Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat
Transcript
It's good to see you all this morning. My name is Chet. I am one of the pastors of Mill City Church. If this is your first time with us, we're glad you're here. We gather together on Sundays. We have groups that meet throughout the week.
We gather on Sundays. We sing to Jesus and about Jesus. And then we open the Bible and we read it and study it together. If you'll grab a Bible and go to Genesis chapter 37. We've been walking through the book of Genesis. If you have one of these blue Bibles, it'll be on page 18.
If you don't own a Bible, take this one with you when you leave. That's our gift to you. We want you to have a Bible. We've been walking through this story. We've been following this family. And we are now going to begin looking at the life of Joseph.
We're going to be following his story for the next little while as Genesis kind of rounds its way out. So we are in the home stretch. We have turned. We've touched third base and we are headed home. We're going to be able to finish this book up within the next year or two. And the next several weeks we'll be finishing up and studying through Joseph.
I, when I was in 10th grade. Oh, sorry. First of all, let me say I'm glad. But I'm always excited when the elementary students are in here. It's good to see you all this morning. I love having the elementary students in here.
I learn things. Like today, I learned that your soul is located right here. Which makes so much sense as to how I feel after I've eaten. Like I've just fed my soul. And so it's good to see you all this morning. When I was in 10th grade, I was playing quarterback for our JV football team.
And I was not a very good quarterback because I was what my driver's ed instructor called impetuous. And for those of you who aren't familiar with that word, it means when you need to make a decision quickly, you just go for it, which is a problem when you're at yellow lights or when you're throwing a pass into double coverage. So I threw a lot of interceptions. And we were only a few games in. I went to, I faked a handoff. I was rolling out this way.
Somebody grabbed my right shoulder. My left foot got out in front of me and buckled like that. Oh, I actually just did there because it's got problems. And my kneecap shot out of place, which it does. Well, it started around then. And I would have one knee injury every football season for the next six years.
And I learned a lot of things. I was introduced to LCLs and PCLs and ACLs and meniscus and sublexed patellas. I dislocated my kneecap a lot. And if you've never done that, if you've never dislocated like your left kneecap, just imagine what it would feel like to dislocate your right kneecap and then pretend it was over here and you'll have a good idea of what that feels like. And so I did that a lot. And what I was really introduced to was having plans for the way things were going to work out and then having that just knocked out from under you.
That ended my quarterbacking career. I didn't go pro. You know, I just never, it just knocked it out. And I did this every football season. I would get injured again. And so the progress I had made and the way things were working would just get reset.
And I would just have my plans, my future just wiped out from under me. And that was kind of how it began. And this happens in life consistently and on a much greater scale. That we will have plans for our future and just have them snatched away. We'll have plans for our future and how things are going to look and just have our legs knocked out from under us. We'll lose a job.
Somebody will have been drinking and will drive left of center. We will have a parent leave or a spouse leave. We will have plans. We'll have a vision for what future is going to look like and just have it derailed. And that's what happens in this story. That's what happens in the life of Joseph.
And so we're going to ask that question today is what do we do in those times when we just get kind of stuck where we had a plan, we had a future, we had an idea of what things were going to look like and that just gets taken away from us and now we're just kind of stuck in a holding pattern. And so that's what we're going to be looking at this morning. So I'm going to pray and then we'll start reading this text together. God, we come here today from all different places. There are some people who have had a joyous, life-giving week. And there are some people who have had the life beat out of them this week.
There are some who feel much the way Joseph is going to feel like the future was snatched away, like they're stuck in kind of a holding pattern. And we just ask for your help as we study this and we ask for your Holy Spirit to minister to us, to comfort us, to teach us that we might grow to look more like you and that we might grow in our love for Jesus. In your name we pray. Amen. Chapter 37, verse 1. Jacob lived in the land of his father's sojournings in the land of Canaan.
These are the generations of Jacob. Now whenever it says that, it means we're kind of starting a new chapter, a new set of stories. And it says, Joseph being 17 years old. So let's pause for a second and let's remember who Joseph is. At this point, now we left off in chapter 35. For the few of you that maybe remembered that and you're going, wait a second, did we just skip some stuff?
I'm going to read back and find out what we skipped. I'll tell you real quick. We left off in chapter 35. They move towards Bethel. God protects them. Then they live in Bethel for a little while.
