Speaker 1Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan. This is the account of Jacob's family line: "Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father's wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them. Now Israel had loved Joseph more than any of the other sons because he had been born to him of his old age, and he made an ornate robe for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him. Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, 'Listen to this dream I had. We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.' His brothers said, 'Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?' And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said. Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers. 'Listen,' he said, 'I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.' When he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebuked him and said, 'What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you?' His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind. Now his brothers had gone to graze the father's flocks near Shechem, and Israel said to Joseph, 'As you know, your brothers are grazing their flocks near Shechem. Come, I am going to send you to them.' 'Very well,' he replied. So he said to him, 'Go and see if all is well with your brothers. Go with your brothers and with the flocks and bring word back to me.' Then he sent him off from the valley of Hebron. When Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, 'What are you looking for?' He replied, 'I'm looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks?' 'They've moved on from here,' the man answered. I heard them say, 'Let's go to Dothan.' So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. But they saw him from a distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him. 'Here comes the dreamer,' they said to each other. 'Come now, let's kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we'll see what comes of his dreams.' When Reuben heard this, he tried to rescue him from their hands. 'Let's not take his life,' he said. 'Don't shed any blood. Throw him into the cistern here in the wilderness, but don't lay a hand on him.' Reuben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the ornate robe he was wearing, and they took him and threw him in the cistern. The cistern was empty. There was no water in it. As they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm, and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt. Judah said to his brothers, 'What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him. After all, he is our brother, our own brother. Our own flesh and blood.' And his brothers agreed. So when the Midianite merchants came by, the brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for 20 shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt. When Reuben returned to the cistern and saw that Joseph was not there, he tore his clothes. He went back to his brothers and said, 'The boy isn't there. Where can I turn now?' Then they got Joseph's robes, slaughtered a goat, and dipped the robe in blood. They took the ornate robe back to their father and said, 'We found this. Examine it to see whether it is your son's robe.' He recognized it and said, 'It is my son's robe. Some ferocious animal has devoured him. Joseph has surely been torn to pieces.' Then Jacob tore his clothes, put on a sackcloth, and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. 'No,' he said, 'I will continue to mourn until I join my son in the grave.' So his father wept for him. Meanwhile, the Midianites came. Meanwhile, the Midianites sold Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh's officials, the captain of the guard. This is the word of the Lord.
Speaker 2Thanks be to God. We all inherit something. Some of it is beautiful, and some of it, as we know, is complicated. There are things I've inherited from my family that I'm deeply grateful for. for. My mom has this I can do literally anything mentality. She's an eight on the Enneagram, so charge away. I grew up watching her figure out things and make the impossible genuinely feel possible. And somewhere along the way, I apparently decided, I guess I can do that too. My grandma, she had this incredible knack for organization, and I inherited what I'm calling that little twitch. I love a plan. I like things in their place. I like knowing what's happening next. I love control, amen? And then there's my dad. I got a lot from my dad talking, being one of those things. But the unique thing that I was thinking about as I was thinking about this teaching is that he has this unmistakable, just slight talking out of the side of his mouth, Drew Barrymore thing. And if you watch. If you watch me close enough during this teaching, you'll notice I do that too sometimes. That's obviously not a character trait, but it's definitely something that was passed down, something I inherited. And I am, with all sincerity, genuinely grateful for a lot of what I've received from those who came before me. But here's the thing about inheritance. You don't get to choose all of it. Sometimes what's passed down isn't just a family recipe or a personality trait. Sometimes it's a way of relating or handling things. And I think that's a really good thing. A way of fighting conflict, a way