got there, Joseph is standing before his brothers and he has a revelation that everything that has happened in his life wasn't good, But everything that happened in his life has been held in the hand of God. So God wasn't just using the stuff that felt good to you, not just the stuff that you praised him for, not

just the stuff that you thanked him for. Paul finally came to the point where he said, I learned to thank God for my thorn. I learned to thank him for the things that he is using that I did not choose for myself, the things that he is using that tormented me at one time. But the tormentor was my mentor that transformed me into who I needed to be so that I would rely on the grace of God. It's the blessing of both. It's both. So when Joseph said, you meant it to harm me, but God meant it

for good. He's not speaking out of both sides of his mouth. It's both. They meant it, but God used it. God is going to use both. I promise you he is. I promise you he is. That's what the cross represents, after all, is two beams, one vertical that's you and God, one horizontal that's you and people. Is both. Love the Lord, your God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, Love your neighbor as yourself. It's both. It's not one or the other. It's both. I praise God when I feel it.

I pray God. When I don't feel it. I praise God when I sense him. I praise Him when it's so distant that I wonder sometimes as any of this even real. I praise him in the good times. I praise him in the bad times. I praise him when he does what I ask. I praise him when he runs a little late to lazarus funeral, because I know, even on the fourth day, he can say something. And Joseph said, oh, it's both. Is pain and purpose. It's both.

And we keep waiting to this day when everything in our life will be stable, and all of our relationships will be harmonious, and God said, I need you to learn how to celebrate the wheat even while you're looking at the weeds. Even the enemy serves a purpose. Even the devil works for God. The devil's not in charge of what happens in my life. God doesn't do everything that happens to me, but he uses everything that happens

to me. There is nothing that is happening in your life that will not have to pass through the hand of God by the time is said and done. And so I saw this picture that really moved me of how Joseph's father, Jacob, at the end of his life, was sitting on his deathbed. And Jacob was an interesting character because he had two names, Jacob Deceiber Israel Prince, which one was he If you'll be really honest, you're both too. So please don't judge people just because their

shortcomings are exposed. If it weren't for the grace of God, who knows where you would be. Come on, how many know what you're capable of. I didn't have a problem. I didn't have a problem preaching in that prison the other day because I'm not in that same situation. But I could be. There's nothing better about me than anybody that I was preaching to. It wasn't a problem for me to preach. It's the power of both, it's the

blessing of both. And when Jacob was about to die, Joseph wanted to get his kids in front of Jacob so that they could be blessed. And he brought these two sons that he had in Egypt. The oldest one was named Manassa, the younger one was named Ephraim. And they sat on Jacob's knees for a minute. Jacob couldn't see very well. And after all that Joseph has been through, God has blessed him. Anyway, these two sons have significant names. Manassa means to forget, because he said, I'm going to

forget the shame and the pain of Egypt. God has made me forget. And then Ephraim means fruitful, not beautiful. How God can produce fruit and even the hardest and worst situations. Well, anyway, when Jacob was sitting up to bless the boys, he did something weird. I want to show you this real quick. I don't know who this is for, but in Genesis forty eight thirteen, you got it forty eight thirteen. Please they said in Joseph took them.

He took both of them, Ephraim in his right hand toward Israel's left hand, and Manassa in his left hand. God's gonna bless both, and he brought them near him next verse and Israel stretched out his right hand laid it on the head of who was the younger, and his left hand on the head of Manassa, crossing his hands for Manassa was the firstborn. Now understand when he did that, it broke every protocol and violated every expectation, because he was supposed to bless the oldest one first.

But God doesn't do things the way we think that he should do things, and we don't get what we deserve from God. We get so much more. We get his grace and his mercy. And when he crossed his hands over to bless the younger, when first do any of you know that God has blessed you in ways that you don't deserve and didn't earn. And there's no way in the world you could have built a resume to afford it. So when he did it, Joseph got

really upset. It said, when Joseph saw verse seventeen that his father laid his right hand on the head of Ephraim. It displeased him, and he took his father's hand to move it from Ephraim's head to Manassa's head. Watch the next verse, and Joseph said to his father, not this way, my father, This one was the firstborn. You know, I know you're getting old and you can't. You used to do this when you were a little kid. You've been trying to switch things up your whole life. But put

your right hand on his head. Watch the next verse. But his father refused and said, I know, my son. I know he shall also become a people. He shall also be great. In other words, he said, I'm gonna bless both. You know why I don't ever have to be jealous of anybody else's life. You know why I don't ever have to worry about comparing myself to what God does for somebody else, because God is big enough to bless both of us. And when you know that, come on, when you know that this is the blessing

of both. To know that what I call good, what I call bad, God is going to bless both, don't you go trying to pluck stuff yourself that's above your pay grade. Don't you go on a self improvement project without God's help, You'll mess up the masterpiece. God said, it's all working together for the good. I'm gonna bless both. They were singing a minute ago. Come here, Tiff. She was singing, you never lost the battle, You never lost a battle. I felt that when when we were writing

that song, I felt it. We were just singing that you never lost the battle, never lost the battle, and we just started singing that. Yes, oh man. I was like, yes, Lord, the church is gonna want to sing this. And then I was like keeping it. But then I was like, Chris, why don't you, uh, won't you help her? And then she's sang it. I said, if they what if they both? If they what if they bone? Yeah? What if they bone? What if? What if it? What if Paul is silas

start praising God together? What if we come together in his name? Can't begin to lift him off? What if we praise him? Things work together? Thank you for joining us. Special thanks to those of you who give generously to this ministry. Is because of you that this ministry is possible. You can click the link in the description to give now or visit Elevationchurch dot org. Slash podcast for more information and if you enjoyed the podcast, you can subscribe.

You can share it with your friends. You can click the share button, take a screenshot and share it on your social stories and tag us at Elevation Church. Thanks again for listening. God bless you.