They move from Bethel. Rachel dies in childbirth. Rachel is one of Jacob's four wives. You really should only have one. He has four. She's his favorite.
If you have multiple wives in the Bible, you're not supposed to have a favorite. So he's messed this up in multiple ways. But he has multiple wives. He has a favorite. She passes in giving birth to what she names, her son, who she names Ben-Oni, which means son of my strength or son of my sorrow. And his dad changes his name to Benjamin, which means son of my right hand.
And he's honoring his wife and acknowledging that he's lost a part of himself. That is Joseph's little brother. So his favorite wife has two sons, Joseph and Benjamin, who are the second to last and last of his children. And so he's got 10 older sons from his other wives. He's got these two sons. That's who Joseph is.
He's second youngest and first son of Rachel. Joseph, being 17 years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's wives. And Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. All right.
So Bilhah and Zilpah had four sons, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. And when it says he was a boy with them, it does not mean that they were all, they were friends and all the same age. It means he was their boy. He was their small boy. He was their lad. He was their runner.
So they were teaching him how to tend the flock. And he was running back and forth and having to do all the things they said and working for them. And he brings a bad report. He goes and tells his father that they're not doing right. Now we don't know what they were doing.
It just says he brought a bad report. He tells them that either they're sinning or they're not treating him well. I remember when we were little, I have an older brother and a younger brother. And my older brother kept demanding that me and my younger brother do things. He would send us to do things. He would send us on errands.
We were his small boys because he was older than us. And my mom and dad fussed at him and told him to stop doing this. And then one day we were down playing in the woods. We had a little camp and we said our, I can still remember vividly, he was like three or four at this point, him dragging a two liter Mountain Dew down to us from our house. It was almost as big as he was but we had sent him to get us a drink so he brought a two liter Mountain Dew which is a brilliant choice on the part of a four year old. My parents fussed at us and said, y'all have got to quit telling Vince, making him run all your errands and do all this stuff for you.
And my older brother looks at him and says, Mama, you gotta fuss at Chet. Don't fuss at me, you gotta fuss at Chet because every single time I tell Chet to do something he turns right around and tells Vince to do it. But there's this dynamic here where these four have this small boy Joseph and Joseph goes to his father and he gives a bad report and we don't know, we don't know, there's two kind of ways to give a bad report. There's a way that you tell on someone that is for your own benefit. You're telling on them just to make yourself look good, just to puff yourself up. I remember going to my dad one time and I was doing a service for the family because every time my older brother did something wrong, I would let my parents know.
They needed to know these things. They needed to stay on top of his behavior and his actions. And so I went to tell on him one time and I remember my dad looking at me and going, he just looked disgusted. He just stood there looking at me for a while and I was like, this is not the right response. Maybe I was thinking, yeah, that's right, we should be disgusted at Logan's behavior. I don't know.
He just, but I could tell it was like aimed at me and it was just like, okay. And then he said, you're just a little snitch, aren't you? Just a little rat fink, which y'all should use in real life from now on. Rat fink is an amazing term to call people. And he called me a rat fink and he said, you're just a little tattletale. He said, look, I don't want to hear it anymore.
It's you and your brother against me. It's not me and you against your brother. That'd be messed up. I'm not on your team. Quit, quit narking on your brother all the time. And I just remember thinking, but the whole reason he was doing that was because the only reason I was telling on him was to make myself look good.
It wasn't that I was actually genuinely worried about my brother and his character and his life and his health. I just wanted him to get in trouble because it made me look good and I enjoyed watching him be in trouble. There's also a genuine, heartfelt what they're doing is wrong and giving a bad report. We don't know which one he did. Best guess though is that he did this in integrity, in honesty, just because as you watch this play out, his brothers aren't very good people and he seems to genuinely handle things well. So as best we can watch, they don't seem to have a lot of integrity.
Joseph seems to, so it seems as if he's given a genuine report of they're not doing some things right and he's not a rat fink, if you will. He does tell on them. It says this, it says he brings a bad report which is a good way to make your brothers not like you, whether they're wrong or not. That's a really good way to make them not like you. So they're already reading into this.
They would be frustrated with him. Now Israel, that's his daddy, loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, which is a problem. That's the same thing that Jacob, who's also Israel, that's the same thing his dad did. It caused him a lot of problems. He's turned right around and done the same thing. Because he was the son of his old age.