of protecting ourselves, a way of responding when we're afraid, a way of understanding love and even our place in the world. And sometimes you don't even realize you're carrying it until it comes out of you. One day you hear yourself saying something where you find yourself responding in a certain way, and suddenly you think, wait, where did that come from? And why does that feel so familiar? And I know that feeling. You see, because from both my parents, I did a lot of great things, but I also inherited anger as a primary emotion. It's what I go to when I feel scared or powerless or out of control. And from my grandpa, I inherited a desire to be the best, which can be a wonderful trait until achievement becomes a way of proving your value. And from my granddaddy, I inherited a little dazzling saleswoman charisma, which is also great until you realize you can become very good at selling yourself. Something that isn't actually true. So yes, we inherit things, and some we want to keep, and some we have to learn to name, and some we have to learn not to inhabit. Because what we inherit may shape us, but it does not have to define us. In short, the story we inherit, the one that we've been given, thankfully, is not necessarily the story we have to live into. And I think that's a great point. And I think one of the great gifts of scripture is that it is remarkably honest about that truth. It doesn't give us sanitized family stories. It gives us real families, families carrying love and faithfulness, but also wounds and patterns and dysfunction. And Genesis, as we've seen together as a community, it certainly doesn't shy away from that reality. If you're newer to our church or you're visiting today, we as a community are jumping back into a series we've been in for the last few months. We are walking the walk of life. We are walking through the book of Genesis and asking, what is God doing? And what is he saying both to the people in these stories and to us? And today we arrive, as Gavin Grumpily said, at Genesis chapter 37. And here, you had to hear the whole story. Here, we're not just meeting a healthy family that suddenly has one bad day. We're meeting a family carrying a story that stretches back generations. And we're not just meeting a healthy family that suddenly has one bad day. And there's a promise here. But there's also favoritism and deception and competition and betrayal and wounds carried from one generation to the next. This family has inherited a lot. And the question Genesis 37 begins to put in front of us is not simply what happened to this family. It's something deeper, like what gets carried forward. And perhaps even more importantly, what does God do when he enters the middle of it? And that's what we're going to look at today. Sound good? Great. Now, before we get into the story, I got to remind you of where we've been, because you got to have the full context. Genesis 37 is the beginning and introduction of Joseph's story. And his story will carry us all the way to the end of this book. And so far, we've journeyed through stories like Noah and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And now we arrive at Joseph and his brothers. I want to talk to you a little bit about Joseph's story. And I want to talk to you a little bit about Joseph's what God made whole. And we've watched that story repeat itself throughout this series through people like Cain and Abel and Isaac and Ishmael and Jacob and Esau. Totally different people, different circumstances, but familiar patterns. Things like rivalry and favoritism, jealousy and deception, fear and violence, and the things I just named a second ago too. So now we arrive at Joseph and his brothers, and here's what makes that significant. This is the family through whom God has chosen to carry the promise of redemption to the world. God promised Abraham that through his family, he would bless the nations, that through him, God would begin the work of making right what had been fractured. That promise, it moved from Abraham to Isaac and then to Jacob, and now it is being passed on to Jacob's sons. So here's what we see. So here we have a family carrying the promise of God while also carrying the patterns of generations before them. And Genesis gives us a remarkably real picture of that. In this story, we'll see that God's faithfulness does not require human perfection. Yes, the dysfunction will be real, and man, will it be real. You're going to feel good about yourself when you leave here today. But so will the faithfulness of God. Now before we walk through the text, I want to give us a little map for where we're headed. Genesis 37 moves through four movements. This is at least how I've named them. The first is the promise. The second is the pattern. Third is the dream. And finally, the descent. The promise, the pattern, the dream, and the descent. And then from there, we'll turn the question towards our own lives of how then now shall we live in light of what we see in this text. So let's look at the text together. Sorry, Gavin, real bummer. And we're at church, so Genesis 37, if you have your Bible in front of you. We'll start in verse one. We will move through the text, not perfectly line by line, but I do want to walk us through the text, and then we'll get to what we're going after. Genesis 37, it begins this way, Gavin. Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan. Now at first, that sounds like a throwaway detail, the land of Canaan, but it isn't. Because Canaan matters. Canaan is the land of promise. This is the land that God promised to Abraham, then to Isaac, and then to Jacob. And Jacob's family now, this is what we're reading just through this first line, Jacob's family is now living here. So before Joseph ever has a dream, which we read about, or a coat, or brothers, before any dysfunction we're about to see, the author of Genesis is quietly reminding us that this is still the story of promise. The family may be deeply broken. But the promise has not been. That said, standing in the promise doesn't mean the family has suddenly become healthy. Because the next thing Genesis shows us is what this family has carried with them. The promise is still intact, yes, but the pattern, oh, it's still there. In verse three, we read, now Israel, or Jacob, right? Remember the name change? Okay, maybe. You need to go back and listen. The name change happened over the summer, and we read that Israel, or Jacob, loved Joseph more than any of his other sons. And because he does, we read Jacob gives Joseph a special garment. It could have been a coat of some sort. We don't know exactly, but what we do know is that the narrative is clear. Joseph is visibly favored, and his brothers can literally see it. Verse four says that when they saw that their father loved Joseph more than them, they hated him. And I know you can't see it perfectly, but I do just want to highlight or notice together the subtle but important progression at play. So there's favoritism, and that leads to resentment, which leads to hatred. And eventually, we'll see that that leads to violence, but we'll come back to that in a moment. Now, hopefully, you know this pattern isn't new to this family. You've seen this before. Remember Isaac? He favored anyone? Esau. Yes, that was wonderful with your chest. I loved it. Rebecca favored Jacob. And now Jacob favors Joseph. The same family is repeating something. And I love that Genesis here is showing us something about how patterns actually work. No one wakes up one morning and says today, just around the Cheerio bowls, we're going to recreate the dysfunction of the previous generations. Most of the time, we don't even realize we're doing it, right? We absorb it, we normalize it, or we learn it, and eventually, it can feel like this is just who I am. This is how my family communicates. This is how we handle conflict. This is what we do when we're hurt. And this is how we get love, or this is how I stay safe. Those things get woven into us so deeply that we recognize, we don't even recognize them anymore. We think things like, I'm a perfectionist, or I'm just independent, or I'm just really responsible. But sometimes beneath the behavior, and when I say sometimes, I mean all the time, there's a deeper story. A part of spiritual formation is allowing Jesus to uncover that story. Not so that we can blame our parents, and not so that we can shame ourselves, but so that we can see what is actually there and give God space to heal it and redeem it. But we cannot interrupt what we refuse to recognize. And the same is true for Jacob and his family. Now, there's a tension that begins to build in the text. The family is carrying this old pattern, and God, is still carrying a promise. And right in the middle of those two things, we read that Joseph dreams. The promise isn't new, but something new is beginning, and the story is about to take a turn. Look at verse five. The author here tells us that Joseph had one dream, and then another dream. And if you're counting, that's two. And he shares both of these dreams, seems boldly, with his brothers. In the first dream, he says to his brothers, you're binding sheaves, and his sheaves rise. And he says, you're binding sheaves, and his sheaves rise. And he says, you're binding sheaves, while the others gather around and bow down to it. And of course, his brothers immediately understand the implication and say, do you intend to reign over us? And that would have been a great stopping point for him. But baby didn't read the room. No, he didn't. Joseph then has another dream. And this time, it includes the sun, the moon, and 11 stars, and they're bowing down to him. There were 11 brothers in total, so you can guess where the parade was headed. From there, we see that Jacob, their father, rebukes Joseph. But then, verse 11, we read this summary statement of sorts. His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind. And that, again, feels like a throwaway detail, but it's actually really important. This is noting for us that the brothers respond with jealousy. I want you to think, same old pattern. But Jacob does something different. He pays attention. He doesn't understand the dream. He doesn't know what to make of it, but he doesn't dismiss it either. Something is happening here that he doesn't yet understand, and that's important. Because in the middle of a family repeating its old patterns, God is quietly doing something new. Now, before we move on, I want to pause here because the dreams in this teaching, they're going to matter. So I want you just to have context for them. Again, they aren't a random detail in this story