Dinner with some friends. They're from another state. They're vacationing in Pismo Beach. So we made the sacrifice to go to Pismo Beach to join them for dinner on Thursday night. As we were driving south on 101 toward Morgan Hill, and you know you get out of the city and you're just starting to see the open space and you're feeling good, and I had a big smile on my face and I turned to Jeanette and I said, this is the life, isn't it? Out on the open road.
And she gave me one of those looks like you and I are on different pages. I love the open road. She, well let's just say enjoys it less than I do. But I thought to myself that life is an awful lot like an open road trip, isn't it? Life has a destination, but it holds many detours and stops along the way. Life is a journey. It's about the journey as much as it is about the destination itself. Nothing like a road trip with life, you need a map.
You need a map to tell you where the destination is and where you are in relation to that goal. Life is an awful lot like a road trip. I heard about a man who was traveling in Texas. He was heading toward Brownsville and he came to a fork in the road, didn't know which way to go, and there was a rancher standing over in the field. And he said to him, hey old timer, I'm heading for Brownsville. Does it make any difference which road I take?
The rancher looked at him and said, no, not to me it don't. Well, it may not to him, but it makes a big difference to the one who's on the journey. As we come to our text today in Genesis chapter 50 and conclude this series on the life of Joseph. We see that Joseph is about to arrive at his destination after living 110 years. We've traced the journey of his life giving thanks to God for such an unblemished example of one who lived a God-centered life.
I think perhaps only Daniel equals Joseph in the record of the Old Testament as one who had no unblemished record as far as the word of God is concerned. And one of the things that we admire about Joseph is that Joseph never allowed himself to become the victim of the detours and the stops of his journey. As he traveled along the road, he suffered many losses, great losses, but Joseph endured through them and his faith was ultimately rewarded.
In your journey this morning, you may be at a fork in the road or at a rest stop or a detour, or maybe you've come to a screeching halt because of something that's happened in your life. And you're facing change, you're facing interruption, you're perhaps even facing the loss of your dream. It's possible that like Joseph, your future may be quite different than what you've always dreamed it would be. What you need to understand is that this is a time of test for you.
It is a time when it will be made known what you have chosen to build your life on. And the thing I hope to write in your heart and mind this morning is this, that our faith foundation is made especially evident as you and I encounter loss, or as we face interruption, or as we go through change. It's true with Joseph. We find out what his faith rested on because of what he experienced. I ask myself the question, how do you strengthen the faith foundation of your life in times like these?
In times of detour, times of change, times of screeching to a halt, how do you strengthen your faith foundation? I believe there are several answers we could give. One is that you need to look to your past. Look to the past and ask yourself the question, how has God already proven himself to me? Because we tend to do that, don't we? We forget what God has done in the past.
I was with the men in the men's Bible study last Tuesday night and we saw that as the people of Israel got out of the Red Sea and they were away from the bondage of Egypt, the first thing they did was to what? They started grumbling. And in chapters 15 and 16 and 17, you see the people of God complaining to God, complaining to Moses about the lack of food, the lack of water. They forgot already what God had done.
So when you and I are in the time of test, we need to ask ourselves, how has God already proven himself to me? And then secondly, look at the present. What is God saying to me right now? You say, well, I don't know what God is saying to me in what I'm passing through in my journey. Then ask him. God's not trying to keep it a secret from you. Ask God what he's doing and then remember you have to be quiet enough to listen to what he has to say. Because that's the issue.
It's a great quote I want to share with you by C.S. Lewis. It says, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. If you're going through the pain of some detour in your life and your journey is uncertain today, God perhaps is shouting to you. Ask him. Lord, what are you saying? So look to your past, look to your present, then look to the future.
And ask yourself the question, what are the promises of God that I can claim in this time of testing? By taking these three looks and asking those three questions, you will be able to strengthen your faith. You will be able to build your faith foundation. Now Joseph's faith foundation was solid, like his parent Jacob and his grandparents Isaac and Abraham.
He is listed too in the great hall of faith of Hebrews chapter 11, where it says in verse 22, by faith Joseph, when he was dying, that's chapter 50 where we are today, when he was dying, made mention of the exodus of the sons of Israel, that they would one day leave Egypt and gave orders concerning his bones. Joseph was believing God as his journey came to an end.
Now Joseph in his journey had helped his family, but beyond helping his family, he was able to see also the future that God had for them. When our faith foundation is in the living God as was Joseph's foundation, we have the privilege of bringing blessing to others and in the end, God's reward for ourselves. I don't know of a better way to live, do you?
When we have a faith foundation that rests upon the living God, we bring blessing to others as we go through the journey and when the journey concludes, we receive God's reward. What did Joseph believe? What did he believe about God that empowered him to overcome such loss and tragedy in his life with such grace and character as he did? As we examine even this chapter, chapter 50, I'd like for you to look at three statements that express the essence of Joseph's belief.