And he made him a robe of many colors. We don't, that robe, that thing could be a robe of many colors. It could be a robe that was like sparkly or shiny. It could be a robe that had long sleeves. We don't really know. The only other place this is used in the Old Testament is to describe an outfit that a princess is wearing.
So what we do know is that Joseph looked fabulous. He was shiny and colorful and sparkly in his princess outfit. It was amazing. I'm sure his brothers envied him and mocked him because that's how brothers would work. And so he gets this fancy outfit. His dad shows great honor to him, privilege to him.
And in some ways it's treating him the way he ought to treat the firstborn son. And he's messing up the birth order from Reuben down to Joseph. But Joseph is the firstborn of Rachel. So there's this weird favoritism that's plaguing this family. And it says, but when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him. Some of you who have siblings know what that is like.
You go through these stages where it's like your siblings cannot talk nicely to you, cannot speak nicely to you. You come in and you're like, hey, what's going on? They're like, shut up, get out of here, Steve. Like, whatever. Like, you just have this kind of, this animosity that grows and this happens. And I want you to know this.
Parents, you have a role to play in how your children get along with one another. Seems as if Israel is further fueling this the same way his dad did, but you have a role to play. There's a family in our church family that has a get-along shirt that they make their two children wear at once so that they'll get along. My dad used to make us hug. You have, after we had fought, you have a role to play in trying to help them get along, and he's not, and it's further dividing, and they cannot even speak to him without being cruel to him. So Joseph, this is verse 5, now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more.
He said to them, hear this dream that I have dreamed. Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright, and behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf. So he says, we were binding grain, my sheaf stood up, looking good, and all y'all's little sheaves that y'all put together just came right around and bowed down to mine. What y'all think about that dream? His brothers said to him, are you indeed to reign over us, or are you indeed to rule over us? So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words.
Then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers and said, behold, I have dreamed another dream. Behold, the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me. But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, what is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come and bow ourselves to the ground before you? And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the saying in mind. All right, we've got to talk a second about dreams.
Immediately, they understood when he tells them this dream, they understood that this ought to be understood in a prophetic way. That there's meaning behind it and so they're saying, oh, are you prophesying to us? Are you telling us that your dream tells the future and that we're going to bow to you? And that's why his dad fusses at him and says, oh, me and your mama are going to bow to you. They were the sun and the moon and your brothers are going to bow to you. Really?
So they understood it to be prophetic. Now, let's talk about dreams for just a second. There's kind of three ways to think about dreams. There's a group in here probably that just believes dreams are just dreams. They don't mean anything. They're your brain keeping itself occupied while you're asleep.
Like if you dream that you had to build a golf cart with your old PE teacher, probably just a dream. You're not waking up thinking, oh, wow, in the future I'm going to have to build a golf cart with my, like it just seems like it's a dream. Like dreams are just dreams. They're just random things. Some people would say, well, no, dreams tell you a lot about yourself. You can study them for psychology.
You can study them to know more about yourself. Like I have a dream periodically where I get up to preach and I, for some reason, have folded my notes into a tiny little thing and then I'm immediately trying to unfold them up here and I can't get them unfolded. The truth is that's exactly what I did the first time I ever preached. I had written all my notes on a yellow sheet of memo pad, had it wadded up in my pocket and got up and it was one of those lecterns with the microphone right here and then just like sweatingly unfolded it while I was sitting here and I don't do that anymore. Crisp, clean sheets of paper.
But I have that dream. I have dreams sometimes where I can't read the Bible or y'all keep moving so like I'll find it, I'll get ready, I'll look up and I'm facing the wrong way. There's that middle zone. I think it means I'm stressed out when I have that dream. Sometimes you have dreams where you're having to give a presentation at work and suddenly, you know, my wife periodically have dreams where her teeth fall out and that kind of stuff. It's just like I have dreams where my contacts are as big as dinner plates.
I can't put them in my eye. Now some of you who study this are going, oh no, I've just learned seven things about you. We can talk later. And then there's other people who are going, no, dreams are prophetic. They're from God. They're dreams that will tell you things that you need to know, reality that's around, things that are coming.
And the answer to this, yeah, okay, some dreams are just dreams. You wake up, you're like, that was weird. You move on with your day. Or, you know, you wake up and you're like, that was weird. I'll be mad at my husband for the rest of the day. Whatever, however you choose to do that.