of Joseph. They become one of the threads that actually carries the story forward. And because of that, we need to be careful about what we mean when we call this a dream. First, we need to hold Joseph carefully here. I'm so grateful for the details. Joseph is not presented to us in the text as a flawless prophet or a terrible narcissist. He's 17. He's favored, and he's obviously immature. But the dreams matter. And here's why. Because Joseph's dreams here aren't dropped into a vacuum. It's dropped into a family that is carrying an old pattern and a promise that God has been carrying forward for generations. So this isn't Joseph discovering his secret identity through these dreams. It's not a five-year plan, and it's certainly not a promise that if you have enough faith, your dreams will come true. The dream is not primarily about Joseph's identity. It's about God's purpose for Joseph with and the larger story of God's redemption. Remember, the promise to Abraham was through his family, God would bless the nations. So Joseph's dreams, they're part of that larger story. So as we go on and we talk about dreams here, beyond the actual physical dreams he had that night, we're not talking about a secret future. We're talking about a God-given hope or calling or desire or longing for redemption, a vision for what could be different, something God has entrusted us to steward. And no matter what, we are responsible for these kind of dreams. We're responsible to be faithful. We're responsible not to control the outcome, and that's important. Because Joseph doesn't know what his dream will cost him yet. He doesn't know the route it's going to take. He doesn't know the timeline, and he certainly does not know what's coming. But beyond all of that, here's the strange thing about Joseph's dream. The dreams, don't immediately take him forward into fulfillment. Blessing. up and to the right, as we Americans say, it actually takes him into a descent. So Joseph dreams extraordinary things that he's seeing in these dreams. And we would think onward and upward. And yet we see him take a descent. And that's where the dream meets the dysfunction. In verse 12, Joseph's father sends him out to go check on their brothers. They're out tending flocks. And Joseph goes looking for them, which is something that's painfully ordinary about his time and place. And Joseph is simply doing what his father's asked him to do. And we read that he goes looking for his brothers. And when they see him, before he sees them probably coming from a distance, they say to each other, here comes that dreamer. And they literally, in that moment, decide to kill him. Now, Reuben, the older brother, he intervenes. And eventually, as we read, they end up throwing Joseph into a pit. Also not great. And then we read that they sit down to eat. Did you hear that in the story? Brother in the pit, let's have dinner. And I don't want us to move too quickly past that, because this moment isn't just a family having conflict. That's what I want to highlight for us. This is a family whose dysfunction has now become dangerous. Favoritism has become resentment, resentment. Has become hatred. And hatred has now become violence. And it doesn't stop there. Because eventually, we read that Judah sees a caravan coming and says, why kill him when we can make some money off him? So they pull Joseph out of a pit, they threw him in, and they sell their brother for 20 pieces of silver. And can I just say, this is as horrific as it sounds. This is what we would call in modern day trafficking. And that is what's happening here in the story. And this, this moment, when the story begins to turn, for Joseph, this is the descent. The boy who's been favored by his father is now rejected by his brothers. The one who dreamed of being elevated is now being thrown into a pit. And then he's pulled out, but not to be rescued, but to be sold and taken down to Egypt. The dream he had has not changed, but Joseph's circumstances have changed dramatically. The dream said one thing, but the circumstances say another. The dream suggested that Joseph would be elevated, but now he's being stripped down and thrown into a pit and sold. And this had to have been an extraordinary moment of suffering and also confusion for that 17-year-old boy. Joseph had no idea, likely, how any of this is going to fit together. But it had these dreams. And now I'm here. And the truth is, Scripture, at least the text I was given, Gavin, Scripture doesn't give us any explanation here. It does not tell us that God caused Joseph's brothers to do this. It doesn't suggest that their jealousy or hatred or violence was somehow God's doing. What they chose to do in this moment was genuinely evil, and they were and are responsible for it. And I think that's important for us, for how we even understand what God's doing. And I think that's important for us, for how we even understand our own stories. Because Christian hope isn't that everything that happens is good. It isn't. Our hope, at least as we've seen it through this book, is that God can redeem what he did not call good. The brothers' evil is real. Joseph's suffering and dissent is real. And God's faithfulness is real, even when it feels hidden. And here's the bigger thing. All of those things can exist in the same story. The end of our text, I