I would like you to look at these three statements as like three bricks that you can put into your own faith foundation for your life journey. The end of chapter 49 and the first part of chapter 50 records for us the death of his father Jacob and how the Jacob was buried back in Canaan.
When all of that was finished, we come to verse 15 in the chapter and that's where I pick it up for the first point and it says this, that when Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, what if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back for all the wrongs we did to him? So they sent word to Joseph saying, your father left these instructions before he died. Oh really? If he did, we don't have any record of it. Maybe he did, more probably he didn't.
But these are the words at least that they say, he said, this is what you're to say to Joseph. I ask you to forgive your brothers the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly. Now please forgive the sins of the servants of the God of your father. When their message came to him, Joseph wept. Isn't that interesting? Here's the first statement. You can trust God with the hurts of your life. You can trust God with your hurts. I believe we see that in Joseph right here.
Now the issue of his brother's crimes against him resurfaces at an interesting point and we can understand their fear. After their father died, they were worried that Joseph would now use this opportunity to retaliate against them. You see for these years they have carried with them their guilt and they've worried about the retaliation for the past. They said, oh now Joseph may hold a grudge. He may pay us back and so they confessed their crimes to him.
They use words like the wrongs we did, the sins we did. We treated you badly. In essence they say, Joseph we've harmed you. We've trespassed. We've crossed a line of what's right in treating you the way we did. We did offensive things to you Joseph and our father before he died had this message to give to you now. Please forgive your brothers. To forgive means to release them from their responsibility.
And when Joseph heard this plea for forgiveness, he breaks down into tears and I wonder why there are two possible answers. I think the better one is that Joseph wept because he had already forgiven his brothers 17 years before this. And he weeps to think that his brothers didn't get the message then and that for these years they have unnecessarily carried with them the burden of this guilt. He weeps to realize that now after proving himself to them for 17 years they still don't trust him.
So Joseph reassures them with these words. He says, don't be afraid. I'm not in the place of God. What is he saying? He's saying I have forgiven you and I'm not in God's place. Remember when we talked about forgiveness a few weeks ago? How Joseph forgave his brothers? We said that what forgiveness really is that you release the other person from what they did. You don't hold it against them any longer.
It doesn't mean that what they did was okay, but it means that you're not going to hold it against them. You're not going to take revenge on them. And that you give to God the right for any judgment. You give it up yourself. That's what Joseph means here. He says I did forgive you 17 years ago. I'm not God. God is the one who judges. The rule of all things belongs to God. And Joseph responds to them with words of grace and mercy. I want to ask you a question.
On your life's journey, have you come into a detour? Have you gotten bogged down on the journey because you're hanging on to your hurts? Are you holding your hurts against those who injured you? Unforgiveness says I hold you accountable to me. I have a grudge against you and I'm looking for a chance to get even. And I want you to hurt like I've hurt. And that unforgiveness can detour you on your life's journey and destroy the reward that God wants to give you at the end of it.
But forgiveness releases the hurt to God. Who is the judge? And it no longer holds the grudge against the person accountable for it. Paul writes in Colossians 3, bear with each other and forgive. Forgive whatever grievances you may have against another. Forgive just as the Lord has forgiven you. Do you want to live like the overcomer we sang about earlier in the service? Are you today enduring some loss? Because of what someone did to you? Are you hanging on to that?
If you want to be the overcomer, if you want to journey with a firm foundation, you have to put in place this brick. And here's the statement that I would put on the screen for us to look at. I must be able to say I can trust God with my hurts. Would you read that with me? I can trust God with my hurts. One more time, I can trust God with my hurts. I can trust God. If I can say that, then my faith response follows on it. And here is the faith response. I will what? I give my hurts to God.
I will forgive. You put that into place in your life. Like Joseph, you will journey on in your life, be a blessing to others. But if you hang on to bitterness, you will curse those who come in contact with you, including those closest to you. I can trust God with my hurts. I can release them to Him. I will forgive. Would you say that with me? I will forgive. But as we move on in the text, there is another statement that we can see in Joseph's faith. It's part of his faith foundation.
It's a brick I hope that you would put into your faith foundation. We're going to pick up the reading in verse 20 where it says, you intended to harm me. This is Joseph speaking. But God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then, don't be afraid. I will provide for you and your children. And He reassured them and spoke kindly to them. Brick number two for your faith foundation would say this. You can trust God with your circumstances.
What I've just read really is the key to the whole story of Joseph. The key to it is this, that God overrode the evil intentions of His brothers in order to achieve His divine purpose in Joseph's life. Notice the word intended used twice. You intended, but God intended. That word is the picture of fabric being woven together. The strings coming together. What it's saying is that Joseph's brothers wove together a scheme that was evil.