Then there's the middle zone of like, yeah, maybe it does tell you about something you've been thinking about, something you've been worried about, something you're stressed about. I wouldn't put too much weight there trying to figure out all the secrets of your soul from dreams, but okay. And then yeah, biblically, some dreams are prophetic. We're going to see that throughout the story of Joseph. We're going to get to see that more. The New Testament carries that out.
There are prophetic dreams in the New Testament. When Peter stands up and preaches at Pentecost, he says, your young men, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. It's this prophecy about coming true through the Holy Spirit. That happens. So what do we do?
In general, you don't want to place too much weight on dreams. You want to place some weight. There's room for them to be prophetic, for them to be from the Holy Spirit. But the New Testament also gives warning. It says that people can be puffed up by visions. They can be led astray by dreams.
So we don't want to give them all the weight in the world. We would share them in community under the weight of Scripture. We would discuss them. You could let other people in on them. You can keep them to yourself and just wait and see what happens. Wouldn't make all my life decisions off of dreams.
And we can do what Jacob does here and keep it in mind. Try to pay attention to it. Ask the Lord about it. Talk about it in community. Let Scripture bear weight on it. Make sure you don't run off after them.
Maybe you feel like you need to pray for somebody. Trust that. Walk with people in it. But we don't place too much weight on them. If you want to talk more about that would be interested too. We will talk more about it as well in upcoming sermons.
That's all we can give it right now. He has dreams. They understood him to be prophetic. He understood him to be prophetic. And so they move forward in the story. His father keeps this in mind.
Pick up 12. Now his brothers went to pasture their flock near Shechem. And Israel said to Joseph, Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send them to you. And he said to him, Here am I. So he said to him, Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock and bring me word.
So he sent him from the valley of Hebron and he came to Shechem. All right, let's pause for just a second. He's no longer their small boy. He's not with them anymore. We don't know if that just means sometimes he did this, sometimes he didn't. When they travel off, maybe he just stays closer to home.
He is 17, which means he's in between being an adult and being a boy. They would not count you in a census as prepared for war until you were 20. And so there is some room here, especially for those of you who are in that 15, 16, 17, 18 range. There are some times where it's perfectly fine to be in your parents' household, to be leaning into them for wisdom, to be asking them for help, to be living under that roof. And there are other times where you need to be capable, like he is, to be doing some work. His dad's sending him three or four days away on his own to go find out about his brothers and to give a report.
If you're 16, 17 years old, can you be at home by yourself for three or four days? Are you incapable of doing that? Are you capable of doing that? There's time to be willing to grow and to carry some weight and also to be understanding that I'm still able to lean into my parents and walking that out and trying to work towards health. And that's where he is. So he's sent out on his own 60 or so miles away to find his brothers.
Verse 15, And a man found him wandering in the fields and the man asked him, What are you seeking? And he said, I'm seeking my brothers. He said to him, Tell me, please, where have they been pasturing? Where they are pasturing the flock? And the man said to him, They have gone away for I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan. So Joseph went after his brothers and found them at Dothan.
That's another 20 miles. That's another day or so journey. So Joseph's just walking around fields like this. They walk over a hill. Somebody sees him and says, What are you looking for? He says, My brothers and our stuff, do you know where they went?
And they said, Yeah, I heard them say they were going on to Dothan. And then he heads on to Dothan. He doesn't head home and say, I didn't find them. He finishes the job and he heads on to Dothan. They saw him from afar. Before he came near to them, they conspired against him to kill him.
Okay, so his brothers see him headed towards him. Now, if you know someone and you're familiar with them, a lot of times you can recognize them from a distance. You can tell how they walk. You can kind of tell, Okay, this is this person. I know this person. I don't know this person.
If that person that you know is wearing a splendid rhinestone coat that they wear all the time, you can tell them from a distance easier. And he's wearing his splendid coat. They see him and they go, Okay, here's colorful. Joseph headed our way and they decide, When he gets here, let's kill him. They said to one another, Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of these pits.
Then we will say that a fierce animal has devoured him and we will see what will become of his dreams. So his brothers hated him. Then they hated him more. Then they hated him even more. Then they see him and they decide, Let's kill him.
Some of you have been betrayed, harmed by family. And it is some of the most harmful thing that can happen. And his brothers, his ten older brothers decide, Let's kill him. And they go about this the way that we go about things. They slowly let it grow and fester in their souls so that eventually it seems like a really good idea to do something absolutely evil and wicked. Some of you right now, if we said, Would you ever do this?