want us to notice that the dissent doesn't only affect Joseph. The brothers take the robe. We read this part of the story. They slaughter a goat, dip the robe in blood, and bring it back to their father. And Jacob, he recognizes the garment immediately, and we read his responses. Devastating. He tears his clothes, and he puts on sackcloth, and he mourns his son. And the text says, he says, he refused to be comforted. And again, it could be a small detail, but I want you to notice that the dysfunction here keeps moving. Just different. Joseph is carrying the wound of what his brothers did to him. Jacob is carrying the wound of believing that his son is dead. And the brothers, they are carrying the weight of what they've done and the lie they've constructed. The family is still carrying the story forward, only now they're carrying it in different ways. Different forms. Our author, he concludes the text with this almost jarring final verse. He says, meanwhile, the Midianites sold Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh's officials, the captain of the guard. Meanwhile. I want you to pay attention to that word, and where the author is drawing our eyes. Joseph is gone. The family is broken, and the dream seems impossible. And we aren't given the next chapter. We don't get Genesis 50. We get Genesis 37. We might know the larger story, but Joseph doesn't. And that matters. Because as so many of us know, sometimes we are living in the meanwhile. Chapter 37, not chapter 50. Meanwhile, we can't make rent. Meanwhile, the cancer is still there. Meanwhile, we wait for another pregnancy test. Meanwhile, we know what has happened, and we may have some sense of what we hope for, but we don't know how the two are going to meet. And Genesis, at the heart of the start of this story, it doesn't rush past that tension. It lets the dream and the descent sit next to each other. The dream doesn't erase the descent, and the descent doesn't erase the descent. And the descent does not erase the dream. Joseph doesn't know the plan. He simply has to live faithfully without knowing the whole story. And that's where Genesis 37 leaves us, Gavin. The promise is still there. The pattern is real. The dream has been given, and Joseph is going down. He doesn't know how the story is going to come together, and neither do we. And that's where I want to turn the question towards us today. How then shall we live? In light of this story, in light of this text, in light of the layers of it, how are we meant to live in our lives in light of what we see here? Like Joseph, we didn't choose what was modeled for us. Some of us would say, amen. We didn't even choose what was normalized around us. But eventually, by the grace of God, we all become responsible for what we do with what we've received. And that means the question we all carry moves from what happened to me to what am I going to do with what happened to me? Big or small, fully aware of its impact or not, what am I going to do with what I inherited? What am I going to do with the anger I carry? What am I going to do with the ways that I suffered? What am I going to do with self-medicate or self-protect? What am I going to do with that impulse to judge so that I feel better about myself? So on and so on. We all inherit patterns and we unknowingly bring it to the way that we pursue our future. Scarcity makes many of us grip for what God has given to us. Rejection makes many of us need our image to prove our worth. Achievement can turn calling for a lot of us into accomplishment. And fear can make many of us try to control the outcome. What we do with what happened to us determines and sets a trajectory for how we are going to carry God's promise or his life, that resurrection life that Paul talks about that's at work in us. That determines and sets a trajectory for how we carry God's life forward, his goodness forward, and the dreams he's put into us and for us forward. I've been able to mention a few times over the last couple of weeks in random moments that I took a sabbatical recently and you're like, that's why you look so good. And yeah, that is. But with all sincerity, on sabbatical, and I actually did this one right, first one I went to Europe, which was fun, but not great. This one actually leaned into my life. And I took time on sabbatical with the help of some people to remember the dreams that God had given me. I spoke about this last week, some dreams that I have had and have for Bridgetown, some dreams for my personal life and for the days I have yet to see. And that was great, really fun. It was such a gift to sit in those dreams, to actually have time to play them out and to hold them before God. That was extraordinary. But what was also true was as I did that, I almost equally became more and more aware of the fact that I had things in me that could keep me from knowing or stewarding the dreams faithfully. In a matter, and I say weeks, I wrote weeks in here so politely, that's being generous. In a matter of days, once God was like, I was face to face again with things in my life, patterns more specifically that were keeping me from freedom. Freedom to fully give myself to God and all that he was inviting me into. And the bummer of it all was that these patterns were not new. In fact, I was telling Gavin this morning, this passage was