But behind their weaving was the master weaver and he was weaving something different. And it was good. God weaves together the strings of the fabric of your story too. There is absolutely nothing that can come against you that will present an obstacle for God. God is bigger than it all. Nothing can prevent Him from what He determines for your life. Romans chapter eight. I have it there in your notes for you. Just look at it with me. Can anything ever separate us from Christ's love?
Does it mean He is no longer, He no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity or are persecuted or hungry or destitute or in danger or threatened with death? Or you lose half of your retirement? Or your home is put up for sale by the bank? Or your spouse leaves you? Well it doesn't really say that does it? But that's what it means. Whatever loss you have encountered, nothing can separate you from the love of Christ.
Nothing. And so He goes on to say, and I want you to underline these words, verse 37, know despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ who loved us. Overwhelming victory. Your journey may be taking you through lost dreams right now like it did Joseph. You may be on a detour because of things that have happened to you and you felt like the victim. Does Joseph understand, understand those feelings?
My friend, whatever comes against you, you are already in Jesus Christ, an overwhelming conqueror. Nothing can succeed against you. As we are looking to Tuesday, an election day, we do not know yet the outcome of it. We face the possibility of loss on several things that are important to us. May I say to you that it's important to get out and vote and do our part as Christian citizens?
But in the end if our cause or our candidate wins, let's not think, oh thank God, we've found the answer to the problems of our country. And if our candidate loses, let's not think, oh dear God, what's going to happen now? Because in Jesus Christ, whatever the outcome of the election, we who are the people of God are already the victors. We're already the victors. We don't have to worry about it. Now we can be disappointed, but we are the victors.
We have a statement that we can make, and that statement is this, I can trust God with my circumstances. I can trust God with my circumstances. Would you say that please? Would your circumstances be those of loneliness today, or a financial crisis of some sort, or health, or divorce, or betrayal, or you're looking for a job? Put this into your faith foundation. I can trust God with my circumstances. And so my faith choice, my faith choice is this. I will be what? Confident.
I'm not going to be depressed. I'm not going to be disillusioned. I'm not going to be overwhelmed. I'm not going to be the victim. I will be confident because I can trust God with all of my circumstances, and whatever comes against me is not greater than God's sovereign purpose for my life. What a great part of a foundation to trust God with your circumstances. Joseph did. He was a blessing to others. He got reward in the end because this was present in his life.
As we look further into the text, we see that there was yet another statement, a faith concept in Joseph. In verse 22 it says, Joseph stayed in Egypt along with all his father's family. And in that one sentence, 54 years pass. Joseph lived 110 years. And he saw the third generation of Ephraim's children and the children of Maker, son of Manasseh, were placed at birth on Joseph's knees. Then Joseph said to his brothers, I am about to die.
But God, but God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And Joseph made the sons of Israel swear on an oath and said, God will surely come to your aid and then you must carry my bones up from this place. And so Joseph died at the age of 110. And after they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt. He was buried in Egypt. But Joseph had this as part of his faith foundation.
You can trust God with your future. Even out of his lifetime, he knew what the future held. We come here to a significant point. Joseph is 110 and most probably when it says he said to his brothers, it doesn't mean his literal brothers because most of them are probably dead too by this time. But he's talking to their descendants. And what's happening here is a generation is passing. It's a very significant time. And he's speaking to the next generation.
And after that generation will come another generation and another generation. And with each generation, the people will become more comfortable in Egypt until they're put into slavery. And then they cry out to God in their bondage some 400 years after they went down into Egypt. And God sends them a deliverer and the person of Moses who's writing this story for us by the inspiration of God's Spirit. A generation is passing. Those are critical times in families and in nations.
We as a nation are losing a generation. Tom Brokaw called it the greatest generation. The generation that fought World War II. Born beginning in 1901 up through about 1924, the youngest of the greatest generations today would be 84. Some of you fall in to this generation. But we're losing this generation. The values of this generation were dedication, sacrifice, hard work, conformity, law and order, respect for authority, patience, delayed reward, duty before pleasure, adherence to rules.
We're losing that generation with its values. This is a critical time for us. And this election is critical. I was telling Dave as we were walking into the church together this morning that as I look out in our country today and I listen to what's being said and I see what's happening, I feel like our nation is in a period similar to the 1930s in Germany. We are at the cusp of change in this nation, however the election goes. And you and I say, I can trust God with my future.
Joseph had seen his father pass away and in fact it so struck him apparently that when he dies he uses some of the same words his father died with. And in doing so he acknowledges the continuity of the covenant that God had made with his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather. And he speaks to the next generation and he points them to the faithfulness of God in their family. And he expresses his own faith about the future by the command concerning his bones.