Would you ever do this? You'd say, No. But the truth is, you've already planted the seed and you're already letting it grow. An oak tree doesn't seem like it would come from an acorn, but if you plant it in the ground and it has the right circumstances, it can grow. And some of us right now are fostering bitterness, are fostering lust, are fostering hatred. We're watering it and we're letting it grow and eventually it leads to really heinous action so that we do things we never would have thought we would have done.
And that's what his brothers decide, Let's just kill him. And then, and then we'll see about his little special dreams. When he's dead, we'll see who bows down to him. Verse 21, But when Reuben, that's the oldest brother, the firstborn, he'd had some weight in the family, heard it, he rescued him out of their hands, saying, Let us not take his life. And Reuben said to them, Shed no blood, throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but do not lay a hand on him. And he said this, that he might rescue him out of their hand to restore him to his father.
So Reuben tries to protect him. Now, he's not in the strongest position. He's the firstborn, but he can't just tell him, No, we're not going to do that. Y'all are wrong. I think he probably fears they might turn on him. If they'll kill Joseph, who's Jacob's favorite, they might just kill Reuben as well.
So he just says, No, don't kill him. Just throw him in the pit, in the wilderness. Kind of saying, We'll just let him starve and die, but that way we won't have his blood on our hands. But Reuben's plan was to go get him out. So when Joseph came to his brothers, verse 23, they stripped him of his robe, the robe of many colors that he wore, and they took him and threw him into a pit.
The pit was empty. There was no water in it. He finally sees his brothers. He's been on this trip for days. He's probably like, Oh, here we go. Good.
He may even have some things he was supposed to bring him. We know he was supposed to find out how it was going and give a report. He shows up to his brothers, probably felt like something's a little off here. His brothers gather around him. They rip his robe off of him and they throw him in a pit. Now, he had 10 older brothers.
This probably was a bit of a struggle, but not exceedingly difficult. We can guess that maybe Ruben wasn't really hands-on here, so maybe nine. I don't know if you've ever fought nine people. Unless your name is Jackie Chan, you lost. That's usually how that goes. Because, you know, they don't do the one-at-a-time thing like they do in movies.
And so he is thrown in a pit fairly easily, and I think probably very confused, very hurt. He's the youngest. He's not actually seeking this relationship to be bad. He probably is hurt over how this has all gone down anyway. And now he sees his brothers and they harm him. And they throw him in this pit.
And it's a man-made pit. It would have been used as like a cistern. He can't get out of it. It's probably steep-walled. Kind of like a well. They threw him in a well.
That's kind of how that works. So he fell in at the pit. All right. And then, 25, then they sat down to eat. So they don't even care.
They're not worried about him. And they just throw him in there. And they sit down and start eating. And looking up, they see, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead with their camels, bearing gum and balm and myrrh on their way to carry it down to Egypt. Then Judah said to his brothers, he's one of the older ones, what profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood?
Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and let not our hand be upon him. For he is our brother, our own flesh. So he says, it's probably bad if we kill him. Let's just sell him and make some money off of this deal. His brothers listened to him. Then the Midianite traders passed by and they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit and sold him to the Ishmaelites for 20 shekels of silver.
They took Joseph to Egypt. So Joseph had been in Hebron. He'd headed to Shechem, then to Dothan. These guys are coming around from Gilead down to Egypt. They sell him. He heads all the way down over here to Egypt.
He's now very far from where he started. It says, when Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph was not in the pit, he tore his clothes and returned to his brothers and said, the boy is gone and I, where shall I go? So what he's saying is I'm going to have to pay life for life on this that we lost our brother, that this is under my leadership as the firstborn. He tears his clothes and he says, what have y'all done and where shall I go? Doesn't seem like he's super worried about Joseph. He doesn't say, where did he go?
He says, where shall I go? Then they took Joseph's robe, this is verse 31, and slaughtered a goat and dipped the robe in the blood and they sent the robe of many colors and brought it to their father and said, this we have found. Please identify whether it is your son's robe or not. And he identified it and said, it is my son's robe. A fierce animal has devoured him. Joseph is without a doubt torn to pieces.