the first sermon I ever preached at Bridgetown Church and that was 175 years ago. And guess what? The patterns I was talking about then are the same patterns I'm talking about this morning. They weren't new. They were just things I continually dismissed over the years of this is just who I am or who I've become or what I do. They were annoyingly the things I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon, things like angers that led to unforgiveness of so many people, self-protection through self-deception where I told myself a better story than the truth. Because denial felt way better than disappointment. Scarcity, I was holding onto spaces that were born out of a desire to control the life I wanted rather than the life I had received. And my point in all of this is, look, we all have an invitation at some level, good or bad, to inhabit what we inherit. And we don't just do that once in our life. That's what I want to say. We don't just do that once in our life. We usually know this invitation again and again and again as we become like, Jesus. And the gift of stories like Genesis 37 is that we all get to sit outside of the story and yes, rightfully judge these banana people and ask ourselves, how then now shall I live? How do I live in light of the truths I see in this story? The goal in observing a text like this, hearing the Lord of God and letting it wash over us isn't simply just to become more self-aware. It's to become free. And as I've sat with that and had the chance to, let this live in me again this summer. And by the way, it's still living in me. So if you're like, she looks sad. Yep. Just bleeding out. She's coming out. God's healing me. I believe that Genesis 37 actually gives us three invitations towards that freedom that we want. Are you ready for those? Are you ready for an alliteration church? She's back. Okay. First, face what you can interrupt. Listen, face what you can interrupt. So there are things that you have agency over. There are things, no matter what your life feels like right now, there are things you have agency over. Patterns you can confront, apologies you can make, boundaries you can set, and habits you can change. There are things you can refuse to hand out. And sometimes the starting point in doing that, at least according to our friends, Pete and Jerry Scazzaro, will mean going back so that you can go forward. Not living in the past for the past sake, not to blame anyone, but to end it. And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do that. To actually understand what actually happened here. Go back to go forward. Face what you can interrupt. Now, in doing that, you'll have to ask questions like, where did I learn this? What did I learn about love and conflict and safety? What have I normalized that Jesus may be inviting me to do differently? These questions help us see. Because remember, you can't interrupt what you refuse to see. You can't interrupt what you refuse to see. And so the invitation is to do what you can to bring whatever patterns, small or big, into the light. If you want another alliteration, because you need that, I would say pay attention, pause, and then push it into God's presence. That was good. Pay attention, pause, push it into God's presence. To name it is one of the most important things that we can do. To get curious about it is also one of the most important things we can do. And more importantly than anything else, repent where you know you can repent. And let the freedom and grace of God be yours. Some of you are going to have to grieve what needs to be grieved. You're going to have to, again, get curious and pay attention. And you're going to have to receive what's good and refuse what's destructive. That's going to be the way this goes. And again, it won't be perfectly, but it will be important. Because from there, you're going to have to take that information, and you're going to have to take that information, and you're going to have to practice another way. And in my own experience, you can't and you shouldn't do that alone. It's really difficult. You know, we are all able to see our patterns from inside, which is a unique perspective. But you know what's true right now? I can't see if there's a hair out of place in my headband. Only you can. My eyes, they just won't go up far enough, you know? All to say, you're going to need people who help you see what you cannot see. So beyond just yourself and the presence of God helping you see what you may need to face and even interrupt, you will also need other people to help you do that. And people to come alongside you as you journey along. Community. It gives us a place to tell the truth, to be known without shame, and to receive perspective with other people. And sometimes that doesn't mean you're going to do it yourself. You're going to do it with other people. Get in here, man. This is going to be bad. And she said, yes. Yes, it is. And then a spiritual director also, same thing, said, you're trying to work your way out of this pastorally, but no. This is the way. Walk in it. And pastors even can help you do that. Trusted friends can help you do that. You just need someone to help you name what you're carrying and discern what Jesus is inviting you to do with it. That's all I'm trying to say. You may not be responsible for what was