He knows he will be buried in Egypt but he doesn't want his bones to rest in Egypt and when the children of Israel left some hundreds of years later they took with them the coffin of this man because of the oath that was sworn on this occasion. You see Joseph would die in Egypt but his heart was already in Canaan. He knew what the future held because the future was secured by what God had already said.
The loss of his dream to return to Canaan he knew would be realized one day in the future and the reason he wanted his body there was so that when he was resurrected he would be there. He didn't want to travel in time. He wanted to be there.
As you and I face change and our journey with a lot of others is entering into a very uncertain time in our nation it will be very possible for us to get hung up in our journey to get detoured and sidetracked and come to a screeching halt if we don't have this brick in our faith foundation. You can trust God with the what? The future. In fact I have a statement. I can trust God with my future. Would you say that with me? For my faith choice is this. I will be what? Optimistic. Optimistic.
I'm not going to be gloomy and down in the mouth. I don't care what happens on Tuesday. And I'll tell you why because I know the end of the story. I know who's in charge of history. No matter what happens on Tuesday he's the one in control. Joseph knew that. Do you know that? Let's build our lives on that truth not upon an election and its outcome. Let's build our lives on the promises of God. What God has already said he's secured and that is our future.
Now these bricks for your faith foundation are important because what you believe determines how you live and how you die. You see it in Joseph. If you live by faith in the living God your faith foundation will embrace these bricks and you as a result will be a blessing to others as you go through your journey and when your journey is done you will receive God's reward. I have a statement I want to read to you up here about God. God's invitation is this.
He invites you to build your faith on the only foundation that will support you through the rest of life's journey, take you to heaven when it's over to receive his reward and leave blessing behind in the lives of others. Is that the kind of life you want? There's the foundation. No other foundation can anyone lay than Jesus Christ. That's what God says. If you build your life upon him you will have the kind of a life that Joseph did in your generation.
Your life journey will face all kinds of temptations and you may come to forks in the road and you may have a detour now and then but if your life is built upon this kind of a foundation as you move along through life with all of its issues and all of its trials and all of its losses you will bless people as you pass by. As you touch them you will bless them and then when your years are done you'll be called home to receive God's reward for a life well lived.
I can't think of a better way to live, can you? Is that your foundation? If it's not Jesus Christ can become your foundation today if you'll simply receive him into your life as an act of faith and say I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God that he died for my sins on the cross that he rose again from the dead and I receive him into my life as my Lord and my Savior.
David and I as sub-elders went yesterday at the invitation of a family to pray with a man who has only attended here on occasion. He's been a hard working man seeking to provide for his family. He belongs to a union and he's been a carpenter in his life and he has put out his best effort to provide for them but in September something was wrong and he went to the doctor and the doctor performed some tests and he got the call saying there's a spot on your kidney and we know it's cancer.
You need to come in. So they performed surgery and the cancer has already spread to his lungs. He got that word and at that point it seemed like everything was hopeless. Now they have a treatment that they may be trying that will give him an 8% chance of living.
But that night that he got the news he went to bed and he woke up at 3 o'clock in the morning because that had been his routine for years and he got down on his knees beside his bed and he says God I need you and he opened his heart to the Lord and God has come into his life and is changing him. It's an amazing thing to see. He's very vocal about his faith.
He's ready to go and meet the Lord if that's what the Lord wants but he says I'd like to live here too and be with my family a little while longer. He's got teenagers. You don't have to wait to a point like that. You can make the decision today and God's invitation is that you would receive his son, Jesus Christ. Build your life on what will last for your journey. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your presence here this morning with us.
Thank you for the wonderful example of Joseph's life and I pray that every one of us will put into place in our lives these bricks, these truths that will see us through the journey. We trust you with our hearts Lord and we choose to forgive. We trust you with our circumstances. We trust you with our future. Lord, we choose to be optimistic about life because you're the living God.
And if some of us have gotten into detours or we have stopped along the way and we're in that slew of depression and we're kind of lost out there in the journey, I pray today we'll make some decisions to get back on the road and journey on with you. Father I pray especially for that one who's here today without Christ as the foundation. Right now open that heart to receive Jesus with our heads bowed and our eyes closed.
If you're here today and you have never before received Jesus Christ into your life as Lord and Savior, if you're building your life on other foundations that have and will surely fail you, will you choose today in the midst of whatever you're passing through, whatever your loss has been to say I want Jesus Christ as my solid foundation. I receive him this morning. Would you just lift your hand to say that? God bless you. Anyone else? I want that foundation for my life.
Father thank you for what you have said to us in your word and how it instructs us and builds our lives so that we can live, so that we can journey through life and be a blessing to others and then someday receive your reward. So help us to live that way I pray with Christ as our solid rock. In his name I pray, amen.