In this countryside, they would have had lions, they would have had bears. It was not out of the question that someone would be attacked and killed. And his sons do the same thing to him that he did to his father. They slaughter a goat in order to trick their father away from his favorite son. It's the same thing Jacob did when he pretended to be Esau. And it's the same thing they do to Jacob here.
And Jacob and his family are living out patterns. So he sees it and he says, yes, this is my son and they've, he's obviously been killed by a wild animal. Then Jacob tore his garments and put sackcloth on his loins and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted and said, no, I shall go down to Sheol to my son mourning. He just says, I'm going to be sad until I die. Thus, his father wept for him.
Meanwhile, the Midianites had sold him in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of the Pharaoh, the captain of the guard. Now, if you've ever been watching a show and something terrible happens and then it just ends and you're like, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, no, no. And then you wait till, okay, I can't wait till the next episode and the next episode picks up and tells you nothing about what just happened in the last episode. That's what happens here. Next week, we're just going to read about Judah and Tamar. The text intentionally says, meanwhile, he's a slave and then just moves on to something else.
It's a Old Testament cliffhanger that we don't know what's going to happen with Joseph. We're just kind of stuck here. And the truth is, Joseph is just kind of stuck. His life was going well. He has 11 brothers. He's the favorite.
They have regular coats. He has a magnificent coat. His dad loves him more than his brothers. Now, we don't know how he handled that. We don't know if he was gracious with it, but he also has these dreams that he, maybe in his youth and naïveness, naivety, tells them what his dream is. And maybe he was bragging a little bit.
We don't know, but he has these dreams from God that say, they're going to bow down to me. He's going to have this position of power. He's going to, in the future, things are going to go really well for him, not only as his brothers, but his dad and his mom. Like, he goes and tells them these dreams. Like, what do y'all think this means? I think it means it's going to be awesome in the future.
He goes, he's working hard. He goes and sees his brothers and immediately thrown into a pit. They save his life, barely, sold into slavery, and everything that was going to happen in his future is taken away. As best he can tell, his whole future, his whole plans, his whole idea of how things were going to work, the way he had marked it out, the way he had mapped it out is just gone. And he's just stuck. I love the word meanwhile there.
Meanwhile, while everything else is going on, he's a slave. And I think sometimes we feel like that. Like, that's how our life works. Like, you, while everybody else was having a good time, while everybody else was advancing at work, while everybody else was having things go well for them, meanwhile, I lost my job. Meanwhile, my family fell apart. Meanwhile, my health deteriorated.
For some of you who are older, maybe you felt this very distinctly when you went to high school reunions, that sometimes you felt like you were showing up and you had the meanwhile story. Oh, you became a doctor. Well, meanwhile, I gained 30 pounds. And, you know, I'm really kind of between things right now. You just feel this on you and that's where he is. He feels, he's stuck.
And we don't get any extra part of the story here. And so what do you do in those moments? What do you do when you're stuck? What did he do? Well, we'll find out later that one of the things he does is he trusts the dreams that he had. He trusts what God had already told him.
He understood that those were prophetic and he trusts them. He believes in them. He would hold on to those, lean back into those, know that this is something that God had said so that regardless of how the situation seemed to be working right now, he could lean back into that. And some of you were like, neat. That sounds nice. I have had zero special dreams.
I've had some weird ones, but none that I'm like, when I get sad, I'll think about that dream and feel good again. That's not how they work. And you're going, I don't have anything special from God that he's told me that I can hold on to in the middle of this crisis, in the middle of this pain. And I would tell you that you're wrong, you have something better. Hebrews chapter one says this, and we'll have it on the screen. It says, long ago, at many times, and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.
That means that God specifically spoke to people to give a message that this dream is prophetic, that he speaks in a way to declare what his will was, what he was doing, what he was about, what was going to happen. And then it says, but in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed to the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. That through Jesus, he has spoken definitively and clearly that he loves us, that he's good, that he's the heir of all things, that he's the creator of the world and that there's hope fully and forever in Jesus, that he has spoken through Christ to us, that you have something better than a dream, you have the person and work of Jesus who has gone before us and who our hope is in forever. There was a story written in the middle of the 1800s called The Princess and the Goblin.
There's this princess, her name's Irene. She lives in a castle. She dresses very similarly to Joseph. It doesn't say that, but I'm just helping you picture it here. She lives in a castle. She's kind of by herself and she doesn't know, but there's a goblin kingdom that's near her castle and they've decided that they're going to try to rule again.