handed down to you, but by the grace of God, you can be responsible for what you hand on to other people and to generations to come. Now, here's the thing about facing what we've inherited. Seeing it doesn't mean we can fix all of it. And I hate that. That's a hard lesson for me. Naming it doesn't mean we can go back and change it even. Understanding where that stuff comes from doesn't give us control over what other people did and that's important to hear. And that's important because awareness can show us what is ours to address and what was never ours to control in the first place. And that's where the second invitation comes in. So it's face what you can interrupt and then it's forgive what you cannot control. Joseph could not control his brothers. He couldn't control his father's favoritism. He couldn't control the pit. He couldn't control being sold. He couldn't control Egypt. He couldn't control the timeline. And he couldn't control how the dream would eventually be fulfilled. And neither can we. There are things that are ours to carry. And there are things that we have to release connected to our own story and what we've inherited. Maybe it's a person or a relationship or an outcome or a timeline or the way our story is supposed to go. And sometimes, and in my own experience, most of the time, forgiveness is part of that story. And it was for me this summer. Because when we've been hurt, there's often a part of us that wants something we can't make happen. We want those people who hurt us to acknowledge what they did. We want them to become different even. Even if we love them, we're like, please be different. We want the past to be acknowledged. We want it to be repaired and somehow made right. We want the story to end differently than it did. And forgiveness doesn't end there. It ends there. It doesn't mean that those things don't matter. Forgiveness is simply the practice of releasing the person who hurt us from our ongoing judgment and expectation. And releasing ourselves from the responsibility of controlling what they do with what happened. In forgiveness, we release them to God. We release the debt we wish they would pay. We release the expectation that they will finally become who we needed them to become. And we release the debt we wish they would pay. And we release our judgment of what they should have done and our attempts to control what could be done in the future. We release all of that. And again, it doesn't mean we're pretending something didn't happen as we do that. We're not calling something good that wasn't good. We're not removing boundaries or saying there's no consequences for choices. That's not what we're saying. It just means we stop making our freedom dependent on them changing. Forgiving what we can't control is and will likely be for most of us daily surrender. Releasing of the resentment and the rehearsing, if you're anything like me. And the need to prove something over and over and over again. We release it. We release it. We release it. We release it. And the goal in all of this is to be faithful with what is mine to carry and to trust God with what isn't. When we release what isn't ours to carry, we become more available for what is ours. Because eventually the question isn't only, what am I letting go of? It's also, what am I going to do with the life that's in front of me? Joseph couldn't control what happened to him, but he could decide how he would live wherever he found himself. And that, I think, is our third invitation. Faithfully live the chapter you're in. Sometimes we are so focused, and some of this is just out of just a pure good desire, but some of us are sometimes so focused on where God is taking us that we forget to ask, what does faithfulness look like here? Joseph doesn't know where the story is going, but wherever he finds himself, the question becomes, can I remain faithful here? Not how do I get out of this as quickly as possible, not how do I force the dreams to happen, but what does faithfulness look like here? Remember, Joseph doesn't have Genesis 50, he has Genesis 37. He doesn't have the palace, he has a pit. And in that, we see an invitation, or see that the invitation is not just to understand the whole story all at once. It is to be faithful with the chapter you're actually in. Because sometimes we want God to explain the whole story before we know it. And we want God to explain the whole story before we know it. And we want God to will offer our trust to him. You would never do that, but I would. But Joseph's story, it gives us another possibility. It says, I can be faithful with what God has actually given to me to carry, even when I cannot see what God is doing with it. And that's where these three invitations come together. Face what you can interrupt, forgive what you cannot control, and then faithfully live into the church. And I want you to be faithful with the chapter you're in. Because the dream and the descent, they can exist in the same story. And maybe part of becoming like Jesus is learning not only to trust him with what we hope for, but to let God form us along the way. When I stop needing to know the whole story, I can actually live in the story I'm in. When I stop needing to try to control the outcome, I can be present to what God is doing right here, right now in this moment. When I stop needing the next chapter, I can be present to what God is doing right here, right now in this to prove that God is faithful, I can begin to recognize his faithfulness in this one. And when I stop trying to make my life become what I think it needs to be, I become free to receive the life God is actually giving me. And that's the fruit. That is, surprise F, freedom. Freedom isn't necessarily God changing the circumstances. Joseph wasn't free because his circumstances were immediately good. He was free because his circumstances no longer had the final authority over who he would become. And that's where we see these three invitations. This is where they've been taking us. Face, I don't have to hide what is true, hide from what's true in my life. Forgive, I don't have to control what isn't mine to control. And faithfully live, I don't have to know the whole story before I live faithfully today. And together, they lead us to freedom. Freedom from repeating what was wrong with me. And I don't have to know what was wrong with me. And I don't have to know what was handed down. Freedom from needing to know the future to prove my worth. Freedom from trying to control what only God can control. Freedom from believing what has happened to me determines what happens through me. But also, hear me when I say it's freedom for something, not just from something. Freedom to receive God's redemption. Freedom to become who it is that God is forming me to be. Freedom to love differently. Freedom to live differently. And freedom to hold the things we hope for with open hands. Because if the dream is ultimately about God's purpose, not our destiny, then we don't have to make it happen. We can steward it, we can pray over it, we can work towards it, and we can release it back to God. Push. Because God's faithfulness is not dependent on our ability to control the story. Praise him. Joseph had Genesis 37. Again, he didn't have Genesis 50, and neither did he have Genesis 50. He didn't have Genesis 50. He didn't either do you. What happens to you matters. What happened in the past and what happens in the future, what you inherited, it mattered. It really mattered. In a church culture that says it didn't, I am telling you it did. It matters. The patterns in your life, they matter, and the dreams, they matter. And the descent, it matters. But none of them get the final word. God does. And because God does, he does. And because God gets the final word, we can face what we can interrupt. We can forgive what we cannot control, and we can faithfully live in the chapter we're in. And we can continue over and over and over again to become free. That's it. All right, listen. We're going to do this together, and over the next few weeks in your Bridgetown communities, we're going to lean into this. Some of you are like, this sounds so familiar. You're right, it started 72 years ago. We did this. We're going to do it again. And through the practice of community, we're going to do this through the practice of community, through the exercise of dealing with our past. And specifically in your Bridgetown communities, you're going to work through a tool called the geniogram, genogram, genogram, however you want to say it, which is a way of visually mapping your family of origin so that you can, in both a gentle and honest way, get a closer look at the story you've inherited and what it means for your faithfulness in the days ahead. Now, I'm going to end where I began. Some of it's beautiful, and some of it is complicated. And some of it we have to learn to name. And the good news is that we somehow become people, and sorry, maybe the good news is that we somehow become people who get untouched by our stories. The good news is that Jesus meets us in the story we've been given and teaches us how to live differently within it. That's what I'm trying to say. What was handed to us doesn't have to be something we hand down. And I'm saying it again and again and again because we need to hear it again and again and again. What wounded us does not have to become what we wound others with. What we learned doesn't have to be what we keep repeating. And the things we cannot change does not have to keep controlling us because there is a redeemer in heaven. And he can take even the complicated and unfinished and imperfect things that we have, and he can take even the things that we've given and weave something into them we could not have written ourselves. So maybe you do not need to know how the story ends. Maybe you just need to trust the one who does. Because what was handed to you is not the end of your story. And I just want to say it again. And neither is it the end of what God can and wants to do through you. This is formation into the way of Jesus.
Speaker 3Tyler here to share with you that registration for our ninth annual Holy Spirit conference is now open. The theme of this year's conference is the wedding at Cana. And we'll spend time together in the text exploring the rich themes of Jesus' first miracle turning water into wine. Join us in person at the Keller Auditorium in downtown Portland on February 26 and 27, 2027. I'm so excited that you'll be joining us in Portland once again and anticipating being with you all. You can register right now at holyspiritco.me.
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