She's very lonely. She's wandering around the castle. She enters into this room and she finds her great-great-grandmother who is actually a fairy, as some great-great-grandmothers are. And she starts to talk with her and she gets to building this relationship with her great-great-grandmother. She goes and visits her often. And one of the things that happens is there's some bad things that happen.
Eventually, her great-great-grandmother gives her a ring and it's a magic ring and it has a thread on it that only Irene can see. It's a very thin thread and the grandmother says, if you ever are in danger, put this under your pillow and then grab the thread and follow the thread and it'll lead you to safety and it'll lead you to me. There's this time that comes where the goblins attack the castle. She puts the ring under her pillow. She grabs it and she starts following the thread. And as she heads out of the castle, she comes around and she sees that the thread leads her directly into the goblin's lair.
She just keeps following the thread in her fear and then finally the thread winds and it turns into a giant pile of rocks. She's terrified and heartbroken. This is awful. And she tries to follow the thread back to get out of the cave, but that's not how the thread works. It only goes forward. So after being sad for a while and being confused for a while, she decides, well, I might as well just follow the thread.
That's my best option. So she starts digging the rocks out. She's soon bleeding, soon crying as she tries to get these rocks out. Her fingers are hurt and as she digs them out, she finds hidden in the rocks was a prison and she finds her best friend, Kurti, who was trapped by the goblins. And Kurti's like, how on earth did you know I was here? She said, I'm just following the thread and now I see why it brought me here.
And she says, let's keep following the thread and Kurti says, no, we got to get out. That thread doesn't lead the right way and she says, all I can do is follow the thread. And she follows it and she follows it and she follows it and sometimes it leads to places that seem like there would be utter despair and destruction there, but she follows the thread and eventually she makes it to her great-great-grandmother and she makes it to safety and the thread was trustworthy because her great-great-grandmother was trustworthy. Pastor Tim Keller was writing about that story and he says this, he says, if you asked a seven-year-old, I'd like you to write me an essay on what it's like to fall in love and get married.
He says, when you read the essay, you'll say it isn't very close to the reality. We've got some parts right, but in general, doesn't really understand the process. He says, a seven-year-old can't really imagine what love and marriage will be like and he says, when you start to follow Jesus, you're at least that far away. You're at least that far away from understanding what this is going to look like. You have no idea how far you'll have to go. Jesus just says, follow me and sometimes you'll be following him and you'll be asking, why on earth are you bringing me here?
That's Joseph's story. God has a plan. God's made a promise, but it doesn't look like it's going to work out, but God is sovereign over all of it. Joseph's brothers haven't overpowered God. They haven't outwitted him. And for us, as we follow Jesus, a lot of times we just have a thread and all we can do is go forward.
It only goes that way. And sometimes we're going to hit places that we think, why on earth am I here? How on earth are you going to bring good out of this? But we have good and beautiful promises that are sealed. All the promises of God find their yes in Jesus. And they're sealed in him that he will take all things and turn them to good.
That he will make our suffering matter. That he'll bring glory out of it. That he brings hope in darkness and that we can trust and follow him. And we're not to turn back. We're just to hold on. We're to hold on to the fact that we know that Jesus has gone before us.
That he's suffered more than we have. That he's loved more than we have. That he's been tempted more than we have. And that he's walked it out in faithfulness and we can trust him. And that's our hope. So in those moments of just being stuck, trust that he's good.
That he knows what he's doing. And that you can follow him forward even though it doesn't look like it'll work out. Because he's gone before us. The band's going to come back up. We're going to take communion. If you're a follower of Jesus, one of the ways that we remind ourselves that he is good, that he has gone before us, that our hope is in him, that his promises come true, is that we remember his death in our place, on our behalf.
And so we'll take bread and we'll dip it in the cup to remind us of his body that was broken for us and his blood that was shed for us and to remind us that he has gone before us and our hope is in him. So we'll take a moment if you need to confess and repent of sin, if you need to go to Jesus with your anxiety and your fear and then we'll take communion together. If you are not a Christian, we would ask that you do not take communion because it is something that is for Christians. And in a moment after you've taken communion, we'll stand, we'll sing together one final song. So let's pray.
God, we thank you that you're good and that you go before us and that our hope is in you. We love you and praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.